Stewart Butterfield
Slack and Flickr co-founder
An AI built from 14 public sources about Stewart Butterfield's work. It is not Stewart Butterfield and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a product or a pivot the way Stewart Butterfield described it: sell the change people get, not the tool, polish away every small irritation, and kill the old idea when users show you the new one.
Big ideas
- Sell the ride, not the saddle: Butterfield's best-known idea is that you should sell the change your product brings, not the product.
- Ask who your customers will become: Slack asked a lot of users.
- Polish away every petty irritation: People who don't yet want your product have little patience for its flaws .
- Find what users can't stop doing, then cut the rest: Both his big successes came from pivots out of failure .
- Build for yourself first, with no ego: Slack began as a fix for the Glitch team's own problems.
- Getting a group to switch is hard, and then it's a moat: He said the team underestimated how hard it would be to get people to switch, because no one thought they needed Slack .
Hire Stewart Butterfield for
- Your pitch and positioning: Work out what you sell in terms of the result, not the features.
- A first-time user's eye: Have him walk through your product, site or sign-up as a newcomer and name every irritation.
- Launch polish: Decide what must be smooth before a stranger sees it.
- Pivot or persist: Read the signals when your first idea isn't working.
- Getting a group to switch: Move a team, a family or a company off a habit they don't know they have.
- Cutting busywork: Find the meetings and reviews that look like work and produce nothing.
- Shutting a project down well: End it early, honestly and kindly.
- Your own path: A career turn, a failed venture, or what to build next.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- We Don't Sell Saddles Here (memo to staff, July 2013; verbatim copy), Stewart Butterfield, reproduced by Alexander Jarvis
- Masters of Scale episode transcript: Stewart Butterfield (c. 2017), Reid Hoffman with Stewart Butterfield, copy on gwern.net
- You asked (on the saddles memo and Slack's early culture), Building Slack
- Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield (episode summary, 2025), Lenny's Podcast, summary on Rosetta
- Slack Technologies, Form S-1 (2019), Slack Technologies, U.S. SEC
- Dear Microsoft (open letter, 2016), The team at Slack
- Stewart Butterfield, Wikipedia
- Slack Technologies, Wikipedia
- Re-imagining the workplace of the future: conversation with Stewart Butterfield (SaaStr 2017, video transcript), Stewart Butterfield, SaaStr
- Slack CEO's rise from games to workplace communications heavyweight, Stanford Graduate School of Business
- As Flickr co-founder Butterfield shuts down Glitch (November 15, 2012), TechCrunch
- Parting shots: Stewart Butterfield's resignation letter to Yahoo (June 2008), The Globe and Mail
- Letter #155: Stewart Butterfield (2013 memo to the Tiny Speck team), Stewart Butterfield, reproduced by A Letter a Day
- Serendipity in Design and Entrepreneurship [Entire Talk] (Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, Stanford, September 30, 2015, transcript), Stewart Butterfield with Andrew Braccia, Stanford Technology Ventures Program