The much-awaited Slack developer conference finally took place at The Midway in San Francisco on 22 May 2018. Of course, we are talking about Spec: Slack’s first conference for builders.

We, at YellowAnt, have been eagerly waiting to see what Slack had in store for the attendees of the event and boy, were we psyched to see the upcoming developments from the amazing teams at Slack!

This post covers the highlights from the keynote speeches. The entire event is available on YouTube as well.

Slack Spec was live-streamed on YouTube and is available on their channel.

First to take the stage was April Underwood, Chief Product Officer at Slack. After a quick introduction she dived straight into some numbers. Slack has been growing steadily ever since its launch in 2014.

The platform currently has more than 8 million active users with 3 million of them on the paid plans. The user base spans across the globe covering 100+ countries. Of the 500,000+ organizations that currently use Slack as their communication platform, 70,000+ organizations are on paid plans.

Slack users | From April’s Presentation.

Apart from the massive user base, Slack has more than 200,000 developers who build on the platform as well. They build integrations not only for the popular applications but also for internal applications. Back in December, 2015 Slack’s App Directory housed around 150 applications. Since then, it has grown to a massive 1500+ applications.

April went on to talk about a few of Slack’s partner organizations —