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by muzani 336 days ago
Vertical is deep, specialized. Horizontal is broad, workflows, teams.

MS teams is horizontal. Send files, real time chat, channels based around access. Integral with general tools like Office and thus you're paying for more.

Slack is more vertical. It plugs well into integrations, people can write their own alerts. Discord is for games and gaming communities.

Full vertical - I helped to sell one for Asian hospitals. Hospitals were building their own comm system because Slack didn't have the fine grained access for patient data. Also Asians took stickers seriously. You can't just give a doctor a thumbs up frog emoji on their message to acknowledge. It had to take significant message space.
1 comments
mattbrewsbytes 335 days ago
Your own definition seems to contradict itself. Slack is horizontal, like Teams, send files, real time chat, video huddles, channels based on access, integral with other tools via plugins.

Not every tool is going to be HIPAA compliant, or the equivalent in other countries.

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muzani 335 days ago
Yes, a vertical saas will have many of the same features. If they didn't have the feature, people would just buy the horizontal.

Slack does not come bundled with a spreadsheet and word processor though. MS Teams does - that's your horizontal. People who buy Slack generally don't buy Word.

It's a common strategy for a startup to go vertical, then horizontal. Slack was in the business of replacing IRC at first (hence the # logo), but kept going deeper.

HIPAA compliance is another vertical. It's not worth it for Slack to go after hospitals; it's a customer channel they don't understand or sell to. The apps that do hospital won't go after Slack's customers either. But both will go after the ones using MS Teams, email, or WhatsApp.

Another example is payment gateways. Stripe covers 46 countries. Yet nearly every country and region has their own localized payment gateway. Because Stripe doesn't have the depth to cover all the channels, every bank, every e-wallet. E-wallets are lighter than bank accounts, making them some of the most tightly regulated, especially for money laundering and countries with more crime/corruption. Stripe won't do these; most people with e-wallets have bank accounts and credit cards. It's a lot of work just to deal with one country, too much to cover 46 countries.

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