Some of you may or may not be familiar with Slack, an app which people have access to via their desktops and smartphones to help streamline business tasks and other work related things. Slack is also a great way for team members of any business to keep in contact during the work day as it’s pegged as a sort of “essential team communication platform.” If you use slack on a daily basis and have been for some time, then you may already know that it is recently one year old, as of today, and it’s already being called the fastest growing business app in the last 12 months according to Tomasz Tunguz who is a partner at Redpoint Ventures.
That’s a pretty bold statement to make but one that may not be too unfounded looking at some of the figures that helped Slack grow to the size that it is. According to Slack themselves, there is an estimated daily number of users totaling 500,000 which are sending a monthly total of about 300 million messages. With numbers like those, it’s no surprise then that Slack says it grew its user base by about 35 percent over the last month and a half period which is just between now and the beginning of January as Slack moves into its second year.
Slack is a completely free platform to use albeit having some limitations on features, but it also offers three paid tier packages for users which start at just $6.67 per user per month when paid annually, moving from there to a $12.50 per user per month and finally to a package costing $49-$99 per user per month, which is the companies enterprise package and is slated for a launch later in 2015. Even though the access to Slack is free, many users are actually paying to use the platforms tiered packages which is netting the company around $12 million in annual recurring revenue for its very first year. Part of this can be due to the fact that messaging is a huge piece of the platform. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield states that “Messaging has emerged as one of the most fundamental applications of the Internet, and its value is shifting into our work lives.” As work space communication platforms continue to be a growing trend, Slack will likely see continued success as more and more large companies(like Walmart, Foursquare, Box, and Airbnb among others)look towards a way to allow entire teams of people to keep in contact while also sharing resources and daily tasks.