While everyone talks about Salesforce buying Slack, it is interesting to look at how Slack came to be.

Its founder Stewart Butterfield really wanted to make a great video game. He first tried with a game titled Game Neverending. You have never heard of it, because it failed, but putting together a bunch of features they had developed for that game, Stewart and colleagues came up with Flickr. Which you might have heard of, and sold to Yahoo! for 20 something million dollars. Later on he tried again, this time with a game titled Glitch. Fortunately for him, that did not work either, and while developing the game, Stewart and colleagues had put together a funny tool for internal communication, that later became Slack.

The point is, Stewart had no idea. He did not have any great master plan to build Slack (or Flickr), any recipe for the success of his video games, any routine or ritual that would make him smarter, faster, eventually richer.

He was lucky.

And he was (probably still is) in the habit of doing.

Now you can go and read “The 3 steps to make your startup successful”, or “Rich entrepreneurs typically do these 5 things (first thing in the morning)”.

Or you can start shipping. You already know what and how.

[…] this, by the way, I think is the greatest software development methodology that’s impossible to replicate, which is, don’t think about what you’re doing, have no ego. There’s no speculation, there’s no, “I can imagine a user would want to.” To spend a minimum number of minutes addressing the most aggravating problems that you have, and just use it, and then see.

Stewart Butterfield, Masters of Scale