Today, we see the Slack of yesteryear make a pretty bold statement. We head back to SaaStock Dublin. Plus, our team considers the value of company equity in a game we call Overrated/Underrated. 

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SaaStock Dublin, see you there

SaaStock Dublin kicks off next week and we’re psyched to be there to connect, sponsoring a booth fixed with a space to take a load off and caffeinated reinforcements. Look out for us in Ireland.

We want to hear your thoughts on it all—from content design to data sets.

Plus, Patrick's on lock to speak to the whole crew there. He'll be among a bunch of our friends in the space, like SurveyMonkey's Leela Srinivasan and SaaS coach Dan Martell. Details on his talks below. 

Main stage, day 1
How SaaS Companies Fail in Growth & Scale
Growth is hard to get right, and the reality is: most companies will fail because of this. Yet there’s still hope. Using research from more than 15k subscription and SaaS companies, Patrick dissects where companies fail and how we can avoid those critical mistakes. You’ll walk away with a modern playbook for SaaS growth and tactical tools you need to break complacency and drive growth.

Main stage, day 2
Death Is Inevitable: Building a Business That Outlives You
First fact: We’re all going to die. Second fact: Most business will, too. Armed with that understanding, how do we build something that overcomes the statistics? Patrick explores data from over 15k SaaS companies on what separates the average businesses from the unicorns and the benchmarks for a company built to stand the test of time.

Check out the SaaStock trailer to get pumped.

Orion x Riskalyze

We're eyeing our friends over at Riskalyze, launching an integration update with Orion to ease the stress in one of the toughest parts of the client experience: onboarding. 

With it, the two are upping their preexisting partnership to empower you to take your clients from proposal to invested in record times. They've changed a couple crucial items—like adding contextual links—to the process, to get your clients invested in a quicker, more seamless way.

For the investors and advisors out there, read on. 

Learning from the leaders with Userlane

Userlane—the navigation system for software—releases a list on its blog of the 10 Must-See Videos on SaaS Growth (and our very own Patrick Campbell makes the list with his SaasStock talk on the Lessons Learned from 3,000 SaaS Companies). 

The list is pretty sweet if you’re looking for a knowledge drop on the daily (apart from subscribing to Recur Now, that is). I’ve watched one each morning since its release, a solid kickoff to the day.

They’ve got topics from designing killer sales calls to strategies on scaling from $1M to $500M ARR, with names we know like Chief Instigator Dan Martell, tech exec and angel investor David Kellogg, former CRO at Castlight Health and former COO at OpenDNS Michele Law, plus Intercom COO Karen Peacock.

I usually spend my early mornings scanning Twitter for stuff like this, but Userlane’s done the work for me—at least for the next week, that is. Hit me up at abby@recurnow.com if you have resources like this you’re sitting on. As always, I’m all ears.

Deep dive

A modern day Slack attack

Slack—adore it, despise it, use it, avoid it.

Regardless, Slack has an omnipresence in the industry we’re in. It’s the messaging platform we admittedly cannot function without, often replacing email communication (thus is the case with us here at ProfitWell), offering a workday reprieve, connecting coworkers with channels of memes or yoga plans, or bringing in external communication to help make internal moves.

Whether you adore it or begrudgingly use it on the daily, Slack—as a business—has undeniably caught our eye since day one. 

From the ProfitWell content side, we’ve already torn down its pricing page in our Slack episode of Pricing Page Teardown and talked with Hiten Shah about Slack’s booming business in Tradeoffs. 

Most recently, Jackson Noel, Co-Founder and CEO at Appcues, takes a look at Slack from an angle of onboarding, and how it has evolved since its 2014 emergence as darling in the SaaS world.

Jackson points to Slack’s user onboarding as clearly demonstrating the collaboration tool’s value proposition and swiftly getting users to take meaningful action—both of which are critical for creating aha moments as users discover the variety of things they can accomplish with the tool.

Yet despite this success, the product peeps over at Slack never slacked off. They’ve continued to iterate on their best practices to keep onboarding hot. 

Here’s how Jackson lays out the evolution of what Slack's done right:

1. Visually communicating the “why”
   Because as humans, we’re conditioned to avoid high-effort tasks. So when asking users to volunteer information (i.e. make an effort), it’s important not only to convey what information you’re asking for but also why you’re asking for it.
2. Deferred password creation
   In an aim at removing unnecessary friction that stands between a new user signing up and their aha moment.
3. Simplified copywriting
   Because here, less is often more (completely agree with this sentiment). But sometimes, a few extra words can go a long way toward helping your users achieve tangible results, quickly.
4. Fast-tracking user action
   Because the most engaging products keep new users laser-focused on the path to success, accomplishable by highlighting the most important actions a user should take on each page.
5. Consolidating mission critical information
   To create the most effective way of getting users to interact with a product and take the actions they need to become activated users. 

To dive even deeper into what these could mean for your operation, check out Jackson’s post, as he outlines in serious depth the difference from Slack’s 2014 to 2016 to present-day jump in user experience. 

As a bonus, we found this cool read by Medium, consisting of a memo sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, back in July 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release.’

In it, Slack makes a pretty bold statement.

"Any team who adopts Slack as their central application for communication would be significantly better off than they were before. That means we have something people want."

Slack made it clear: they weren't selling a group chat system, but rather an organizational transformation. Over the past few years it did exactly that, changing interoffice communication vastly.

Oh, and in the same regard: we also spotted a fresh product on Product Hunt called Shoulder Tap to put some manners on your Slack notifications—all in the name of ending Slack fatigue.

Overrated vs. Underrated

Overrated/Underrated is a game in which players deem debate-worthy items as they see fit. From freemium and free trials to the cannabis company boom, no topic is off the table. In today's segment, I'm joined by ProfitWell's Andrew Gierer, Ian Black, Neel Desai, and Gina Eygenson to argue the value of offering company equity to employees. 

And that’s a wrap for your October 8 subscription news. Recruit your friends into the subscription know by sending them to profitwell.com/recur/recurnow to sign up for episodes on the daily.

If you have news to share, hit me up at abby@recurnow.com and we'll collaborate.