Slack: Ship the Internal Tool?

You are the CEO of a venture-funded gaming studio. Five years in, $17M raised, ~50 employees. Your flagship MMO has been live for fourteen months and bookings are still under $1M ARR. Player retention is flat. The board is asking pointed questions about runway.

Internally, your team uses a chat tool you built to replace IRC for the studio. It has channels, file sharing, and a search-everything- ever feature that nobody else's enterprise chat has. Your team uses it 12 hours a day. Two of your engineers refuse to take meetings unless they happen in your chat tool. A friend who works at a small agency in San Francisco asked if he could try it.

You have about 9 months of runway and one big decision to make in the next month.

The principle: The strongest pivot signal is when your internal tool — built to support the product you're failing at — is the thing your team actually loves. A team that loves something they built tells you more about product-market-fit than any user survey.