On Twitter, Slack CEO discussed some of the dramatic changes Slack has seen over the last few weeks, like quickly adding 9K net new customers; stock up 14%+
- Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield posted a thread to Twitter telling a story of how wild things have been for Slack this month.
Context & Ripple Effects
Stewart Butterfield's Twitter thread lands two days after his Q&A on COVID-19's impact on Slack and its rivalry with Microsoft and Zoom, turning that interview's anecdotes into hard numbers: 9,000 net new customers added in a matter of weeks. Against the 100,000-plus paid-customer base Slack reported in September 2019, that is roughly a quarter's worth of net adds compressed into days of lockdown-driven demand.
The market read it that way too — the stock jumped 14%+, a sharp reversal for a company whose last earnings report in September sent shares down double digits despite 58% revenue growth. The thread is effectively an off-cycle earnings announcement, delivered on Twitter rather than in a filing.
First-order effects
- Slack's sales and support teams are absorbing an unplanned demand spike — onboarding thousands of new organizations at once, many of them free-tier signups that must be converted to paid seats to matter financially.
- Public-market investors re-rate Slack immediately on the news, with the 14%+ stock gain erasing some of the discount applied after the September earnings selloff.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft Teams and Zoom, both named by Butterfield as competitors in this week's Q&A, face the same work-from-home demand wave — the battle shifts from winning new categories to proving reliability and conversion at record signup volumes.
- If even part of the 9K surge converts to paid, Slack's next reported quarter should show customer-count growth well above its recent cadence — setting expectations that later 2020 results struggled to meet, when Q2 revenue growth flattened through the pandemic despite continued customer adds.
Third-order effects
- The episode previews the pattern the rest of 2020 confirmed: crisis-driven signups are easy, but converting emergency free usage into durable paid subscriptions is the real test — Slack kept adding customers while growth rates slid from 58% toward 49%, pressuring the stock each time it reported.
- Enterprise collaboration software shifts from a discretionary purchase to assumed infrastructure, which raises the bar for every vendor: growth expectations get set by pandemic-era adoption curves, not pre-COVID baselines.
The trend: Forced remote work is compressing years of enterprise SaaS adoption into weeks, but the harder problem — converting surge signups into sustained paid growth — is what ultimately moves these stocks.