I’m Going To Say It, Slack is WORSE Than Email

I feel like this is blasphemy to the rest of the startup community as a whole, and flies in the face of most venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs. I will not be popular for saying this. I will not be on the cover of a magazine. I will not be retweeted. Only 2 people will ever read this writing.

I do not care.

Because what I believe is the truth. I know it. I’ve felt it. I’ve been angered by it. And I’ve removed it from my life.

I’ve used Slack in multiple situations. In a global software company with hundreds of distributed employees. In a small startup with only a few employees. In a non-work capacity with personal relationships.

And in every case, do you know what Slack actually is?

Slack is a group text message.

Much like GroupMe, only years later. I remember many many years ago when a few digital friends and I, during the Evolyte days, concepted and built a group text messaging app, before all of this including GroupMe, happened. We knew it would be big. We have the sketches, the time-stamped emails, and the code to prove it. But we also saw there was no way to make money. And so, we abandoned it.

BUT WE COULD HAVE BEEN STARTUP FAMOUS!

Who cares.

I’m not going to spend 10,000 words writing why. I’m going to give you the most precise and concise answer I can.

I get hundreds of emails every day. Some create long threads of responses that are better for group text messaging. But it’s not, and here’s the critical point, a summary of the information a group of people are trying to convey.

Instead of a real-time DING! DING! DING! DING! of constant notifications in a group thread about why something happened, I’d much rather have a simple note at the end of it that says, “This X thing happened. The reason is Y. And we’re doing Z to address the root cause.”

Sure, if you want to have a searchable group text then Slack is your man. But you can just do that in Messages on the iPhone for free and use everyone’s phone number, without forcing them to sign up for something different. And it works on, get this, the computer!

But slack has #hashtag groups though! Isn’t that just a different group thread? Of course it is, silly. How often have you muted a group text conversation because you came back from working out for an hour and you have 200+ missed texts? Same thing with Slack. Same thing with email. It’s just that with Slack, it incentivizes even more lazy responses than with email. Problem not solved. Problem made worse.

Heh. Go figure. I’m not investing.

I think I found a solution for both of these problems years ago. Nobody has yet to come close to addressing it, and the answer is so very, very simple. It’s a bajillion dollar idea! Raise a seed round at a gazillion bucks and give away 60% of your business! Do it immediately! Hurry there’s a bubble and it’s going to pop! Use artificial intelligence, everyone else is doing it! Make sure you have a messaging component or you’re dead and then make the non-existent UI design flat. Then raise more money. Then get the Samwer brothers to force you to expand internationally before you’re ready! Hurry! Make it free! Add ads! Exclamations!

God, are you not just sick and bloody tired of hearing the same things over and over again? You need to be mobile. You need location and gamification because foursquare. Wait, who? Text is so dead. Use voice in your UI. Also, video is really big, lets make a platform! And prototyping software for designers cuz they’re online and they have a problem we can solve with code. Uhhhh…did you hear what you just said?

Slack will rise, and get acquired if they let it, but either way it will fall. It has had it’s day in the sun.

Humans do not change. We like shiny new things. But we hate noise. We are beginning to hate notifications. We keep our phones on us so we can pull them out at the faintest moment of boredom or to appear important in public. We add in a Watch to the mix so we get pings on our computers, iPads, Phones, and now Watches. All of these things are crutches.

This is not a popular sentiment. Billions of dollars of investment will be lost thinking the way I think. But I don’t care.

Because I’m not a figurehead. I’d much rather be a fountainhead.

— Sean