If you want to be bold, start your Slack replacement now. Do whatever you can to make it easy to transition to your product (API compatibility, integration compatibility, etc.). Be ready to pick up the people who will be disgruntled by Slack in two or three years.
You may never be as big as Slack but there's probably a business there.
There probably is but it’s really hard to compete with a company with deep pockets. That’s what I find pretty worrying about these unicorns. They kill a lot of potentially good smaller businesses just by being able to burn a lot of money.
I think they idea was to pick up the pieces when Slack implodes. Most of these businesses, looking for 10x growth, do so at some point.
gitlab and bitbucket ain't github, but as github started burning, they started picking up steam. github sold for $7.5 billion. If they can get 1% of that value, that's still $75 million. If they can do so on the cheap, maintaining control, that's not a bad return. I doubt something like gitlab requires more than 5 people to do well enough to achieve that, given patient, low-overhead investors. Done well, that's $75 million returns for a $10 million investment. If you toss the investor $50 mil, and each employee $5 mil, it's not bad.
On the other hand, as far as I know, patient low-overhead investors are a myth.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that GitLab could be five-person company, but it's much larger. I don't think they list the number of employees, but say 56 countries so I'd wager at least two or three times that.
I am saying, exactly, that it could be, waiting in github's wings with 5 employees. They were exactly that at some point. They started in 2011, and they went for Y Combinator in 2015. They waited, and waited, and then grew. The $100 mil raise was right after MS bought github.
How do they “kill” the competition exactly? I understand they have a lot of money, but what do they do with it that makes it impossible to compete? (Honest question)
I work in an industry that is a bit niche and weird SaaS world.
There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits.
Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absurdly low cost pricing from the other two companies. But I know of others who have lost customers, nobody can match the pricing, and simply because they don't have the backing they will not survive.
It's very possible the two deep pocket companies won't survive either, but it seems like a fairly destructive pattern to have a market torn up ... when the driving force isn't even creating a stable company / what I would think of as typical market forces that help everyone.
That's very true of niche businesses; one competitor price-warring can wipe our half your enterprise customers and they sometimes haven't got any way of growing except trying to pick up their customers. Not sure it's quite so true of general purpose SaaS sold to a market as big as "people that want to collaborate", especially not when the 800lb gorilla's pricing starts at $60/user/year and their apps aren't universally loved or difficult to replicate at smaller scales
It's much easier to develop a product if you don't need to make money for financing the development. Selling is also easier if you can afford marketing budgets and sales people. As long as they are losing money they are basically selling 1 dollar bills for 90 cents. Hard to compete with that.
It's not impossible to compete but just much harder.
You’d want to look at the market fundamentals carefully: if that company has high fixed costs and lacks strong customer lock-in, problems with satisfying customer needs, etc., you might reasonably think you could pick up customers with better pricing or support.
A great example is Uber: they’re dominant but they have a ton of debt and neither their customers nor, especially drivers, have a reason to stick with them if the money is better somewhere else. They could conceivably make that up through superior logistics but if you thought you could do better, say in a particular geographic area where you can get drivers who know where anything is, it might be reasonable to compete if the absence of such a huge amount of debt gives you enough leeway to support an app development team and treat your drivers enough better that they’ll favor your clients.
You may never be as big as Slack but there's probably a business there.