The game that failed twice — then became Slack
- Stewart Butterfield's studio, Tiny Speck, spent roughly three years and $17 million building a game called Glitch, which shut down in December 2012.
- While building it, the team's distributed engineers built an internal real-time chat tool just to stay coordinated across three cities.
- When the game failed, the chat tool was the one thing still clearly working. The team pivoted in early 2013; Slack entered beta that August.
- Daily active users reportedly grew from around 15,000 at launch to over 1.1 million by June 2015.
Most pivot stories are about abandoning a bad idea for a better one. Slack's is about a team that had already built the better idea — and almost didn't notice.
A game called Glitch
Stewart Butterfield had already lived through one pivot: he co-founded Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in 2005. After leaving Yahoo, he and several former Flickr colleagues — Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov — founded Tiny Speck in 2009 to build something different: Glitch, a cooperative, non-violent, browser-based world with a hand-drawn aesthetic, built on Adobe Flash.
Glitch officially launched in September 2011 after roughly two years of development, raised around $17 million in venture funding, and grew its team past 40 people. It built a loyal niche community, but never found an audience large enough to sustain itself — partly because it deliberately broke from genre conventions, and partly because Flash itself was falling out of favor as players shifted to phones. The game shut down in December 2012.
The tool nobody planned to build a company around
Tiny Speck's team worked across several cities — Vancouver, San Francisco, New York. To stay coordinated while building Glitch, the engineers built an internal real-time messaging tool for their own use: searchable, fast, and far better suited to a distributed team than email or scattered chat threads ever were.
When Glitch shut down, that internal tool was the one thing the team had built that was still clearly, obviously working. Rather than dissolve the company, they chose to build on what had actually proven itself under daily use.
From internal tool to public beta
Development on what would become Slack began in earnest in early 2013, with the same founding team — no new hires, no formal pivot announcement. By March 2013 there was a working prototype the team used internally. By May, around 45 outside companies were using it, after the team asked friends at firms like Cozy and Rdio to try it and give feedback.
Slack entered public beta in August 2013. Growth from there was fast for enterprise software: daily active users reportedly grew from around 15,000 at launch to more than 1.1 million by June 2015, well ahead of its broader public release in February 2014.
The lesson for builders today
The product Tiny Speck spent roughly three years and millions of dollars deliberately building wasn't the one that mattered. The module they built almost as a side effect — just to keep their own team functioning — turned out to be the actual business.
The part of the system nobody planned to ship is sometimes the part that ships.
That's a useful caution against treating any part of a system as "just internal tooling, doesn't need to be done properly." You don't always know in advance which module is core to the business and which is incidental. The practical version of this lesson for a build today is architectural: keep internal tools, admin panels, and "just for us" services built to the same standard as the customer-facing product, because the line between throwaway and load-bearing can move without warning.
FAQ
What was Slack before it was Slack?
Slack began as an internal real-time messaging tool built by Tiny Speck, a gaming company, to help its distributed team communicate while building an online game called Glitch.
Why did Glitch fail?
Glitch struggled to attract a large enough audience for its unconventional, non-violent gameplay, and it was built on Adobe Flash, which was falling out of favor as players moved toward mobile devices. It shut down in December 2012 after roughly two years live.
How fast did Slack grow after launch?
Slack entered public beta in August 2013 and reportedly grew daily active users from around 15,000 at launch to more than 1.1 million by June 2015.
Who founded Slack?
Slack was founded by Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov — the same team behind Tiny Speck and the game Glitch, several of whom had previously worked together at Flickr.
Is your "just internal" tool actually load-bearing?
We architect every module — customer-facing or not — to the same standard, so you're never caught off guard by which one turns out to matter.
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