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A Developer's Inside Look At Where Slack Started -- And Where It's Headed [venturebeat.com]:

In 2020, Slack nearly doubled its paying customer base over the previous year, thanks to the pandemic, and was recently acquired by Salesforce [venturebeat.com] for over $27 billion. But according to Justin Hardin, senior software engineer at Slack, the product originally started as a gaming platform that failed to take off.

"They unfortunately ran out of money and had to lay people off, so they pivoted by asking, 'Which piece of our product works?' And that was the chat aspect," Hardin says on the latest episode of Decoded [outsystems.com], OutSystems' podcast for the next generation of developers.

But the app's friendly human tone was inspired by its gaming roots.

"They kept the writer on who was creating the dialogues for the games, and instead had her do the dialogues for the product," he says. "That's how you have this enterprise chat platform with help messages and onboarding that's in a more conversational tone, which helped define the product experience."

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