Slack’s growth is starting to slow, but that’s ok

(Updated with comment from Slack)

Slack had been growing a remarkable pace for a while now, so it might just be natural part of the lifecycle for it to eventually start to slow down. 

The company announced new numbers on Thursday, revealing that it has grown to six million users, and 1.25 million paid seats. That’s up 33 percent in each category from the last time it gave an update, back in May, when it had three million users and 930,000 paid seats. 

The easiest comparison for how its grown in the last five months would be the five months prior to that, from December of 2015 to May of this year.

In that time period, the company went from two million to three million active users, which is 50 percent growth, while the number of paid seats went from 570,000 to 930,000, a jump of 63 percent. 

Obviously, the company is still growing pretty quickly, but it is starting to slow down a bit. Frankly, that’s not a surprise given the number it had been putting up over the last year and a half

Slack’s recent growth

In June of 2015, the company had one million DAU and 300,000 paid seats. By October it had 1.7 million DAU and 470,000 paid seats, growth of 70 percent and 56 percent, respectively, in those four months.

In December of 2015, its DAUs had grown another 17 percent to two million, and the number of paid seats had increased 21 percent to 570,000 in two months,. Just two months after that, by February of this year, DAUs had grown by 15 percent, to 2.3 million, while paid seats were up 18 percent to 675,000. ARR also grew by 28 percent, to $64 million.

In April, when the company raised its big $200 million round of funding, DAUs were at 2.7 million, an increase of 17 percent in two months, while paid seats had grown by 18.5 percent to 800,000.

From April to May, Slack grew its DAUs by 11 percent, and its paid seats by 16 percent, in just one month.

That kind of growth is simply unsustainable in the long run. Even so, it still was able to grow its DAUs by 135 percent, and its paid seats by 165 percent, so it’s no wonder the company doesn’t seem all that worried about declining numbers. 

Slack was founded in 2013, and has raised roughly $540 million, most recently a $200 million round in April, which valued it a $3.8 billion.

Among the other stats that the company released: it currently has an annual run rate of $100 million, 33 million teams, 5.8 million weekly active users, 415,000 apps installed per month and 746 apps in its directory.

VatorNews reached out to Slack for comment. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: famlii.com)