As millennials have overtaken the workplace, so too have their preferred ways of communication. And if email was the way their parents gossiped, joked and actually talked about work at work, then Slack is the way they do it now.
However, Cofounder and CTO Cal Henderson told Mashable Australia that the uber-popular messaging service is actually catching on with people that don’t share a common workplace, too. During a trip to Melbourne to open a new Slack office, Henderson remarked on how, though Slack is ostensibly designed to work best with those actually doing work, it’s begun to catch on simply with members of similar career paths and even employees’ family members as an efficient way to plan trips to the grocery store, collective travel plans and much more.
“We see it used by interest groups, such as leadership groups, or groups of developers who don’t work together … that’s been a real vector for it to spread,” Henderson told Mashable. “A lot of our growth has been bottom-up within a company, where someone introduces it to their small team and then it grows from there.”
While the temptation to enter the consumer-facing side of messaging apps is certainly there, Henderson explained that Slack has no plans to tailor its platform to the non-employee just yet. Henderson himself said that he uses Slack as a way to keep errands straight with his family but that “the product wasn’t built for that, so you lose out on a lot of the things that are good about Slack.”
The non-working world might not be ready for Slack, according to Henderson, but the 2.3 million active daily users the company counts among its ranks have certainly shown a willingness to ditch email, or whichever proprietary messaging service their companies have hitched their wagons to, in favor of Henderson’s platform.
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