You may remember the old, chunky Wacom Tablets, designers and illustrators were using with their Apple PowerPC G4 in the late 90s. Then the iPad came and some years later Bamboo Paper, a digital Notebook, made by Wacom (or acquired?!)
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You can buy a pen as well (I got the solo), which really makes sense, though you can use it with your fingers also quite well.
Bamboo really changed the way I keep notes and even make concepts or presentations and use my iPad in a productive way. As I am into Keynote for presentation stuff, hand-drawn illustrations really give them a personal and individual touch – and it’s super simple.
You can organize your work into different notebooks with different paper styles – there is no OCR but I don’mind because I haven’t seen that working anywhere in a useful way yet.
You can share either single sheets or a whole notebook directly in your Dropbox in a Bamboo native format or as PDF.
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.
