It is an interesting question, I disagree with just about everything in the article.

The question is this, if you have to essentially identical goods, and neither price nor features are sufficient to differentiate them, how do you change market share?

I spent some time embedded in Sun's marketing group and that taught me that classically this is called product positioning. It is marketing's task to create a system for "scoring" the products, contextualize this in terms that the market accepts as legitimate, and then shows how the product scores better than the competition (positions it ahead of the competition). When you are effective at this, you can "drive" your competitors, by forcing them to spend time creating competitive features which you already have in order to counter your marketing message.

So for chat programs I'm surprised that Ryver (already at a disadvantage with a crappy name) doesn't try to define some new standard of excellence and then market leadership in that standard, say "we encrypt all of your chats so even we cannot tell what you're talking about." or "pre-built integration api in more languages" Etc. Some features that then can use to say they are better than Slack when using that score. Looking at the Tuft & Needle example the article uses, the billboards get the attention but the positioning is "the competitors rip you off and we don't."

The Ryver positioning is "We are free for things that you have to pay Slack for."

Which might be effective except there is a trail of people with scars where they used some 'free' component of something, and then it was suddenly "not free" or "no longer available" as the team was acqui-hired. So "we are more free" is in fact a big red flag to a lot of people that the company is clueless and has no future. To make the message more robust, it would need to be something like "We are already a profitable company based on these other products we're selling, as a result we can offer you the same thing Slack charges for, for free."

But I doubt they could do that. It is likely that somewhere there is a data scientist who has a spreadsheet that says "x% of our free customers buy y% of our upsold products, if we could get to 'z' active users, and the ratio holds we will be able to continue in business." But anyone who has been in a startup or watched a startup knows there is unlimited demand for 'free' and just boosting the MAU numbers with "tricks" rarely boosts the sales rate. This is because the tricks don't bring in customers who are genuinely hearing the message, it brings in customers who fall for the trick. And those sorts of tricks are the things that make "growth hacking" a pejorative in some places.

Bottom line, I get the whole "if nobody knows you exist, nothing else matters." kind of mindset that will lead to creating awareness, but it only works if you can effectively position your product to take market share from the incumbent. That seems to be missing.