Join us as we share what we’re learning as we build a company that approaches work from a fresh perspective. We write about workplace culture, our finances, and our business decisions and strategies.
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Rodolphe Dutel, Buffer team member and founder of Remotive, recently joined us to discuss remote working. Rodolphe has spent many months traveling and working from all corners of the globe and has even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. He brought many of his lessons learned, tools of the trade and general advice to #bufferchat! Catch all the great tweets fro
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. I discovered bitcoin in early 2011. At first it was something that felt like play money and almost surreal. I didn’t fully understand all the details back then, but a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency was just too crazy and I became intrigued. Over the years I started diving deeper and deeper into bitcoin. Along the way, the true power of it re
***Quick update: We’re building a more inclusive Buffer! We’d love your feedback on our new Diversity Dashboard.*** Not too very long ago, developers at Buffer were called “hackers.” We had front-end hackers, back-end hackers, Android hackers, iOS hackers, traction hackers. We started using the word “hacker”in Buffer’s early days because—at the time—it felt like the most inclusive way to describe the work developers were doing. I asked our CTO Sunil to describe what the word meant to him: “I
February at Buffer saw our biggest team retreat yet, the launch of a new mini-product and some big news about buffer.com. Here is the latest: The latest Buffer metrics * 2,171,877 total registered users (+3.9%) * 189,216 monthly active users (+3.0%) * 47,937 average daily active users (+7.0%) * $462,236 monthly recurring revenue (+4.8%) * $5.55m annual revenue run-rate (+4.8%) * $1,827,750 cash in bank * 29 team members across the world * 22 cities, 11 countries, 6 continents It’s aw
I’m so excited to share that Eric Khun has joined the Buffer team! Eric joins us from Beijing, and his focus is on back-end development. Eric was raised in France and fell in love with China when he went to Beijing for a year of school. He’s been there for 3 years now, and has even worked on an Android app called PartyBeijing , which allows foreigners to find top event venues in Beijing and communicate with taxi drivers more easily by offering easy Chinese pronun
Disclaimer: It is only through the kind collaboration with the previous owner of buffer.com that we were able to now be the new owners, and a key interest for them was to stay anonymous and not to draw any attention to them in this announcement, which we are very keen to honor. So we have redacted all names and replaced them with “Bob” for the individual and “Company corp.” for the company name. In similar interest to protect their privacy, the previous owner also wasn’t comfortable in sharing
It’s amazing that there is a huge amount of discussion on the importance of hitting product market fit for what you are building. Interestingly, there isn’t as much about how to measure when you actually have product market fit for what you have built. The reason that’s the case, is because partially it’s a question that you shouldn’t have to ask: “If you have to ask whether you have Product/Market Fit, the answer is simple: you don’t.” – Eric Ries And I can see where Eric is coming from wit
In a forest, there is absolutely no waste. Every single element is reused in a continuous cycle. A tree produces leaves. The leaves fall to the ground and become compost. And the forest uses every last ounce of the compost and puts it back into its ecosystem. We have the exact same idea for Buffer’s organizational design as we move towards a self-managing company. Without any processes, save 4 essential ones, there is little to no occurrence of waste. As an example, we recently completed our f
In my recent travels around Asia, I’ve had the great opportunity to meet a lot of local founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. A few themes that seemed to come up many times are questions like “What triggered you to become passionate about company culture and transparency?” or “How did you know you wanted to build Buffer to what it is today?” One of the most memorable moments for me was talking to a super smart lady who is having a lot of success at a large company and longs to work on something
I’m delighted to share that José Gilgado joined the Buffer team in December. José joins us from Madrid, Spain and helps out the team with a focus on backend development. José learned how to code when studying computer science in school and even cofounded a small web studio while in school. José was recently in charge of supporting push notifications to mobile clients, and we’re excited to have his experience to help support our Android and iOS apps. Here’s a cool story that Sunil shared with
Travel is embedded pretty deeply into Buffer’s values—so much so that our entire remote team meets up every 5 months at various spots around the world. Our Buffer retreats are special times for our remote, distributed team to connect in person with one another, with our Buffer audience and with the community of our host city. Traveling to different locations each time also gives us a great new perspective on gratitude and the extreme privilege we have to be able to work and live the way we do.
Just minutes ago, I went ahead and published a new version of Buffer’s culture-deck on Slideshare. It contains a tiny change that I and many on the Buffer team deemed a very important one. Here is the slide that changed before: and after: The essential change, as you can see, is the removal of the word “always,” which many of us felt made things slightly dogmatic and too one-sided. We’ve also changed the words “never” to something less one-sided, to be a better reflection of how we work as h
There’s something special about Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It makes me happy every time I read it on social media or elsewhere. What it implies for me, is that if you change yourself, and only yourself, you have the best chance of changing things around you too. This is a very non-violent and conflict-free approach. I believe this also extends to organizations as much as individuals. It’s something we try to apply at Buffer. One of Buffer’s core values, take
In January at Buffer, we grew the team, made big progress on upcoming new features, launched a new Transparency Dashboard, and started sharing feedback transparently amongst the team. Here’s a quick update on what’s been going on: The latest Buffer metrics * 2,090,805 total registered users (+4.4%) * 183,638 monthly active users (+9.0%) * 44,790 average daily active users (+10.8%) * $441,108 monthly recurring revenue (+4.6%) * $5.29m annual revenue run-rate (+4.6%) * $2,084,935 cash in
I’m so excited to share that Thomas Dunn joined the Buffer team in December. Tom joins us from Bristol in the UK, with a focus on customer development and UX research. He has a really neat story before finding us at Buffer. Tom was in a rock band after high school and also started and managed his own company. He did full-time social media freelance work while he finished his degree. Wow! Here’s how Leo described Thomas as he introduced him to all of us on the team: “I loved how many high-r
We never get tired of thinking about happiness, do we? Life is so much nicer when you’re able to couple it with joy and gratitude. We’ve published posts before about simple ways to be happy and retraining your brain for more gratitude, and Buffer’s CEO Joel has even shared his own daily to-do list for happiness. (There’s also our popular list of things to stop doing to be happier.) Meanwhile, science continues to study happiness, finding ever more specific and idiosyncratic ways we can bring j
Note: We’re lucky to have the chance to experiment quite often with the way we work. Because of this, some experiments come and go. The post you’re about to read is one of these experiments; we learned a ton and are now exploring new approaches! I remember the first time I heard about companies operating with no managers. During a conversation about it with Joel, we were both absolutely baffled. There was no way, we thought, that Buffer could ever work in that way. How can any work get done wi
If someone were to ask you about your happiest moment yesterday, would you have an answer? How about your happiest moment of 3 months ago? I’ve got an answer for at least 100 of my recent days – and a new perspective on gratitude, thanks to the 100 Happy Days project. The challenge couldn’t be simpler: Take a photo of just one thing that makes you happy each day for 100 days . I knew a bit of what was in store for me once I began chronicling my moments of happy beca
The bookshelf in my office holds a single shelf of paperback books that are very special to me. Amidst the nearby clutter of boxes and miscellany (I find the bookshelf is seldom used for books anymore) sits a row of my favorite writing books and reference guides, stacked chronologically from the time I bought them, each one brought down once a year or so for a fun refresher. Some folks read the same novel multiple times for fun. I tend to read the same writing books [https://blog.bufferapp.com
A while back, I met with a great founder who’s really hustling. We spent some time discussing his idea and I shared some of my experiences with Buffer. When we’d almost finished our 30-minute meeting, he had one last question: “Plan vs build. Where do you stand?” I thought it was a fantastic question. Clearly it’s not a binary choice, yet I think it’s also good to ponder which of the two you should focus on. What does it mean to plan? I believe planning is an essential part of making progre
It started out innocently enough. A busy week of errands and a particularly fun weekend filled with dancing, and there it was: A 7 day “streak” of hitting my goal of taking 10,000 steps per day, according to my Jawbone Up. (The Buffer team + family members all get a Jawbone Up as a gift, and we share our steps and sleep stats with each other. I love this because I think it is an amazing way to be super transparent and share our self-improvement efforts with each other. These are two of Buffer’s
As a teenager I had a period of many years where I stopped reading books completely. I even remember a time where I couldn’t imagine reading books at all. After I graduated and started to be interested in business and startups, I realized the immense power and knowledge contained within books, and I started reading more and more. Today, I can’t imagine even a couple of days passing by without some time spent reading. As an introvert, I’m a reflective person. Sometimes that can be a challenge, s
About 2-3 years ago, I decided I wanted to start to declutter my life gradually. I went from one backpack and a carry-on bag to just one backpack. I count the following things as my belongings at this point: * 6 T-shirts * 2 sweaters, 2 hoodies * 1 coat * 2 pairs of dress-pant sweat-pants * 6 pairs of socks and boxer shorts * 1 backpack * An iPhone, a Kindle, 1 notepad and a MacBook Air (+ keyboard and mouse) * Gym shoes and gym shorts * Various toiletries like toothbrush, contact lens
There are many features of the world that I simply cannot wrap my head around, and one of these has always been time zones. Teammates I work with every day who live in Singapore and Australia are a whole day ahead of me in the USA. Wild! In addition to confounding my brain, time zones also provide some fun and interesting challenges when it comes to how we all work together at Buffer as a fully remote, distributed team. For instance, here’s a glimpse at what our team looked like a while back,