In 2012, Stewart Butterfield was trying to build a massively multiplayer online game called Glitch. It was ambitious, visually stunning, and deeply weird, a browser-based world built around the idea of cooperative play rather than competition.
Glitch shut down in November 2012. Not enough players, not enough revenue, no clear path forward. Butterfield wrote a remarkably gracious shutdown note to his community and started figuring out what came next.
What came next was not another game. It was the internal messaging tool his team had been using to communicate while building Glitch. They had hacked it together out of necessity, a way to keep a distributed team aligned without drowning in email. When Glitch died, a few people on the team noticed that the tool they had built to make the game was more useful than the game itself.
Slack launched publicly in August 2013. Within 24 hours, 8,000 companies had signed up. It reached $1 million in daily messages sent within the first week. In 2021, Salesforce acquired it for $27.7 billion.
What Butterfield actually did right
The easy version of this story is that Butterfield got lucky. He built something for internal use and accidentally stumbled onto a product people wanted. That reading is too simple and not very useful.
What Butterfield did was pay close attention to what his team was actually using versus what he had set out to build.
That capacity to notice is rarer than it sounds. Most founders are so attached to their original vision that they filter out signals pointing somewhere else. When users engage with a feature you built as an afterthought more than the core product, it is easy to explain it away. Butterfield had the intellectual honesty to follow the signal instead.
This is worth sitting with if you are early-stage. The thing your users find most useful about your product right now may not be the thing you think you are building. Do you know what it is? Have you asked?
The pivot that was not really a pivot
There is a tendency in startup culture to mythologize the pivot. Butterfield’s shift from Glitch to Slack gets cited constantly as an example of a founder who had the courage to change direction. But calling it a pivot misses something important.
Butterfield did not abandon everything and start over. He looked at what already existed, what his team had already built and validated through daily use and asked whether that thing was worth pursuing on its own terms. The answer was yes. The “pivot” was really just an honest reassessment of where the value actually was.
That distinction matters because a lot of early-stage founders pivot in the wrong direction. They abandon a struggling product and build something entirely new rather than examining what is already working inside what they have. If you are considering a pivot right now, the question worth asking first is not “what should we build instead” but “what are users already doing with what we have that we did not expect.”
What to take from this
Most first-time founders treat failure as a verdict. Butterfield treated it as data. The distinction between those two orientations, over a long enough timeline, produces very different outcomes.
You are probably not building the next Slack. But there is something in this story that applies regardless of what you are building.
Pay attention to what your users do, not just what you built for them. Be honest about where the value actually is, even if it is not where you planned. And if something is not working, look carefully at what is before you walk away from all of it.
The $28 billion was not in the game. It was in the tool nobody planned to build.
Inpaceline OS helps early-stage founders stay close to what is actually working in their business, so the signal does not get lost in the noise of building. Take a look at www.inpaceline.com
