slack-quick-start-guide

The quick start guide to Slack for startups
This guide is designed to help the business owner work with a few of their team members to set
up Slack for their business.
CONTENTS SUMMARY

FOR THE
MANAGER
WP Curve - The quick start guide to Slack for startups

FOR THE MANAGER
Choose a few key team members that are intimately familiar with different
operations in your business to help you set up and optimize Slack for your
team. The exact number of people you want to recruit depends on your
business and team size.
Adding these key team members early will make sure you don’t get
overburdened with administrative tasks. The team members you select will
become the “go-to” people for questions or issues with Slack.
Invite your team
Go to the “Manage Your Team” menu on https://my.slack.com/admin
3

Make your key team members Admins on Slack
Administrators are able to manage members, add integrations, moderate
channels and handle other maintenance tasks.
Once your team has accepted the invitations, they will appear in a list under
the “Manage Your Team” menu. Click on their name and a “Make Admin”
button should appear.
This will give your key team members the freedom to explore and
experiment with Slack’s features and optimize it for your team.
Once your team is invited and promoted to administrators, it is time to dive
into Slack!
4

FOR THE
TEAM
WP Curve - The quick start guide to Slack for startups

FOR THE TEAM
Introduction
Welcome! By now you should have received an email inviting you to join your
team on Slack. You should also have Admin privileges which means you can
customize many features of Slack.
This is a guide to help you get all the essentials for your Slack set up and
operational. You are one of the key team members selected by your
manager to explore Slack and create the best possible environment for your
team to communicate.
Many people are still using email and can’t imagine another way to
communicate in a business setting.
As a startup, making changes to the way you operate can be costly, especially
with something as fundamental as your communication.
Having a week to determine how to use Slack with the key team members
before bringing the entire team onboard should make the transition smooth.
Why Slack?
There’s a different feel to a Slack conversation compared to email. Emails
encourage long, detailed messages with all the formalities included. Slack
conversations have more of a “chat room” style, where concise messages are
encouraged.
Channels and groups can be set up to facilitate better conversations
around key topics for your team. This focuses the discussion and eliminates
distractions while you are working.
6

SLACK BASICS
WP Curve - The quick start guide to Slack for startups

The Basics Of Slack
Download the desktop and mobile apps
Though the web app is fully functional, we recommend downloading the
desktop and mobile versions of Slack to get the most out of the tool.
Here’s a list of Slack apps for computers, smartphones and tables.
Mobile apps
The mobile app is very helpful for team members on the go. It may be a
good idea to set your status as “inactive” on your phone. You’ll still be able
to send and receive messages, but your team members will have different
expectations if you appear to be working at your computer or if you are out
and about.
To do this, tap the menu icon in the top right of the screen and go to settings.
From there you can toggle the “active” status on your phone.
Do not disturb for iPhone
If you have a team distributed around
the world, it is likely you’ll receive Slack
notifications in the middle of the night
on your phone. We recommend setting
up “Do Not Disturb” on your phone.
Unfortunately, this will also silence
most calls, texts and other notifications
on your phone, so it is not a perfect
system.
There is a way you can automate “Do
Not Disturb” mode on your phone
so it will automatically switch on. I
recommend setting this for about 1
hour before you go to bed.
Go to Settings then Do Not Disturb.
8

Allow calls from
You can set up favorites on your iPhone for people that you might want to
hear from during these hours. Just find them on your contact list and select
“Add to Favorites”
If “Allow Calls From “Favorites” is activated in “Do Not Disturb” mode, their
calls will come through.
The Basics Of Slack (Interface)
Mentions
Using mentions, you can notify team members of a message relevant to
them in a chat channel.
Stars
Stars can be used to create a checklist in Slack. Each message you add a star
to will appear in the stars list. As you complete the task that is related to the
message, you can remove the star.
Hotkeys
To access the basic hotkey list, use ‘command + /’ for mac and ‘control + /’
for PC. My favorite is the quick switcher ‘command + k’, to jump between
channels.
9

Searching
Depending on the size of your team, the volume of messages you send, and
if you are on a paid or free version of Slack, searching may or may not be a
useful feature.
Slack has modifiers to improve the accuracy of your search. You can combine
these modifiers for even better results.
Here are a few examples of modifiers:
• in:[#channel] - Filters search re sults to a specific channel
• from:[user] - Filters search to show results from a specific user
• has:[link] - Filters results around specific content
For more details on modifiers, check out Searching in Slack
With our team of 40+ and the free version of Slack, messages only last a few
days before they are deleted and therefore unsearchable.
We use Trello for communication on higher level projects and to store and
organize ideas for content. This allows our team to focus on immediate
issues in Slack and not have to worry about the messages getting lost in a
few days.
For more on how we use Trello check out:
How we effectively use Trello for project management
10

CHANNELS
GROUPS AND
DIRECT
MESSAGES
WP Curve - The quick start guide to Slack for startups

Channels, groups and direct messages
Channels are used to focus conversations and are open to your entire team.
This is where you will start to enjoy the benefits of Slack.
Setting up the right channels
Setting up the right channels can make it easy for your team to adopt Slack
and move away from old communication defaults. Many teams have the
following channels set up for their operations:
• Management
• Customer support
• Development
• Marketing
• Creative
Keeping these operations separate allows for better focus on tasks and
information relevant to each team’s work. All of these operations also benefit
from conversations happening in the most public venue possible to avoid
repetition, clarify messaging and let people know when a job is done.
There are other ways to structure your channels. Channels can be based on:
Geographic locations: Good for distributed teams that work in different
time zones or to find someone to get lunch with.
Specific tools or integrations: If you have an integration that delivers a
lot of data, it might be best to make a separate channel specifically for
that app.
Projects: You can create channels specific to projects and close the
channels once the project is completed.
Events: You can open up a short-term channel if your team is at an
event and you don’t want to flood normal operations channels.
12

In the first few weeks with Slack, the key team members should create
channels that may be useful for certain groups or projects within the
business. After a week or 2, review the new channels. If they are well used,
keep them. If they only have a few messages, then you can remove them.
To create a new channel, simply click the “+” icon.
You’ll name the channel and add a short description of the purpose of the
channel.
Through trial and error, you should have a system of channels set up that
works well for your team.
13

Establish rules for channels
Once you have your channels set up, you should create rules to make sure
they are used properly.
Rules and conventions for channels are best stored in the “About This
Channel” section.
Private groups
Private groups function almost the same as channels but are only visible and
searchable to the group members.
We have a private group where only the management and administration
team are members. Here we have reporting on key information to our
business such as response times, new affiliates and if there are any failed
payments.
14

INTEGRATIONS
WP Curve - The quick start guide to Slack for startups

Choosing the right integrations
Similar to channels, your key team members should experiment with adding
and configuring different integrations.
How to add integrations
Typically, it’s best to add integrations to specific channels only. We
recommend having notifications from apps you integrate with feed into the
channel that’s most relevant to the app. For example: You would want your
Help Scout integration to feed into your customer support channel, but not
your developer channel.
Integrations we use
Trello - Integrating Slack with Trello will send updates to a channel when
there’s activity on Trello cards.
Help Scout - Integrating Slack with Help Scout allows you to see
notifications when:
• A conversation is created
• A conversation is updated
• A team member or customer has replied
• Conversations are closed or deleted
Twitter - This is great for keeping on top of your social media marketing or
quickly responding to customers who communicate with you on Twitter.
Google Drive - Pasting the link to a Google Doc in your chatbox will make
it available for anyone in the channel and give additional information on
the link instead of just a blind URL.
15

Giphy - Allows you to use gif images in your channels.
• We recommend setting the filters to PG-13 for most work
environments
Stripe - Stripe will post customizable updates to a Slack channel for:
• Charges
• Invoice payments
• Subscriptions
• Transfers
• And more
For more integration inspiration, check out
17 Slack integrations to spice up your team communication
16

AUTOMATION
WP Curve - The quick start guide to Slack for startups

Automation
There are plenty of ways you can create scripts tailor-made to help your
team perform better.
Slack Bot
You can set up slackbot to respond to certain messages in Slack. This is great
for adding a bit of personality to your Slack and for automating instructions
and delegation to your team.
You can create these responses in the “Customize” menu on
https://my.slack.com/
For example, we like to celebrate great ratings on our customer support so
we set up Slackbot as a cheerleader.
You can also use automated responses that link to processes and
procedures. Look for common words or phrases that are said when
discussing a specific problem or issue, and set up Slackbot to automatically
provide the solution.
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If someone on our team mentions there are no tickets available, they will
automatically get prompted to check out our “no tickets” process:
Zapier
With Zapier, you can automate messages to appear at certain times, or when
an event is triggered in another app.
We use Zapier to remind everyone about our weekly team meetings and
what they need to do to prepare.
It is easy to set up a weekly reminder to automatically go out to the team and
attach a process with further instructions.
For more on team task automation, check out: A simple process for team
task automation with Trello and Zapier
18

Webhooks
You can use webhooks to create more customized scripts.
We have a custom script in place so when a VIP customer submits a ticket, a
notification will appear in this channel. This gives an extra boost in response
time for all our VIP clients.
19

Conclusion
With some dedicated time for experimentation and exploration, your key
team members should be able to configure Slack to suit the needs of your
business. You key team members should also help bring the rest of the team
on board and get everyone familiar with the app. After this first week of
setup, you’ll start to immediately notice the benefits of better communication
with your team.
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