The other day it went through the news , that slack’s Valuation is now at 2,8$ Billion.
Whoppa you think, they’ve launched in Feb 2012 – isn’t this going crazy? Well, in a way maybe, tough others – lets have a look at the figures (data provided by Slack):
Table: Prediction for the year 2015, by me
They say, they do have 135.000 paying customers paying $6,67 per month making an average revenue of $900k a month.
In the table above I put in their prediction, to add $1 mio in ARR every 11 days (which is roughly $3 mio. per month) – though I am not quite sure about them using the term „ARR“ which is defined as Accounting Revenue Rate and is more a Return on Investment figure than a figure average revenue return, which would be my interpretation.
That translates to roughly 4,65 mio paying customers and $704k revenue per employe – not that bad.
Given a continous growth, that might even justify the valuation of $2.8 billion as the multiple of 16 would fall throughout the next 4-5 years.
How did they do it? They have no fuckin idea, as Stewart said in munich this year, but let’s have guess:
– they serve a very fast growing segment of business apps: that is, in contrast to the big payers like yammer etc. small and mid-sized companies . These customers typically use other „semi-professional“ apps like Dropbox, Google Apps, Skype and so on. they are in a segment between the typical freelancer and the big corporations. This segment in general, will explode in the upcoming years adding more and more developers and freelancers in always changing (project-wise changing) combinations in the „services-industry“. Btw: all „old-economy“ industries are being disrupted and becoming service industries.
– these customers are the real cloud customers: they want to move fast and flexibel – and they are willing to pay for stable solutions.
– Slack has integrated with the most important other cloud services, and with one click, they are fully integrated.
– Their native clients are fast, stable and of a very nice and intuitive interface – the hashtag style channeling is known by every private twitter user.
– add to that the upcoming „internet of things“ where you want to have ONE system to control them all, and you can guess, why the bet on slack might be a good one
So, slack is doing many things right – and I am really looking forward to see them moving in the future.
And they can do nice gifs, too… 🙂
Daily active user growth:
