Essay
We Don't Sell Saddles Here
Stewart Butterfield · Medium Free Intermediate
This is the internal memo Butterfield sent his team two weeks before Slack's launch, written from inside the wreckage of Glitch, the game that flopped so badly the company nearly folded. It shows exactly what a founder does with a failed launch, mine it for what people actually valued, then relaunch that under a new name and a clearer story.
- A flopped product can contain the seed of the real one, look at what people used, not what they paid for
- Define what you're actually selling, the outcome, before you decide the first attempt was a failure
- Slack was a relaunch of internal tooling Butterfield's team had built for itself, not a brand new idea
