Stewart Butterfield sent the memo to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it later. Its argument is that Slack was not competing in a defined market with clear incumbents, it was defining one, so tweaking the product was not enough, they had to tweak the market too. The line people quote is that what they were selling was organizational transformation and the software just happened to be the part they could build and ship. Practically that meant the pitch led with a reduction in the cost of communication and zero effort knowledge management, not with features. If you are selling something buyers do not yet have a category for, this memo is the clearest statement of what you have to do instead of a feature comparison.
5 resources, 5 link-checked.
An audio reading of the whole memo, which plays inline here, so you can take in the argument in one pass while doing something else.
On NFX by Stewart Butterfield Reading of the memo
This is what the memo changed in practice, from the person who ran Slack's North American sales: why a tool like Slack cannot be sold top down without end users choosing it first.
On GTMnow by Kevin Egan Podcast episode
The founders describe coining inbound marketing as an old game versus new game framing, then choosing SMB over enterprise to defend it. Category creation and segment choice told as one decision, which is how it actually works.
On Crucible Moments by Sequoia Capital with Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah 40 min
Open sequoiacap.com →The memo itself, published by Butterfield. Read the primary source rather than the hundred posts summarising it, because the reasoning is the useful part, not the saddle analogy.
From Medium by Stewart Butterfield Short read
The full verbatim memo, dated 31 July 2013 and sent two weeks before the preview release. Read the primary text rather than the summaries, because the section headings are the argument.
From alexanderjarvis.com by Stewart Butterfield About 10 min read
How how great operators think reads from a different seat.
