Rahul Vohra

how you decided to do this, because now it's pretty commonplace.

I suspect a lot of you are doing a process like this, but in a lot of ways, I think it was unique for a product like this at the time.

I would love to hear some of the motivations for why you did that.

Was it about discovery?

Was it about activation and customer success?

Was it about your price point?

What are the things that fit into deciding to take a very different worldview on how to get people going on product?

So interestingly, when we started the company for a few years, I thought we would do it the quote unquote normal way.

Again, if you wind the clock back 10, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, freemium was considered a big deal because it was a novel business model back then.

Now it's sort of brain dead obvious.

And I think over time it came into fashion, then it fell out of fashion.

Then we all realized what it really was, which is actually a relatively expensive way potentially of financing your marketing.

And there are certain specific cases where it works really, really well.

Slack is a great example.

The product is multiplayer or collaborative by default.

Like that is the primary use case, obviously true for Slack.

And where in using the product, you build up

a retentive moat, everything from the habit of going back to Slack every day in the morning to the data that you're actually putting into the product.

Those are all things that, of course, you want to treat it like...

give it away for free because once people start using it, it'll be so difficult for them to stop using it.