How Teams crashed Slack with a product that most people hate
The Growth Strategy Framework for Startups
Hey everybody welcome back to the Product Market Fit Newsletter 🚀
My name is Guillermo Flor and I write this weekly to help founders, growth professionals and product people to grow & fund their companies.
This week we are going to dive deep into:
How Teams beat Slack with a product that many people dislike
Hemant Mohapatra's (Lightspeed) strategy playbook for startups
Other real world examples
But, before getting into it, as always, some good beats 👇
News!
I’m opening up 2 hours of free weekly consulting for startups fundraising or going to market. Find a slot here.
Inbound website is live! Go check it out!
Brief Background: Slack was launched in 2013 and quickly became popular, reaching 10 million daily active users (DAU) by 2019 and 18 million in 2022. Its intuitive interface and integrations helped it stand out in the team collaboration space. Microsoft Teams, launched in 2017, leveraged Microsoft's existing distribution channels through Office 365 and surpassed Slack’s DAU with 20 million in 2019 and 270 million in 2022.
How Did Microsoft Teams Beat Slack?
1. Target Customers:
Slack initially targeted small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and startups, which allowed it to establish a solid market position. However, it struggled to penetrate larger enterprises.
Microsoft Teams was designed for larger enterprises from the start, leveraging Microsoft's established presence in the enterprise market and its extensive portfolio of collaborative tools.
2. Bundling:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Product Market Fit to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.