Slack: The Killer App for small businesses -@luketucker @sultanventures
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Transcript of Slack: The Killer App for small businesses -@luketucker @sultanventures
is
Killer Appfor
the
Small Biz@luketuckerby
SULTAN VENTURES
Presented at Digital Market Summit | Luke Tucker | 4/26/16#Slack for Small Businesses
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I work with startups at Sultan Ventures and XLR8UH
@luketuckerluketucker.com
Hi! I’m Luke
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Startups Early Stage Ventures
Idea through Series A Sector Agnostic
Biotech Medical Devices Drug Development Health Care
Clean Tech Digital / IT
Education Business Plan Competitions
Judges Mentors
Workshops
Lean Launchpad Methodology
Financial Modeling Misc. Biz Dev
Startup Weekend Sponsor Judges Mentors
Funds Sultan Ventures
Idea through Seed investments
UPSIDE Fund Seed stage venture fund for
UH innovation investments up to $750,000
XLR8UH
A Proof of Concept Commercialization center for Pre-Seed Investments up to $175,000
More than $17M raised in the last 5 years in Hawaii @sultanventures #ReinventVC
Agenda
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• Business Communication: What’s Broken
• What is Slack
• Why it’s so popular
• Understanding and Optimizing Workflows
• How to setup Slack for your business
• Best Practices to Remember
• Using Slack for External, Customer Facing dialogues
• Bonus: Why You should join Slack communities!
19901980 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
The Way Businesses Communicate Has Evolved
?
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19901980 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
Slack is the next evolution of business communication tools
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What is Slack and What Does it Do?
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At its heart, Slack is an instant messaging and
collaboration system on steroids
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Collaboration: more contextual, transparent, and efficient.
Search: Everything is searchable. You can integrate many
apps.
Mobile: Real-time, topic-specific, cross-platform business
data.
Three Main Things Slack Does REALLY Well
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Search Function FTW!
Mobile
Slack Has Apps for every device
DesktopTablet
Mark Sullivan,
CallRail
Instant, integrated communication is the future of teamwork.
Things I Love Things I DON’T Love
Puppies
My Wife
Dark Chocolate
Meetings Email
Searching for Documents
Slack gives me more time to spend on things I care about, not chasing down emails.
Benedict Evans
Andreessen Horowitz
“Slack is a person-to-person messaging platform that's more than messaging - through third-party integrations, it acts as a common aggregation layer for every other system in an enterprise. All the
messages, updates and notifications from the dozens of other systems in a company can be inserted into the relevant team or project chat channels, and then be scanned through or searched later on. Slack is effectively a
networked file manager, but instead of folders full of Photoshop, Word or Excel files you have links to Google Docs, SAP or Salesforce, all
surrounded by the relevant context and team conversation.”
Workflow
It’s all about that….
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Optimizing your workflow saves time and money.
In order to optimize internal team communication and
knowledge transfer, set up contextually relevant
channels and have a “one-stop shop” for your team’s
communication.
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Basically, use
Here’s a few examples of how teams use Slack.
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Different startups / topics get own channel
Majority of our core team chat is here.
Generally, we are in slack ALL day.
Setup specific channels for bots
Bot integrations help us stay on top of things
New Intern Task input into Trello Board
Zapier IFTT recipe for Sending Task
to #intern-tasks channel
Charles Duhigg
Author of Smarter Faster Better
Slack is good because it’s not an inbox. They don’t feel like they go there and have to do something. People use email for their to do list, which is bad.
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How Hobnob uses slack
• Integrations, integrations, integrations
• Created their own custom bot to assist with repeat tasks
that empowers non-engineers to communicate with the
database and pull reports
• Utilize the call feature often to communicate with
remote team members
• Hobnob is on the paid plan
Mark Quezada
CoFounder and CTO, Hobnob
Slack is the defecto repository of all things related to our business.
Joel Gascoigne
CEO, Buffer
Slack is our office.
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How to Setup Your Slack Group
Start Here
Check out these awesome Guides!
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• Have a “#humor” or “#watercooler” channel for silly / goofy stuff
• Use Slackbot for personal data repository - basically like Evernote
but specific to your biz (thanks Mark Quezada for this tip!)
• Put a descriptor term in front of key posts that’s a similar taxonomy
to create value in search queries
• Don’t forget about the “archive” function (no need to keep old /
unused channels in your stream)
• Cutting the noise: Leaving channels you don’t need to be in, Muting
channels, setting yourself to “away” when you need to focus
Some Best Practices
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Slack for Building Community and Customer Service
- Invite to join when dropping in… builds community
Utilizes Slack for Customer Support Help
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I personally have been able to use Slack communities to
build a brand, meet cool people, and get noticed by top
influencers!
Bonus! Use Slack for Personal Branding!
Zoe Noah Amir Sam
Find your community at:
http://www.slacklist.info/
Mahalo!SU
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To download this presentation go to: http://sultanventures.com/news/what-is-slack-and-why-it-is-so-important-for-your-business
