Nomadlist is paying $5k per month for Slack
I still love Slack as a community building tool, despite the lack of chat history. I'm really curious to see how this paid plan goes for Levels and whether the cost of the paid plan is actually worth it.
He does make logical points for his reasoning:
- the cost is 1/6th of the current revenue — he can afford it
- he has members on Discord and Slack
- it's really not as simple as moving people over to Discord, many people just won't make the move
- it's hard and probably not worth the effort of building his own version, especially when there is huge risk of people not having the habits of using a new tool.
- it's an experiment, he can always cancel it if it doesn't make sense.
For me, these days it's a toss of the coin between Discord and Slack. Both have their pros and cons.
Lack of moderation and chat history are the biggest issues for Slack. However, I feel it wins for being a standard for most 'knowledge workers'.
Discord is cool, but their lack of threading is a huge pain. Though the custom roles, moderation, bots and their voice + Stages is pretty awesome.
Of course, there are plenty of other community tools out there, but one of the biggest challenges for community builders is getting people to show up. And increasingly this means going where your people are.
I still think it's a crazy amount to spend per month, but probably no worse than hiring someone to do custom dev or needing to hire more hands to help manage the community. I also have hope that it may just open up discussions for more affordable community focused Slack plans.
One can live in hope, eh? 🤞
Most of these comments, while well-intentioned, ignore Rosie's main point, which is that you need to go where your people are. Unless they are a small subset of (overwhelmingly male) nerdy dev gamers, that isn't Discord. Slack has far more traction among young users, especially those in tech-adjacent fields (eg marketing). Sure, Discord might work for you, blah blah, but it's never a matter of tools, it's a matter of usage.
I ran an overwhelmingly successful community using Facebook. This was a grossly inferior tool by any measure except the one that actually counted--people on it and using it every day. Every week I'd get four or five "helpful" emails about how many other features X had, or why didn't we use this weird Linux-based distro that the person had rolled, or...
Not a single person--ever--out of a few thousand members joined because of the forum features. Every single one joined because they saw the immediate benefits of belonging, most of which was triggered by seeing the benefits their friends were already enjoying.
If you're trying to compel people to join a community, e.g. at work, that "immediate and obvious benefits" thing is the principle to work from. A threat or "because" is not a benefit.
I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I'm a huge fan of paying for what you use. The only path away from surveillance capitalism is through market capitalism. If you're not the customer, then you're the product. My own product is going to be a subscription service.
On the other hand, it's hard to fathom a single org paying $5k per month for chat. I guess it's kudos to Slack for making such a compelling product that this calculus works out.
If you want to have fun, use Discord. If you want to work together, use Slack. If you want to enable people to do both, use Mighty Networks.
Discord was born out of a gaming dream so it offers the compelling nature of a social network.
Slack gains the trust of workforce with it's ability to manage message clutter. It charges for message history because there is no such thing as free garbage collecting.
Mighty Network gives you the space to have fun and work. Their ability to separate these 2 audiences for you using Groups brings all the pieces together.
Real Estate Management is a thing and for doing it on the web, tenants just have to pay some good rent. That's why Mighty Network charges a lot for their multi-tenant community platform.
Slack wasn't built for communities like that. I'm a member of NomadList and would much prefer it to be on something like Circle or Mighty Networks. Either of which could help him drop another $55K+ to the bottom line.
I started 11 years ago by building forum communities online, and I can't imagine having to pay $5000/m for Slack when you have a myriad of cheaper IM or forum options out there.
Forums are still viable for online communities imo, and in some cases can even help you by providing more content for the search engines.
If you don't want to deal with hosting, there's paid services out there that are still far cheaper than Slack. Discourse (one of the most popular ones in recent years) has a $100/m tier.
Disclaimer: it's not my business, they're not my customers; I'm sure he has a better understanding of his own situation better than any of us can conjecture, so I'm all for him doing what he feels is best for the business. ✌️
Having said that, I'm a part of less and less Slack "communities" and more and more Discord ones.
I know Discord isn't perfect, for sure, but it's leagues better than most other solutions other than Slack, especially the "popular" open-source/self-shoted ones. Furthermore, I feel Discord offers a better solution for building and developing (mid-to-large) communities than Slack and for a myriad of reasons, and they've been working away from the "chat for gamers" concept from where they (very successfully) grew out of.
I can point to quite a few of dev-related communities that are EXTREMELY well managed and set up on Discord, with high degree of engagement and activity. Of the many that come to mind, I'd mention ZeroToMastery, Kent C. Dodd, Reactiflux, and many more.
I feel like he knows Slack and prefers Slack and with that, more power to him for being able to afford this. But, looking at it from a purely business standpoint, he was making $30k MRR WITHOUT paid Slack, so unless this move INCREASES revenue, activity, interaction, or, above all, happiness, I don't think it was a decision worth sharing or analysing publicly…
But then again: these are my 2¢, and I haven't build a successful community like he has! 😅👏
There are many alternatives to Slack, which works/looks very the same or similar. Matermost is one of them, and it can be self-hosted.