Hi Ben and thanks for hunting us!
The short answer is that workgroup is a much simpler/faster/less noisy platform - it actually has no teams and no setsup, you simply open workgroups on-demand, in seconds, with anyone you want, from any company, to discuss any subject.
So if Slack is ideal for a dev team working mostly internally, Workgroup is perfect for anyone working with people from inside and outside their company, especially when working with non-tech people, who find Slack a bit much. This includes business people, investors, service agencies (from lawyers to PR agents), freelancers - and anyone who would find themselves switching between 10 teams.
The longer answer, since I've been asked this already, is in a post I wrote, called: "Is Slack the last business app we’ll ever need?" https://medium.com/@amibendavid/...
The reason we built Workgroup is that in our vision, practically every email conversation with people on CC, represents a group of people trying to get things done - a workgroup, and can achieve huge efficiency advantages from switching the discussion to simple real-time messaging platform.
So since even the most die hard Slack fans (including the CEO), still connect outside via Email, I think most Slack users will find it very useful to open on-demand workgroups outside their teams.
Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback...
@amibendavid You just described all the weakness of Slack and the strengths of Skype. Additionally Skype most likely has the person you want to chat with signed up.
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I love workgroup, using along with Slack for communications outside my organization.
@omerkalderon Will do, at the moment we are playing with it (mobile & web)
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I have used it a bit and it's really comfortable communicating with co-workers or co-partners on a project.
Really screens out the clutter and distractions of social media and alternative communication platforms.
Took and look and at first glance, very nice. But I am still not sure how you're hoping to compete with Slack. You say" you simply open workgroups on-demand, in seconds, with anyone you want, from any company, to discuss any subject."
The very same can be done in Slack. Create a restricted channel, invite anybody you like and bang, you're in business. Invite somebody to Slack proper and they have access to all the accumulated knowledge of the organization. That's really valuable and, unless I am missing something, Workgroup doesn't compete here.
The other problem is that the reach of Workgroup will most likely stop with invited guests, unless they are tech-savvy enough to invite further circles. This, in turn, creates issues of confidentiality - unlike in Slack you now have to watch what you're saying because everything you say can be public at a moment's notice. This makes Workgroup useless for confidential conversations with clients or collaborators. The same can be said for email of course, but there the act of forwarding to a non-involved party needs to be a conscious one, in Workgroup it is really easy, perhaps too easy, to just send out a link to a conversation.
Workgroup, to me, feels like a, admittedly slick, take on WhatsApp or Telegram rather than a Slack competitor. The problem then becomes that you're opening yet another app, yet anothe knowledge silo, yet another set of notifications, yet another technology to explain to clients and that all conversations can turn open at with the simple sharing of a link. We had clients express reservations about the confidentiality of Slack, you're now taking business data and making this even easier to be accidentally made public. From a corporate point of view (boring, I know) that's an issue.
Of course, these weaknesses lead directly to a massive strength - there's no need to join different teams to take part in different projects that might be championed by different stakeholders. That's huge and really, really appealing. But again, this feels like WhatsApp or Telegram territory, not competitiveness with Slack.
@andreasduess Thanks for your question.
First of all the idea behind "workgroups" is larger then a team, as it's a group of people working on an ongoing projects, deal negotiations, trying to achieve something together, and more. Many times its involving people from different companies and places, which many of them aren't using Slack as they find it to much.
As simplicity is one of the main features, Workgroup doesn't require any set up or special account. You get a link or invite someone by email in Workgroup, and thats it, they are in, no need to enter a password.
@andreasduess adding to Omer's answer, you do raise a good point with the comparison to Whatsapp, but it's just half of the big picture.
We are actually somewhere between Whatsapp and Slack - on the one hand, as simple as Whatsapp groups (which are MUCH easier to use than Slack for the non-tech user), but on the hand other we provide all the business tools, so for example, when someone new joins a workgroup, they do get all the accumulated knowledge of that workgroup.
Our vision is to replace working on projects using email (the vast majority of the market today), and to do that, adding users to a workgroup must be as slick and simple as adding someone you never met on Cc. On the other side, for the people you invite, they should be on the group with one click too - as fast as they can answer an email (rather than set up another user for another team).
The result is that Workgroups, tend to be smaller (3-9 people), much more task-oriented, and they tend to be much less "noisy" than big open Slack channels. It's just a group of people working together to get something specific done. It's a different philosophy from the all encompassing Slack strategy.
I believe both approaches have their place in the market. Slack has 3M users a day, out of hundreds of millions of business email users. We believe the market is just beginning...
@andreasduess I see you added another point, re ease of adding new users, this is good feedback - we added the ability for workgroup members to invite new team members easily, but that can easily be fixed to be an option of the workgroup owner, but in real-life scenarios, you invite one person from, say an external firm, and they say, "hey can I add...", so we made it as easy as adding someone on CC... again, in the spirit of replacing email.
About Whatsapp, we did an extensive research about the use of Whatsapp for work, and found that people do use Whatsapp 1:1 for work, but much less when it comes to groups. Whatsapp is just not built for business, so that's a space operate in.
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@amibendavid That's really interesting WhatsApp data and one that is mirrored, much to my surprise, is our Slack setups. Over 70% of communication in (our) Slack is peer to peer. I have no knowledge of the numbers for Slack overall, of course. At the same time, our internal email has all but disappeared.
I understand that you're trying to remove friction wherever possible, but I do think you'll run into worries from corporate users. Omer mentioned deal negotiations as a user example, I wouldn't dream about using Workgroup for this purpose. It's, potentially, wide open, even more so than Slack - and we had legal departments question our use of Slack with several clients we wanted to onboard. Where I can see Workgroup shine is for quick, almost throwaway, conversations about very defined issues - but then again, I've already got tools that answer that need.
I my experience, people use WhatsApp, and comparable apps, as a workaround for corporate restrictions. If a corporation doesn't make better comms tools available, people will bring their own to work - that's been going on for years. Telegram is now routinely being used by politicians trying to have confidential conversations that cannot be traced - now there's an interesting market. :)
Finally of course, there's Facebook For Work coming up, which will be really interesting to watch. Weird as this sounds, the current testers appear to love it. This market is just about to get very saturated, in my opinion.
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@amibendavid I might be 100% wrong about all of the above, And, just to make that point, I wish you nothing but success!
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