一文解析Slack的2B独角兽之路

以下英文内容来自First Round Review，由网易创业Club重新删减排序整理后加上原创中文解说，不是翻译哟。为了便于理解，我们把中文内容放在相应英文段落的前面。最后，跳过全部英文也不影响阅读的完整性。

原文作者 Stewart Butterfield是企业级沟通工具Slack创始人。他曾是图片分享平台Flickr的联合创始人 。从2012年底开始正式推进Slack项目起，Butterfield的团队已经将公司的估值做到了10亿美元级别。谷歌风投、Accel Partners和Andreessen Horowotiz累计向Slack投资1.62亿美元。

产品形态上，Slack是“聊天群组 + 大规模工具集成 + 文件整合 + 统一搜索”的集合工具。

本文主要涉及了几个主要问题：2B初创的一种可行切入方式是与所服务的公司用户一起成长；明白目标用户和他们的需求，用适当的方式搞定他们；竞争优势的核心在于始终和用户反馈在一起；产品定位有取舍、懂深耕、留出口；市场推广和PR策略要提早制定合理的策略。

文/网易创业Club 傅昊

切入方式：作为SaaS初创，让团队和产品与所服务的初创客户一起成长

Slack正式启动于2012年底，到2013年5月份，创业团队开始寻找最初的外部用户加入体验。

最初，说服朋友的创业团队使用并获得产品反馈，包括Cozy、Rdio等团队。

在这个过程中，Slack团队认识到小团队（几个人）和大团队（几十人、上百人）对于产品的使用需求非常不同。适合小团队的产品对于大团队来说可能非常粗糙。因此，如何持续通过用户反馈进行产品改造就是重中之重。

Slack的做法是，首先把自己的产品提供给小团队使用，随着小团队逐渐变成大团队，Slack团队自身从这个迭代过程里完成对产品的迭代和学习经验的积累。

这个阶段的经历对于公司的后续发展非常宝贵。创业团队应该尽一切努力从实践和用户反馈中搞清楚下一步所应该满足的用户具体需求并基于此不断明确下一步的发展策略。

当产品迭代到一定阶段后，创业团队就应该进入获取野生新客户的发展阶段了。这意味着之前的经验和业务模型马上要进入真正的商业环境了。

从2013年5月起，Slack用了3个月完成了这一阶段的积累和迭代。

从网易创业Club对市面上SaaS创业公司的了解看，不少初创SaaS公司都是从面向其他初创企业服务入手进入2B市场的。

这种打法和Slack初期的做法在思维上非常类似。无论其具体效用，至少看上去是有一定普适性的市场切入方式。

“We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies totry it out and give us feedback,” Butterfield recalls. There was Cozy, whichsells rental management software for landlords and tenants, and the musicservice Rdio. “We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we foundthis way.”

Immediately, the Slack team learned that their productfunctioned very differently as team size increased. “Rdio, in particular, wasmuch bigger than us. They used it with a small group of front-end developersfor a while but then it spread to the whole engineering group and then to all120 people in the company,” Butterfield says.

Suddenly we saw what the product looked like from theperspective of a much larger team, and it was pretty gnarly.

Armed with these observations, the Slack squad made anumber of changes to the product —then started the process all over again.

“The pattern was to share Slack with progressively largergroups. We would say, ‘Oh, that great idea isn’t so great after all.' Weamplified the feedback we got at each stage by adding more teams,” Butterfieldsays.

By summer, they had polished Slack into something theywere ready to share more widely, and they announced their preview release inAugust 2013 (just seven months after they started).

教育野生用户，通过有效的策略让他们知道自己有这样的使用需求

在原有业务规模上，经验积累的差不多了，公司进入下一个发展阶段。Slack开始大批量的邀请企业团队来使用自己的产品。

观察、反馈、迭代，这个过程在新的用户量级和需求下持续进行。

挑战在于如何驯服野生用户。所谓“野生用户”，他们可能不知道自己有什么需求、可能认为你的产品没有使用的必要、可能天然排斥某些类型的服务···

首先应该做到的是分辨出目标用户的属性，也就是说，你应该对目标用户画像心里有谱。

对于Slack而言，作为企业级沟通工具，Slack面向的销售对象是团队而不是个人。潜在团队用户中的每个人都可能对这类产品有是否接受的一票否决权。

因此，在销售策略中就要考虑同时使用两个销售手段：

a）对每个团队成员施加正面影响，让他们从实际工作的角度理解工具的价值，至少激起愿意尝试的意愿，并且；

b）让目标用户团队管理者从团队管理的角度充分理解工具对团队整体带来的效率提升。

对于很大一部分野生用户而言，他们对全新的企业级产品是根本没有使用意识的。你需要用生动的方式让他感知到这个需求对他而言很重要。如果你的销售团队能第一个做到这一点，你就在这些目标用户的头脑里占据了这个产品品类的心智空间。

另外，选择目标用户时需要明确目标用户单元是什么。是面向特定业务部门？是面向跨部门特定项目团队？是面向整个公司？

在2B服务企业发展的不同阶段，所需要面对的目标用户单元可能都是不同的。自然，所对应的销售策略也要随着进行调整。从低向上切入？从中层切入？从顶层切入？都需要具体情况具体分析。

其实，这里能够得出的一个结论是，你的产品好只是成功的前提，要想获得持久成功，你还必须在合适的发展阶段准确的定义真正的目标用户单元。

We started inviting teams in batches and watched whathappened. Then we made some changes, watched what happened, made some morechanges...

The biggest challenge was learning how to sell a productto teams, not individuals. “For most companies, the hard thing is making theproduct work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch toit,” Butterfield says. Take Dropbox, for example: A person tries it on a coupleof devices, likes it, and commits to spending a few bucks a month for it. “Wehave to convince a team, and no two teams are alike.”

From job functions to group sizes to whole companies,Slack’s teams run the gamut. But there was one thing Butterfield ran intopretty consistently. When it comes to selecting a team-collaboration tool,every member has a veto — multiplying the product's risk of rejection. “If oneengineer at a startup tries Slack and says, ‘I hate it. I am not going to usethis,’ that’s it for us. We won’t get evaluated.”

Given this pattern, much of Slack’s beta period was spentminimizing that risk. “We created materials to explain Slack to individuals —what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also builtresources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to helpconvince the team,” Butterfield says.

Slack is blazing trails in a relatively new arena, sothat ammunition was equal parts product training and market education.“Somewhere between 20 to 30% of our users — and this is just an estimate — comefrom some other centralized group-messaging system like HipChat, Campfire, orIRC,” Butterfield says. “When we asked the other 70 to 80% what they were usingfor internal communication, they said, ‘Nothing.’ But obviously they were usingsomething. They just weren’t thinking of this as a category of software.”

When Butterfield digs into the “nothing” those companiesare using, it’s usually a smorgasbord of something: “It’s a lot of ad hocemails and mailing lists. Some people on the team might use Hangouts, some useSMS. We see groups that use Skype chat, or even private Facebook groups andGoogle+ pages.”

So Butterfield made it a goal to teach customers thatthis is indeed a product category — one they’re already filling poorly —priming Slack as a better solution. He learned pretty quickly that the app'slaundry list of benefits wasn't going to land sales on its own.

Positioning a product for teams rather than entirecompanies does come with some positives though — which could be relevant forother enterprise startups.

“For small organizations, team and company may be one andthe same. But if you look at an organization of 15,000 people, you end up witha situation like Adobe, with nine paid Slack teams,” he says. That proved to bea helpful loophole. They didn't have to go through the long process of gainingbuy-in from CIOs or other top management. “Mid-level managers could say, ‘Thisthing sounds cool, let’s try it out for our team.’ If they liked it, it wasaffordable enough to just expense it.”

必须做到的事情：主动倾听用户反馈并及时反馈用户的反馈，这是核心的核心

做这件事情并不是形式主义或者单纯的用户至上，这是为了让公司和用户一同对各自的需要有更加深入、具体的认识。也就是说，这种紧密的反馈与合作是让2B型SaaS产品形成自己独特积累和生态的不二法门。

我们估计，这也是为什么Butterfield说“积极倾听是核心竞争力”的原因。

当然，应该倾听的对象是那些位于目标用户单元区间之内的用户。其他过于狂野的用户就让他们暂时回归大自然吧。

Slack对于关键用户对于问题的反馈和修复速度是“immediately”。很多时候，容易被解决的问题可能反而是用户在使用过程中的面临的大障碍。承认自己产品的不足，随时站在用户使用角度换位思考，对于SaaS服务公司而言是一种美德。

目前Slack每月收到的Twitter反馈和Zendesk客服反馈分别是1万和8000条。Slack的全职客服人员有18位，对Twitter是全天24小时实时反馈。这个部门由“质量保障”和“客户支持”部门合并而来，被称为“用户体验部”。

用户体验部是用户和产品部门的接口。当然，Slack是如何有效让这个接口机制在公司内部运转起来的，文章并没有提及。

最后，把良好的用户反馈与针对反馈做出的产品迭代结合在一起会让受益用户成为口碑传播者。在2B领域，口碑传播的重要性只会比2C领域更高，因为B端用户的决策通常是偏向保守的。

As much information as Slack put out to customers, theylearned even more themselves. Butterfield and his cofounders are voraciousreaders of user feedback, and they attribute much of the company’s rapidtraction to this skill. From the get-go, Slack made sure that users couldrespond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as anopportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service. As they listened totheir ever-growing flock of users, the Slack team iterated accordingly.

“Sometimes you will get feedback that is contrary to yourvision,” Butterfield says. “You may be trying to drive in a particulardirection that people don’t necessarily understand at first. In our case, weknew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we lookedat our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extraattention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.”

When key userstold us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.

Take Rdio, for example, one of Butterfield’s biggestbeta-test companies. “In Slack, you create channels to discuss differenttopics. For a small group of people, those channels are relatively easy tomanage and navigate. With a team that large, though, everyone was creatingchannels, and there was no way for people — particularly new hires — to figureout which ones they should join.”

Once they understood that, the Slack team quicklyidentified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels,they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel.“In the grand scheme of things, that’s a fairly trivial example, but those werethings that would make Slack unworkable for certain teams. Beta-tester feedbackis crucial to finding those little oversights in a product design.”

Every customerinteraction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on thecustomer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you.

Whatever form it takes, incoming user feedback must beprocessed, stored and studied. “We’re pretty fastidious about tagging all ofthese incoming messages, collating and entering and retaining the data thatpeople are sending us,” Butterfield says.

The company keeps track of how many people are asking fora certain feature, or how many want a new kind of integration. “Of course hardnumbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always bekey metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitativedata, too — and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act onit.”

深耕产品少即是多

这个产品思想其实并不新鲜，很多优秀的2C产品在发展早期都是这么做的，即便到了成熟期通常仍然是以产品早期推出的核心功能立足的。

Slack的关键产品功能有三个：应用内多内容搜索；跨设备精密同步；符合人类直觉的文件操作方式。

通过把这三个产品功能有机结合起来、不断根据用户反馈进行优化并在合适的实际切入市场，发展到目前阶段Slack获得了阶段性的成功。

总之，在产品定位上，找到差异化的切入方式和未来的某种护城河是非常有价值的思想。

At the root of all your qualitative and quantitativefeedback is a product — and making it the best at what it does is all aboutknowing its core differentiators and unique opportunities. “All of the foundershere are past the stage where we have a lot of ego about building something ourway,” Butterfield says. “We set ourselves an incredibly high quality bar, andwe’re just not going to be happy if we don’t reach it.”

We don’t cutcorners, and we try to focus on the few things that are most important to ourproduct vision.

For Slack, those three most important features are:

Search: Much likeBuchheit did with Gmail, the Slack team knew that the value of their productwas in helping people find what they’re looking for quickly. “People need tofeel confident that when they read a document or conversation, they don’t haveto worry about labeling or storing it — that they’ll be able to find it againlater if and when they need it,” Butterfield says. Google has set the standardso high in this category that people have certain expectations, and disappointingthem can be fatal.

Synchronization: “One of thethings that drove us nuts about every other internal platform was that it wasvery difficult to pick up in the same place when you switched devices — say,when you left your laptop and picked something back up on your phone,”Butterfield notes. From the very beginning, Slack was built with what he’sdubbed “leave-state synchronization.” Slack knows where every person in everyconversation leaves off, and it syncs to their cursor position in real time.This has given them real competitive bite in a market that already hadwell-known players.

Simplefile-sharing: From the ability to quickly paste images to theease of dragging-and-dropping files, Slack was built with attention paid tosmall shortcuts and intuitive UI actions — they add up quickly when it comes tosoftware that users interact with sometimes for hours every day.

These may not be checkbox features, or buzzworthy newconcepts, Butterfield notes; they may not even be things that users thinkthey’re looking for in a solution. But when it comes to a successfulgo-to-market strategy, perhaps the most important decision you can make is tobuild a product you believe is different from everything else out there, and animportant change for the audience you're going after.

“We had a lot of conversations about choosing the threethings we'd try to be extremely, surprisingly good at,” Butterfield says. “Andultimately we developed Slack around really valuing those three things. It cansound simple, but narrowing the field can make big challenges and big gains foryour company feel manageable. Suddenly you're ahead of the game because you'rethe best at the things that really impact your users.”

对于2B服务，市场推广和PR很重要，要提早制定策略

尽管是2B服务，但市场推广和PR策略的重要程度并不亚于2C型公司。你的对外推广和PR都应该提前几个月进行安排，不要用半个月时间眉毛胡子一把抓。

推广上，传统媒体的曝光对于产品的发布有其品牌价值。选择合适的媒体和曝光方式对于现有用户、潜在用户和优质投资人的心理影响力是不可忽略的。

在Beta公测版发布时，Slack团队并没有说这是测试版，而是通过广告形式做了用户招募。这种做法是不是在某些2C公司的营销手法上似曾相识呢？

另外，通过社会化营销手段在目标用户的社交平台上不断不断不断的曝光也是一种应该被考虑的品牌打造手段。具体如何做要考虑的硬币两面因素挺多的，这里不展开讨论。

总之，推广和PR是一个配合公司发展各阶段战略的系统性工作，如果你忽视了这项工作的话，我们提醒你最好重视起来。

“That was essentially our beta release, but we didn'twant to call it a beta because then people would think that the service wouldbe flaky or unreliable,” Butterfield says. Instead, with help from animpressive press blitz, they welcomed people to request an invitation to trySlack. On the first day, 8,000 people did just that; and two weeks later, thatnumber had grown to 15,000.

The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power oftraditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, startingmonths beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings youhave. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalitieson your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigiousinvestors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw somethingtogether.

Social media has leveled the playing field, so whatevercoverage you earn, run with it — give it new life by sharing it with your immediateand extended networks again and again. Engage with interested parties in yournetworks (prioritizing those with lots of followers and known influence) tobroaden your reach. Don't worry about repetition. It will only help you staytop of mind for prospective users.

总结：

嗯·····这里用中文告诉你，文章结束啦~ 希望有价值，欢迎提建议哟。