Another Slack review?

When I started using Slack to collaborate with the team at Process Street, I couldn’t tell you why it was so popular. The day I was hired we moved the work-related chat over from Skype to Slack so I could meet the team. It was a while before I actually understood why.

All the while, by internet buzz standards, it was obvious Slack was doing something right. A study with a sample size of 731 by Hiten Shah concluded Slack is a real market fit, with 51% of its users saying they’d be very disappointed if it no longer existed and 82% recommending the app to others — that’s a high NPS score, for sure.

The news is out that Slack’s value has risen to $2.8 billion, with explosive growth doubling the number of users since the start of 2015. The growth is so remarkable that the New York Times estimates it is the fastest growing business app of all time, and even though it’s just two years old, it’s debatable whether it’s really a startup anymore — it’s even running its first ad campaign.

Slack’s success has been reported enough – it’s the user experience that matters most, right? For the purposes of my Slack review, I’m not saying I rigorously exhausted the app’s uses and put every feature through its paces, I used it like a normal person might for the few things I needed it for.

Here’s what 2015 has been like.

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How often do you manage to read everything you save for later? I mean email, bookmarks, PDFs… everything.

When I first started working as a Process Street content writer, I had to improve my content creation process instantly or start falling behind deadlines.

I don’t want to remember how slow and disorganized I used to be before Pocket. It’s only been a few months, but I’ve already repressed memories of my sluggish content creation process. For the purposes of this post, I racked my brain and dredged up the process for you all to laugh at. Here’s what it looked like:

My day-to-day tasks include research, reading, writing, and keeping our social platforms updated with fresh, relevant content. As far as research goes, I lost most of it or had no way of organizing it properly. PDFs got lost in my overflowing and overlooked Downloads folder, and anything pasted from Gmail to Notepad wasn’t worth looking at because of the formatting issues.

If I wasn’t using a combination of Twitter, Pocket, Evernote and Trello for content creation, I might as well be shoving a load of links into Untitled.txt and forgetting about them forever.

Here’s how I make sense of the research process I go through when creating new content for the Process Street blog.

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A few days ago we silently changed Process Street’s pricing model for all new users from freemium to a 30-day free trial. At the same time, we increased the price on all of our plans except the entry 10 user plan (now Premium 10). Today, we announced to our users that we’re no longer offering the free plan and that everyone who is currently using the free plan will be switched to a 30 day trial of our Premium 10 plan.

During the trial, users have complete, unhindered access to test Process Street. They can create as many templates, team’s and jobs as they want, plus upgrade to any of the plans free of charge. At the end of the 30 days, they must decide if they want to continue using the product as a paid user or not.

All of our paying customers on plans larger than 10 users, will remain on their current plan with no changes unless they choose to upgrade/downgrade, in which case they’ll be moved to the new pricing model.

In this post, I’ll explain why we chose to change from freemium to free trial.

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We have a feature in Process Street that allows you to create email templates and send them straight from within the app.

This is great if you are using a mail client such as Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird or a mobile device. It works smoothly.

But some people (like myself) prefer to use Gmail as their default mail client and don’t want to install a bulky desktop app.

Not to fear! With just a few simple steps you can configure Gmail to be your default mail client and have Process Street emails open Gmail compose, pre-populated with the template right in your browser!

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