Slack’s Business Strategy Case Study

Slack is a team communication application providing services such as real-time messaging, archiving, and to search for modern teams. It offers one-on-one messaging, private groups, persistent chat rooms, and direct messaging as well as group chats organized by topic.

Social impact:

Life changing: affiliation/belonging, self-actualization

Emotional: provides access, badge value, attractiveness

Functional: reduces effort, avoid hassles, informs, connects, simplifies, organizes, integrates, saves time

Add-on:

An additional item offered to a customer of a primary product or service is referred to as an add-on sale. Depending on the industry, add-on sales may generate substantial income and profits for a firm. For example, when a customer has decided to purchase the core product or service, the salesman at an automotive dealership will usually offer an add-on sale. The pattern is used in the price of new software programs based on access to new features, number of users, and so forth.

Blue ocean strategy:

The blue ocean approach is predicated on the premise that market limits and industry structure are not predetermined and may be reconfigured via the actions and attitudes of industry participants. This is referred to as the reconstructionist perspective by the writers. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist solely in managers' thoughts, practitioners who subscribe to this perspective avoid being constrained by actual market structures. To them, more demand exists, primarily untapped. The core of the issue is determining how to produce it.

Codifying a distinctive service capability:

Since their inception, information technology systems have aided in automating corporate operations, increasing productivity, and maximizing efficiency. Now, businesses can take their perfected processes, standardize them, and sell them to other parties. In today's corporate environment, innovation is critical for survival.

Consumerization of work:

Consumerization of IT (consumerization) is a term that refers to the process by which Information Technology (IT) begins in the consumer market and then spreads to business and government organizations, primarily as a result of employees utilizing popular consumer market technologies and methods at home and afterward bringing them in the workplace.

Corporate innovation:

Innovation is the outcome of collaborative creativity in turning an idea into a feasible concept, accompanied by a collaborative effort to bring that concept to life as a product, service, or process improvement. The digital era has created an environment conducive to business model innovation since technology has transformed how businesses operate and provide services to consumers.

Corporate renaissance:

Improving management and performance for companies of all sizes, industries, and globally via creative solutions. Alternate Capital Raising Platform is a novel method of obtaining money that connects the prospective buyer with available capital sources such as venture capital funds, angel investors, and others.

Digitization:

This pattern is based on the capacity to convert current goods or services into digital versions, which have several benefits over intangible products, including increased accessibility and speed of distribution. In an ideal world, the digitalization of a product or service would occur without compromising the consumer value proposition. In other words, efficiency and multiplication achieved via digitalization do not detract from the consumer's perceived value. Being digitally sustainable encompasses all aspects of sustaining the institutional framework for developing and maintaining digital objects and resources and ensuring their long-term survival.

Disruptive trends:

A disruptive technology supplants an existing technology and fundamentally alters an industry or a game-changing innovation that establishes an altogether new industry. Disruptive innovation is defined as an invention that shows a new market and value network and ultimately disrupts an established market and value network, replacing incumbent market-leading companies, products, and alliances.

Donation-based:

Crowdfunding for charity purposes is a collaborative effort by people to aid charitable projects. Civic crowdfunding is a kind of charity crowdfunding in which money is collected to improve public life and space.

eCommerce:

Electronic commerce, or e-commerce (alternatively spelled eCommerce), is a business model, or a subset of a larger business model, that allows a company or person to do business via an electronic network, usually the internet. As a result, customers gain from increased accessibility and convenience, while the business benefits from integrating sales and distribution with other internal operations. Electronic commerce is prevalent throughout all four main market segments: business to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer, and consumer to business. Ecommerce may be used to sell almost any goods or service, from books and music to financial services and airline tickets.

Embedded social enterprises:

The built-in social model is predicated on the premise that everyone wants to do good and lose weight in their awareness in a highly consumerist society. Toms Shoes was the first business to establish a successful strategy for include contributions in the value of its bids. Concentrating on shoe sales, the company gained notoriety in the media and its consumers when they announced that another team is given to a charity for every pair of shoes bought.

Flat rate:

This model is used to describe a pricing system that charges a single flat price for service regardless of its actual use or duration. A company may establish a responsible position in a market if customers get excellent pricing before performing the service. The consumer benefits from a straightforward cost structure, while the business benefits from a predictable income stream.

Freemium:

Freemium is the sum of the words free and premium and refers to a business strategy that provides both free and premium services. The freemium business model works by providing essential services for free and charging for enhanced or extra capabilities. This is a typical practice among many software firms, who offer imperative software for free with restricted functionality, and it is also a popular approach among game developers. While everyone is invited to play the game for free, extra lives and unique game features are accessible only once the player buys.

Lean Start-up:

The Lean Start-up methodology is a scientific approach to developing and managing businesses that focuses on getting the desired product into consumers' hands as quickly as possible. The Lean Startup method coaches you on how to guide a startup?when to turn, when to persevere?and how to build a company with maximum acceleration. It is a guiding philosophy for new product development.

Markets are conversations:

For professional services firms, the difference will be made by converting non-engaged customers into engaged customers. Product development will be obsolete. Customer relations and conversations will replace it. By sharing modular and beta products and services with your current and future customers, companies and their customers interact and collaborate in ongoing conversations. Not only will customers find and follow companies in online social networks, but it will also be the other way around as well.

New job trends:

The workforce as a whole is gravitating toward remote, dispersed teams comprised of freelancers and independent contractors. Workplace customization extends beyond IT and gadgets; workflow, behavior, and expectations are modeled after real-world applications. These are novel methods of job search.

Peer to Peer (P2P):

A peer-to-peer, or P2P, service is a decentralized platform that enables two people to communicate directly, without the need for a third-party intermediary or the usage of a corporation providing a product or service. For example, the buyer and seller do business now via the P2P service. Certain peer-to-peer (P2P) services do not include economic transactions such as buying and selling but instead connect people to collaborate on projects, exchange information, and communicate without the need for an intermediary. The organizing business provides a point of contact for these people, often an online database and communication service. The renting of personal goods, the supply of particular products or services, or the exchange of knowledge and experiences are all examples of transactions.

Product innovation:

Product innovation is the process of developing and introducing a new or better version of an existing product or service. This is a broader definition of innovation than the generally recognized definition, which includes creating new goods that are considered innovative in this context. For example, Apple launched a succession of successful new products and services in 2001?the iPod, the iTunes online music service, and the iPhone?which catapulted the firm to the top of its industry.

Selling of branded merchandise:

Merchandising, in the broadest definition, is any activity that helps sell goods to a retail customer. At the retail in-store level, merchandising refers to the range of goods offered for sale and the presentation of those products in a manner that piques consumers' attention and encourages them to make a purchase. Like the Mozilla Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation, specific open-source organizations offer branded goods such as t-shirts and coffee mugs. This may also be seen as an added service to the user community.

Software as a Service (SaaS):

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a paradigm for licensing and delivering subscription-based and centrally hosted software. Occasionally, the term on-demand software is used. SaaS is usually accessible through a web browser via a thin client. SaaS has established itself as the de facto delivery mechanism for a large number of commercial apps. SaaS has been integrated into virtually every major enterprise Software company's strategy.

Subscription:

Subscription business models are built on the concept of providing a product or service in exchange for recurring subscription income on a monthly or annual basis. As a result, they place a higher premium on client retention than on customer acquisition. Subscription business models, in essence, concentrate on revenue generation in such a manner that a single client makes repeated payments for extended access to a product or service. Cable television, internet providers, software suppliers, websites (e.g., blogs), business solutions providers, and financial services companies utilize this approach, as do conventional newspapers, periodicals, and academic publications.

Take the wheel:

Historically, the fundamental principles for generating and extracting economic value were rigorous. Businesses attempted to implement the same business concepts more effectively than their rivals. New sources of sustained competitive advantage are often only accessible via business model reinvention driven by disruptive innovation rather than incremental change or continuous improvement.