Slack hits 2M daily active users, launches third-party App Directory, $80M developer fund
Slack has made its next move in building out its platform. At a major press event in San Francisco today, the company announced that it has launched a third-party App Directory aimed …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the moment Slack stops being a chat tool and starts being a platform. Six weeks earlier it was still selling features — the user-groups launch paired notifications with a 1.7M-DAU milestone — but the third-party App Directory plus an $80M developer fund is a different kind of announcement: Slack is now recruiting other companies' software into its product.
The arc holds afterward: the fund keeps writing checks ($2M into 14 Slackbot startups in mid-2016, then 11 more bot makers by early 2017), while Slack's own valuation climbs from $3.8B in April 2016 toward $7.1B by its Series H. The platform bet and the valuation are two readings of the same thesis.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers get an official storefront for reaching Slack's 2M daily active users — distribution that previously required each integrator to find its own buyers.
- Slack's $80M fund makes the company an investor in its own ecosystem, aligning startup roadmaps with Slack's platform rather than leaving integration to chance.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise software vendors now face pressure to ship Slack integrations or cede the workspace surface to startups the fund has seeded; the directory becomes a competitive gate for who gets workplace mindshare.
- Rival workplace tools must answer with their own app ecosystems and developer programs, since a buyer choosing a chat client is increasingly choosing a platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — directory plus fund plus compounding DAU growth feeding successive mega-rounds like the $427M Series H — the chat window hardens into the access layer through which work software is bought and distributed, with Slack capturing the toll position.
- Developer-fund-as-distribution becomes a template: platforms subsidize the ecosystem that locks their network effects in place, shifting value from standalone apps to whoever owns the workspace hub.
The trend: Workplace chat is evolving from messaging utility into a platform-controlled access layer, where the owner of the directory and developer fund decides which software reaches knowledge workers.