Sport24
How the team at Sport24, a top 5 sports media outlet, chose Pachca and moved its history over from Slack
About the company
I'm Dmitry, head of development at Sport24.
We're a sports media company with a newsroom, our own production team, an IT team and lots of products, from a news site to sports channels and arcade games. We're one of the top 5 largest sports websites and top 10 sports media outlets, and more than 18,000,000 people read our site every month.
Besides the news site, we run a network of 5 sports YouTube channels with 15,000,000+ views a month.
Life before Pachca
Slack was our team chat app for several years. We'd built all our processes around it: team chats, threads and file sharing. It had its downsides too. For example, Slack didn't have call recording, so its calls didn't work for us at all.
The trouble started when Russian companies began getting blocked. First we ran into payment issues, then access issues. We managed to avoid being blocked for a long time, until 2024, when we got a notice that the service would be blocked in a few days. We had to find a solution, and fast.
Back during the first waves of blocks, we'd put together a list of alternatives to the foreign products the company used. So we already had a shortlist of team chat apps and started digging into what they could do. After testing and comparing them, we settled on Pachca.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
When we realized Pachca already had almost every feature we needed, both for communication and for organizing teams. The changelog and roadmap sealed the deal too: the service was shipping updates really fast, and a lot of the features we were missing were already planned. Another deciding factor was the option to migrate data from Slack. With other services, we'd have had to set it up ourselves through the API, but Pachca already had a ready-made integration. We just handed over the backup, and the Pachca team imported everything for us. That was critical for us.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
Honestly, our processes barely changed, and that's exactly what we wanted: "to find something that would keep our well-oiled workflow intact."
What's new is that we started using things Slack didn't have. For example, we used to have to run calls in some other product, but in Pachca we started making calls right inside the app, which is really convenient.
We also loved cross-chat threads. With them, you don't have to wonder whether someone is actually in the channel. If they need to join a discussion, you can quickly bring them in with an @. The result is a flatter, more convenient structure.
Tips for switching
If you're already using some tool, check what options it has for exporting chats, and keep fewer conversations in direct messages. That will help you bring over as much important information as possible if a block hits you too.
Beyond that, every company is different. Just take a sensible approach: know your goals and deadlines, and test the new service thoroughly.
