Slack announced some pretty impressive numbers yesterday: 1.1 million daily active users after 16 months, 300,000 paid users, and $25 million in recurring annual revenue. And they don’t plan to slow growth any time soon. John Paul Titlow, writing for FastCompany:

Slack has hired April Underwood, an alumnus of Google and Twitter, as its new head of Platform. In that role, Underwood will oversee Slack’s API, integrations, and developer relations.

To date, Slack has worked with about 100 partners to build third-party services directly into Slack’s suite of mobile and desktop apps. Teams using Slack have collectively activated 900,000 of those integrations. With Underwood’s arrival, the company aims to dramatically increase those numbers, making Slack more of a one-stop-shop for work and productivity.

Slack already announced plans for voice/video calling and screen sharing earlier this year.

I was at a party last week, talking with some friends who are definitely not into tech news as much as I am. At one point, I received a notification on my Apple Watch, pulled up the screen, and a friend of a friend looked at it, saw the Slack icon, and said “Oh, you use Slack too? I love Slack”. We spent the next 10 minutes talking about Slack and why we use it. He works in an IT department for a large company here in Rome, and, like others, he started using Slack with his co-workers, then proposed the service to their managers, and eventually started using Slack for professional and personal communications all day long. But keep this in mind – I was approached by someone I didn’t know, while drinking at a party in Rome, to talk about our mutual love for Slack and the Slackbot.

I feel like that sums up many people’s relationship with Slack. It starts as a simple chat tool, but thanks to its design and flexibility, you can make it your own very quickly. This makes the service dependable and personal – and products that people feel a close connection with generate the best evangelists in return. Even at parties in Rome.

(We use Slack for Relay FM and MacStories, and I plan to use it for future projects as well.)