Iād buy some at that price because I basically live on various slacks 
But as always, not advice, do your own thing etc
My previous company did exactly that. They tried to ban slack, because they got an Azure cloud license and then wanted to take all MS products including Teams. However, people still used Slack anyway - forced adoption in tech seldom works. Some companies, particularly larger legacy businesses will for sure take this approach, and it will eat into Slacks market share, but I still think Slack is a superior product.
It feels to me like an Apple Music/Spotify scenario. One is heavily backed and pre-integrated into all hardware, the other isnāt but has the superior product (in my opinion) and so still has a loyal and growing base.
The question for me then becomes about future plans, and how Slack innovates to stay competitive.
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So could one make the argument that the IPO boost has already been priced in, and all the direct listing is going to do is create liquidity and hence allow investors to leak outā¦
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Can we expect Slack to be available on Freetrade today?
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No they wonāt be added today Iām afraid, hereās what to expect: When will the 2019 tech IPOs (Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, Zoom, etc) be on Freetrade?
Iād love to use Freetrade for Slack but if youāre not going to have it when it comes onto the market Iām wondering which other platforms people will use to buy shares when they open?
I guess we are waiting for the new app to make this quick. I was interested in slack and a few others when they ipoā¦ I wanted to make a quick buy and sell.
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Slack is trading now at around $40/share
Itās a shame that other brokers add these new listings almost immediately, meaning we have to use the competition rather than Freetrade if we want a piece of the action today. I hope this improves going forward. Buying an IPO/direct listing 3 weeks after pop is not that appealing for some.
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Who are the competition?
Also btw slack jumped up 48% 
.
Quick buy and sell is what I wanted to make some money aaarghā¦
How much do you think you would have made? You wouldnāt have been able to buy at $26. If you were lucky you would have been able to buy at 38.25ish and intraday the shares reached 42 so you would have made around 10% if you had timed it perfectly. The 48% increase is misleading as it suggests shares started trading at $26, but they didnāt.
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As Astonelesschip says, you wouldnāt have made much in this instance. First trade on the NYSE was $38.50 closed $38.62. 0.31% up.
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I am a n00b here and wasnāt really going to put all my.money. However I would like the option. I did get profits with snap with a buy the jump and sale early. However that involved a lot of fees.
So although I wouldnāt advice it I would like to have an option. Again not pushing freetrade as I know there can be a lot of work to get these things in order.
Please donāt follow this method as @astonelesschip mentioned news can be misleading.
I considered buying these tech ipo shares before ipo but Iām not eligible, need lot of money. They call accredited investor, one eligibility is earning $200k per year in last two years.
This listing was riskier because of its direct listing, there is no lock in period.
If one made money in IPO, its just luck, Iām feeling lucky these days.
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I would avoid Slack. I donāt see how slack is as high as it is (Im an engineer who uses slack every day). I also donāt understand why people would want to invest.
I saw an excellent thread on reddit about the IPO and a very good point was made:
Taking a slightly hypothetical (and very very optimistic) example, there are ~20-25 million software engineers in the world and letās say that slack captures every single one of those developers. Every single one. Letās add a bit more on for non engineers who use slack - 31 million users. Slack costs between 0 and Ā£10 per user per month but lets say they increase this to Ā£15, or $20.
If this scenario was true, slack would make ~$7.4 billion dollars in revenue per year. This is LESS than its current valuation PE - and it is currently making a loss!
The problem is at this stage the company has done its growing. Itās not going to have a huge PE. Around 20 would be reasonable. Not knowing what the profit margin would be, but as software companies go in general 15% would be very good. So thatās ~$1 billion net profit. A PE of 20 yields a valuation of $22 billion.
So here is a very very optimistic (almost ridiculous) scenario in which Slack earns a valuation almost as high as its valuation today.
This outlines how ridiculous the current price of slack is. Slack is currently trading at a value which is equal to a situation which it is almost never going to achieve - $20 per user, per month capturing every single dev in the world.
Looking at the hypothetical situation now - Is Slack worth $20/month per user? I personally dont think it is, and nobody pays close to this at the moment. Most people use it for free. So I donāt see how they can even come close to these numbers.
So Slack either needs to come out with some new products, or add more features to up-sell everyone to $20.
I dont think Slack has that much of an innovative product - I dont see why another company cant make an IRC client with the features slack offers - Good file support, inline web preview, reactions, threads, and search?
To me, that makes me think Slack is not a buy at all.
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Anyone can find some holes in any assumption, but I think in this case they may be big enough to undermine the argument.
The poster assumes no growth in number of software engineers.
Adding a few million on for non engineers is too conservative in my opinion. A bunch of industries have the kind of collaboration that slack is supposed to help with, media being one of them.
I think the margin being 15% is too low, slacks gross margin is 80%+ and the majority of their sign ups come direct according to
https://www.nachoanalytics.com/blog/what-slacks-customer-list-tells-about-their-potential-live-data/
I think the margin could be far higher than 15%, revenue could be higher, and the P/E multiple of 20 is not at all high for a recurring revenue āSaaSā company where the revenue is deemed to be higher quality as its repeated and there is low cost to service each repeated instance of revenue.
I do agree though that some of these companies dont seem as innovative as they are billed. I have not used Slack so dont understand it as well as many here, but it seems like a glorified chat app or IRC like you say, and Zoom a glorified facetime. I guess they are more brand businesses then tech.
Very true, you are right - itās all hypothetical at this stage. Very interesting link too, thanks.
Taking your point about adding a few million for non engineers being conservative - my hypothetical example captures every single developer in the world - each paying $20. Slack has no chance of doing that, so from the get go the numbers my massively optimistic for slack even if the non developer user base was a conservative number. I would assume a more realistic number would be 20% of all developers, which is 4 million. If you then added in a very large, ānon-conservativeā 15 million non-developers with a revenue per user at slacks current offering (a lot less than $20/month in my example) slack is no where near close to being at its current market value PE - and I highly doubt that non developers outnumber developers on slack 4:1 (but maybe they will based on the link you provided)
I would say it would be a struggle for slack to get half of the worlds dev population to use is, let alone pay $20 each per month.
Coupled with all of that, like you say, I dont see how slack can fend off other IRC chat clients - its not like Atlassian JIRA where companies are very invested in the product. My company could switch off of Slack and onto a competitor within a day for example.
So yes, the numbers are hypothetical, but the valuation at present is ridiculous based on their current offering in my opinion.
Havenāt looked into slack, but this is my problem with a lot of these hyped up IPOs. Massive future success is already priced in. Even if they hit these ambitious targets it doesnāt really justify the share price
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Totally agree with you Dave 
I think Slacks is even more so than usual.
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Obviously this is only one of the criteria that we should be using to judge Slackās valuation.
But Iām not sure that judging the size of their target market should be based on the number of developers in the world. Slack has the potential to be used by most office workers so you could use the number of people who use Microsoft products (1.2 billion, as of 2016) or email (3.8 billion) for example, instead.
Thatās overstating the size of the market of course but in my opinion, itāll be somewhere in-between those figures and the number of developers that there are in the world.
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