Slack doesn't care about your "Slack Killer"

Slack isn't going to sweat it if Garry Tan invests in a couple of kids building out a Slack killer with the help of some clankers.

The thing that kills slack probably won't even be a single application or company. I'm unsure if we're having a "can't see the forest through the trees" moment or what, but I think the future of software looks a lot like the past - internal software that is hyper focussed on a single company's problem. In that world, conventional SaaS isn't competing against a hot YC startup, they are competing against Claude Code making simple apps that are just good enough.

Flatfile, where I ran the Infra team, started to experience this at the start of the AI transition. Formerly, many of our deals were essentially competing against Microsoft Excel in the sense that Excel was where the workflow was currently happening and in many cases it was "good enough". We had to show that our product provided an incredible amount of value over a home grown solution that consisted of emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth. That all started to change about a year and half or so ago - instead of a deal dying because Excel was good enough, deals started dying because customers were pasting data into ChatGPT and asking for it to restructure it and then sending the results to their coworkers (this is not a commentary of the wisdom of pasting in sensitive data into ChatGPT, that's for a different article). For a complicated case, Cursor or Claude Code could vibe out a script that was precisely tailored to your data, which beats a complex generalized solution all to hell.

I've used Slack for a long time so when I started a new company, Heyo Computer, one of the first things I did was spin up a free Slack workspace. Then at some point I needed automation. Ok, well Slack is $18 a month per user for a business plan and the company is currently running on my personal credit card. I was on the bus going from where I live, deep in the Rocky mountains in the Arkansas Valley, to San Francisco to see my cofounder one day and had some time so I vibe coded out a Slack clone. Now, I know that I am not going to just vibe code Slack quality chat and business functions on my 3 hour bus ride, but at the same time, that really just wasn't necessary. I just need my founder and I to be in a chat app that has some webhook functionality. So good enough for us is pretty simple; single tenant app that needs stupid simple auth, a KV store, files API, and a webhook feature that uses bearer tokens. That ain't ever going to kill Slack, so Saleforce isn't going to sweat it, but they ain't going to get $18 per month per person for the four of us in the chat.

And that I think, is the real danger to Slack and other traditional SaaS companies, which Wall Street seems to agree: its the evolving nature of what getting to "good enough" actually costs a business.