Paul Sloane tells how Stewart Butterfield's failed game Glitch became Slack, the messaging platform that changed how teams work. Sometimes the best solutions come from abandoning what you planned and noticing what's actually valuable.
Chapters
In 2009, a Canadian entrepreneur called Stewart Butterfield started a company called Tiny Speck. It was a gaming company and they created a multiplayer game called Glitch, which they marketed as best they could, but it wasn't popular. It didn't succeed. It was a failure. The company was going out of business because the bet they'd made had failed. So they looked around. What could they do? How could they pivot? And they realized that they've got something, an internal tool that they'd used for messaging amongst the developers within the company, which was pretty cool. So they repackaged it, polished it up, and promoted it as a messaging, team messaging tool called Slack. Slack is an acronym. It stands for Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge. And it proved very popular with business clients. It grew very, very quickly. Slack became an industry standard, and the company Slack was bought by Salesforce in 2021 for $27 billion. The point about the story is that sometimes a failure, a mistake, an error in business can lead to an opportunity, to an unexpected solution, a beneficial outcome. And there are many, many examples of this in my new book, The Art of Unexpected Solutions. Where I tell you how this can happen and how you can create the opportunities for it to happen in your organization and for how you to benefit by it in terms of exploiting unexpected solutions.
