Jake Knapp

When it became obvious that Glitch wasn’t going to be a hit, the company did something strange. Instead of making a different game or closing down, they shifted their efforts to a side project: a messaging system they had originally built for their own use. The startup’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, had a hunch that this messaging system could be useful to other companies, too. So they launched it to the public, and named it

The lesson of Melitta Bentz is that great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.

When it became obvious that Glitch wasn’t going to be a hit, the company did something strange. Instead of making a different game or closing down, they shifted their efforts to a side project: a messaging system they had originally built for their own use. The startup’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, had a hunch that this messaging system could be useful to other companies, too. So they launched it to the public, and named it Slack.
Technology companies went bonkers for Slack. A year after launch, more than 500,000 people on more than 60,000 teams used Slack every single day. For workplace software, this kind of growth was unheard of. When Slack announced they were the fastest growing business app of all time, the press agreed.