August 2013. The game was dead. What came next wasn't in anyone's business plan.
In August 2013, Stewart Butterfield gathered his small team and delivered news that would have crushed most founders: their game was dead. Glitch, a whimsical, browser-based multiplayer game that had consumed four years of their lives and millions in venture capital, was shutting down. It was the second time Butterfield had watched a gaming dream collapse. What his team didn't know yet was that the tool they'd built to survive the chaos of game development — a scrappy internal messaging system — was about to become one of the fastest-growing business software products in history.
The Habitual Failure That Wasn't
Butterfield had been here before. In 2004, he and his co-founders at Ludicorp were building a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. It was ambitious, underfunded, and going nowhere fast. To survive, they pivoted into a photo-sharing feature they'd built as a side tool within the game. That pivot became Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in 2005 for a reported $22–25 million.
A decade later, history was rhyming. Glitch — a gorgeous, imaginative game set inside the minds of eleven giants — had been incubating since 2009. It attracted genuine fans and critical admiration, but never the player base it needed. By late 2012, the team had already tried one relaunch. By August 2013, the money was running out and the math wasn't working. Butterfield shut it down.
But this time, unlike with Game Neverending, the team had something sitting right in front of them.
The Tool Built for Survival
While building Glitch, Butterfield's distributed team needed a way to communicate across time zones, share files, and track decisions without drowning in email. So they built a custom internal messaging system — part IRC, part email, part searchable archive — that organized conversations into channels and made information actually findable.
The pivot moment came in the final weeks of Glitch's life, sometime in late 2012 into early 2013, when Butterfield and co-founder Cal Henderson looked at their own behavior and asked a simple question:
What are we actually using every day that we can't imagine working without?
The answer wasn't the game. It was the chat tool.
In February 2013, Butterfield officially redirected what remained of the team toward productizing that internal tool. They called it Slack — a backronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. On August 12, 2013 — the same week Glitch formally announced it was closing — Slack quietly launched into private beta.
The Hockey Stick Nobody Expected
The numbers that followed were almost surreal:
- On its first day of public availability, Slack signed up 8,000 teams
- Within 24 hours, that number climbed to 15,000
- By February 2015, Slack was adding $1 million in new contracts every eleven days
- Salesforce acquired it in July 2021 for $27.7 billion — the largest enterprise software acquisition in history at the time
The product succeeded because it wasn't designed by product managers imagining what workers needed. It was designed by a team desperate to solve their own coordination problems, built under the pressure of a failing company, refined through daily use by people who had no alternative.
The Lesson Buried in the Rubble
The easy takeaway is "pivot fast." But that's not quite right. Butterfield didn't pivot because he was strategically flexible. He pivoted because he was honest enough to look at what was already working inside his own failing company. Slack didn't come from a whiteboard session about market opportunities. It came from four years of necessity.
The specific lesson here: when a company is dying, the most valuable thing it may have built is the infrastructure it created just to survive. Before you shut the lights off, look hard at the tools you built for yourself.
Sometimes the product everyone wants is the one you never planned to sell.