Essay · Short read

We Don't Sell Saddles Here

Stewart Butterfield · Medium Free Intermediate

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.

  • Butterfield argues the best way to find product-market fit is to define your own market.
  • Slack is not selling a group chat product, it is selling organizational transformation and a lower cost of communication.
  • Innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not one thing that changes behaviour.
  • People unfamiliar with a product tolerate far fewer flaws, so near-perfect execution is the price of entry.
Open on medium.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold?

Read with it

  1. The founders describe coining inbound marketing as an old game versus new game framing, then choosing SMB over enterprise to... Crucible Moments Podcast · 40 min HubSpot: An Underdog Helps Invent Modern Marketing, and Then Takes on Goliath Sequoia Capital with Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah
  2. The full verbatim memo, dated 31 July 2013 and sent two weeks before the preview release. Read the primary text rather than the... alexanderjarvis.com Article · About 10 min read We Don't Sell Saddles Here memo from Slack Stewart Butterfield
  3. Video · Reading of the memo The Founders' List: Slack's Internal Memo 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' (Famous Memos) Stewart Butterfield
  4. Video · Podcast episode 76. How Slack is Generating $600MM With a Bottom-Up Approach w/ Kevin Egan at Slack Kevin Egan
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →