In 2016, Guillermo Gette, a technical lead at Expedia, realized that Slack's notepad-like feature didn't effectively organize his team. To solve this issue, he built a simple bot that put to-do lists inside Slack conversations and published it in the Slack Marketplace. This led to the creation of Workast, a full-featured project management system embedded in Slack that has been used by over 50,000 people across various companies, including Expedia, IBM, PayPal, and MongoDB. Guillermo faced challenges early on, such as users requesting new features and realizing he was in a "red ocean market" with many established players. To overcome these obstacles, he focused on product-led growth, introduced counters to limit feature usage, and built the app quickly based on user feedback. Workast's advantage lies in its integration with Slack, allowing seamless communication and collaboration. The company decided to build Workast on MongoDB due to its flexibility, scalability, and low cost of change. The schema-less database has enabled the team to evolve their product and database together, accelerating time-to-market and reducing downtime. MongoDB's Performance Advisor has helped identify performance issues, and the team uses it regularly to ensure scalability and reliability.