Ask HN: Is your Slack-based product profitable?

[EtienneLem]

Looking at the last few days on ProductHunt, I’m seeing about 8+ products for Slack. Some of them are a sub-product of the main one with either their own pricing or used to promote the main product. Some are a full-fledged startup, some even only seem to work in a Slack environment. Pricing vary between Free to ~$50/months.

I’m guessing the Slack ecosystem is pretty healthy but is it profitable? I’m particularly interested in products with a dedicated pricing.

[dskaletsky]

Derek from @relayhq & @knowtifyio here (@relayhq is our slack app).

It's way too early to tell. It's early for our app (we only launched a few days ago) and it's early for Slack. So...very hard to say if over the long run, you can build profitable businesses of that platform.

When Salesforce launched Force.com, people questioned whether or not you could build strong, stand-alone businesses of the SF platform. It was a little easier to see the path in that case given SF's adoption at that point, but still, I don't think anyone predicted the scope and scale of the products that have build great businesses off SF.

While I don't think Slack will create the same impact as SF has, I think over time we will definitely see profitable businesses built off their platform...

[ernesto-jimenez]

Ernesto from https://slackline.io here.

It's definitely working for us.

We have hundreds of companies collaborating through Slackline. From investors and startups, to agencies, consultancies and universities. We've been growing nicely since we launched.

With that being said, our objective is to cover much more than just Slack. It's a great platform to start with, but we have had vision that goes beyond Slack from day one :)

[ianlevesque]

Yeah you can tell by the name that the vision extends beyond slack :)

[keydunov]

Artyom from http://www.statsbot.co

A lot of teams have installed Statsbot and have been using it on a daily basis. Since we haven't even introduced paid plans yet, it is too early to tell in a long term. However, we have a few paying customers through direct sales, which covers our server expenses.

[DaneOfKnowtify]

Dane from https://relay.knowtify.io

We only launched a week ago so it's definitely too early to say if we'll be profitable if you factor in dev time, expenses for our server, db, tools...and CPA. But we do have some strong early interest and paying users so we're excited about Relay.

One of the big reasons we built Relay is to extend functionality for teams using Knowtify and integrating through Segment. Since launching Relay, our Knowtify signups have at least doubled.

[EtienneLem]

Very interesting. Would love to see some more numbers in a few months for both Knowtify signups and Relay usage.

[DaneOfKnowtify]

I wont share any specifics on any of our customers but happy to share high level stats if you want to email me in a few months. It might be interesting to poll 20-50 apps 3 months after launch and turn it into some sort of visualization.

[e-mail]

[mrfusion]

What is slack? Their website wanted me to watch a video to learn what it is.

[atomical]

Watch the video.

[coderKen]

I guess we'll have to find out in the coming years.