Derek from @relayhq & @knowtifyio here (@relayhq is our slack app).
It's way too early to tell. It's early for our app (we only launched a few days ago) and it's early for Slack. So...very hard to say if over the long run, you can build profitable businesses of that platform.
When Salesforce launched Force.com, people questioned whether or not you could build strong, stand-alone businesses of the SF platform. It was a little easier to see the path in that case given SF's adoption at that point, but still, I don't think anyone predicted the scope and scale of the products that have build great businesses off SF.
While I don't think Slack will create the same impact as SF has, I think over time we will definitely see profitable businesses built off their platform...
We've been using Readme.io for our documentation for a while now (http://api.knowtify.io). Love the team, but mostly I love that the non-technical folks (ie - me) can maintain/update our API docs without engineering having to time on it. It's one of the last things engineers want to spend time on (and one of the last things I'd want them to spend time on)...
It's way too early to tell. It's early for our app (we only launched a few days ago) and it's early for Slack. So...very hard to say if over the long run, you can build profitable businesses of that platform.
When Salesforce launched Force.com, people questioned whether or not you could build strong, stand-alone businesses of the SF platform. It was a little easier to see the path in that case given SF's adoption at that point, but still, I don't think anyone predicted the scope and scale of the products that have build great businesses off SF.
While I don't think Slack will create the same impact as SF has, I think over time we will definitely see profitable businesses built off their platform...