Slack Beats Campfire Onboarding

Jason Fried tells the story of how Slack overtook their chat product Campfire, despite Campfire being first to market.

"We launched Campfire in 2006, and I remember when we launched it, I couldn't get anyone to buy it. People were like 'Why would you use a chat tool? We're all in the same office, just talk to people.'

Before Slack launched, Stewart Butterfield sent me an email. We were friends and he said 'Hey, just wanted to let you know we're launching this thing, it's competitive with Campfire.' I remember looking at it the first time and my stomach dropped. I thought 'Oh shit, we're dead' because it was really good.

The thing that impressed me the most was the onboarding experience. In my opinion, there were two things: the bot integration was really innovative, but the onboarding experience was so good where you basically talk to the chat and create your user account. Those two things - the chat itself isn't better or worse, chat is chat essentially - but onboarding and bots were the thing. We didn't have them and they crushed us.

We had sort of let Campfire wither. We were really early with it, but because we were early and it wasn't selling that well, we didn't think there was a future in it. So we didn't pour more energy into it. Then along came Slack and they just did it better."