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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →On August 15, 2013, VentureBeat reported that Stewart Butterfield said Slack had received signups from 8,000 companies in roughly its first 24 hours after the launch announcement. That was a remarkable early-demand signal, but it was not a verified count of paying customers, active users, or fully onboarded enterprises. Slack was still a limited preview with a waiting list and a labor-intensive onboarding process.
What the 8,000-company claim actually meant
Butterfield gave the figure during an interview at the Grow Conference in Vancouver. VentureBeat published the report on August 15, 2013, describing Slack as a limited-preview product. The article said companies were joining a waiting list for access and that onboarding each organization required work.
The safest description is therefore: Butterfield’s launch-period signup claim, as reported by VentureBeat. The report does not provide an audit, a list of organizations, a conversion rate, revenue data, or a precise definition of “company.” It does not establish whether every signup became an approved workspace or whether the organizations remained active.
| The number supports | The number does not establish |
|---|---|
| Substantial early interest in requesting access to Slack | 8,000 paying customers |
| A strong response during the first roughly 24 hours | 8,000 active companies or users |
| Demand for a new workplace-communication product | Retention, revenue, or long-term product-market fit |
| Butterfield’s account of launch-period signups | That all organizations were fully onboarded |
Because the product was in limited preview, “signed up” could refer to organizations requesting or beginning access rather than paying for a completed commercial deployment. The source does not resolve whether the unit was a legal company, a team, a workspace, or another signup category.
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Read VentureBeat’s August 15, 2013 report.
Who Stewart Butterfield was before Slack
Butterfield was known as a cofounder of Flickr and later became a Yahoo executive after Yahoo acquired the photo service. Slack was not a Flickr product, however. It emerged from Tiny Speck, the company Butterfield founded to make the online game Glitch.
Tiny Speck’s distributed game-development team built internal communication tools to coordinate its work. When Glitch struggled commercially, the company repurposed those tools as a standalone workplace product. That path matters: Slack began as a solution its own distributed team needed, not as a conventional enterprise-software project designed from the start around a large sales organization.
What Slack was at launch
Early Slack was a team-based internal communication hub. Its pitch was to bring conversations and work information into one searchable place instead of scattering them across separate systems.
- Channels and persistent conversations: teams could organize discussions by project, topic, or group rather than relying only on one-to-one messages.
- Searchable organizational knowledge: past conversations and shared information could remain discoverable instead of disappearing in inboxes.
- File sharing and transfer: files could be exchanged alongside the discussion about them.
- Service notifications: alerts from external tools could appear in the same workspace as human messages.
- Distributed-team support: the product was aimed at companies whose employees were not all in one office.
VentureBeat listed integrations including Dropbox, Twitter, Zendesk, Crashlytics, Help Scout, and Heroku. Those connections made Slack more than another chat window: it was intended to act as a stream for both people’s messages and machine-generated updates.
What Slack was trying to change
Slack positioned itself as a way to reduce fragmentation among internal email, instant messaging, text messages, intranets, wikis, file transfers, and software alerts. Calling it an “email killer” would overstate the evidence; the launch proposition was to centralize some internal communication and make it easier to search.
The product resembled the emerging category of workplace social networks associated with Yammer, but its emphasis on integrations and searchable history gave it a different operating idea: communication, files, and notifications should live in a shared system of record.
The hidden launch problem: onboarding organizations
Butterfield drew a distinction that is easy to miss in the headline. He said Slack could handle the demand technologically, but onboarding each organization was difficult. He discussed groups of roughly 17, 35, or 58 people—not just individual users—because a workplace tool has to be adopted collectively.
Technical scalability
Servers and software can be expanded when traffic rises. That is the infrastructure question behind a sudden signup spike.
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Organizational scalability
Getting an entire group to change communication habits is slower. Someone has to configure the workspace, invite colleagues, decide where conversations belong, explain the new norms, and keep people using the system. Butterfield joked that the waiting period could last four years, while making clear that the bottleneck was the human onboarding process rather than a theoretical lack of computing capacity.
This is why the launch story is more informative than a simple download tally. A consumer app can spread one person at a time; an internal communication system must persuade a team to coordinate its behavior.
Why the early response mattered
Slack entered a crowded workplace-communication market, yet thousands of organizations reportedly requested access during the first launch period. The response suggested that teams recognized a familiar problem: important conversations and alerts were distributed across too many tools.
The product’s origin also gave the signal a distinctive meaning. A tool built to help a distributed game team work together had become a product that other organizations wanted to try. The demand was not proof of commercial success, but it was evidence that the underlying communication problem extended beyond Tiny Speck.
What the figure cannot tell you
No source cited here verifies how many of the 8,000 signups became paying customers, how many people they represented, how many were active after the initial request, or how many completed onboarding. The identities of the organizations, the exact signup funnel, and any launch-day revenue are also not established.
Later summaries often repeat growth numbers for Slack, but those figures should be checked against original company announcements, filings, or investor materials before being treated as definitive. The 2013 number should remain in its proper category: an attributed launch-period signup claim.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What Slack became—and what changed
The 8,000-company surge became part of Slack’s origin story as the internal tool evolved into a major workplace-collaboration platform. The modern service is materially broader than the limited preview described in 2013, with features such as Slack Connect, huddles, canvases, lists, workflows, search, and plan-dependent AI capabilities.
As of August 18, 2026, Slack’s published plans were:
Recommended Free Tools
| Plan | Published price and notable position |
|---|---|
| Free | $0; searchable message history is limited to 90 days. Other collaboration limits apply. |
| Pro | $7.25 per active user per month when billed annually, or $8.75 month-to-month; includes unlimited message history and app integrations. |
| Business+ | $15 per active user per month annually, or $18 monthly; adds stronger administration, security, support, and AI capabilities. |
| Enterprise+ | Contact sales; aimed at enterprise-scale administration, compliance, and security. |
Check the official Slack pricing page and plan comparison for current entitlements. Prices and feature availability can change, and per-active-user pricing means costs rise as a team grows.
How to interpret Slack’s origin story when choosing software
Small teams
A small group can test the Free plan, but the 90-day searchable-history limit may become restrictive if Slack is expected to serve as long-term institutional memory.
Companies already using Microsoft 365
Microsoft Teams may be the more economical operational choice when it is included in an existing Microsoft licensing arrangement. Compare the organization’s actual geography, licenses, identity systems, and storage needs rather than assuming a bundle is automatically cheaper.
See Microsoft Teams for work and its official options comparison.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteOrganizations needing deployment control
Mattermost is relevant when self-hosting or specialized secure collaboration is a priority, although it can require more technical administration than a managed cloud service. Its product and pricing information are at mattermost.com and mattermost.com/pricing.
Public communities and gaming groups
Discord is designed more for communities, informal groups, gaming, and voice-first interaction. It is generally a weaker default for regulated internal business communication and formal enterprise governance. See Discord and Discord Nitro.
The lasting lesson from the 2013 launch
Slack’s first widely reported traction was not evidence that 8,000 companies had already bought or adopted a finished enterprise system. It was evidence that many organizations were willing to request access to a new layer for coordinating work. The important product insight was connecting conversations, files, alerts, and searchable organizational memory—and recognizing that changing team behavior would be harder than keeping the servers running.
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