Buffer's Year in Review 2017
Head of Communications & Content @ Buffer
1
New Salary Formula
Every few years we iterate on our salary formula, which we use to calculate all Buffer salaries. We also publish the formula and salaries transparently. The latest update to the formula included a remote-first emphasis with benchmarks based on a single city, San Francisco.
2
Learning Sabbaticals
For the first time at Buffer we experimented with learning sabbaticals: multi-month time off for current teammates to develop the skillsets they need to move to other roles. Two teammates took a learning sabbatical in 2017, acquiring skills for design and engineering.
Learn more about learning sabbaticals
5
All Hands
Being a fully-distributed, worldwide team makes our company-wide All Hands meetings a bit tricky to schedule but oh-so worth it to see everyone together. We had five All Hands in 2017 and are on a consistent bimonthly cadence. Plus, we experimented with smaller All Hands that highlight one team within Buffer, and we had two of those this past year: product and marketing.
6
Days closed
In 2016, we closed Buffer for two days at the end of year to give our team an extra break. This year we took it a step further and closed Buffer from December 25 to January 1, giving the team six business days off.
Read more about why we closed over the holidays
7
Buffer Babies
In total we had 7 Buffer babies join the Buffer family in 2017! We’re so grateful that we get to see adorable photos pop up in Slack and little happy faces in Zoom!
18
Speaking Engagements
We’re lucky to have many teammates keen on speaking at conferences around the world. In fact, one of our teammates, Joe, spoke at six conferences just this year!
24.5
Percent of new code that was open sourced
Our engineering team has been working hard to make sure Buffer is more open source. In 2017, 24.5% of the code added to Buffer's codebase in 2017 was open source.
Read our guide to open sourcing
25
Gameshow Questions
At our 2017 Buffer retreat in Madrid we played a team-wide game of Jeopardy where we answered 25 questions about one another.
Learn more about our gameshow here
36
Side Projects
The team at Buffer works on some pretty neat projects in their free time! This year we counted 36 projects currently in the works. You can check them all out in the link below.
Learn more about our side projects here
249
Blog Posts
Between our Social blog, the Open blog, the Overflow blog, and now our Customer Experience blog, we’ve published a lot of posts. Here’s the breakdown: 183 on Social, 47 on Open, 12 on Overflow, and 7 on Customer Experience.
1,106
Vacation Days Taken
Last year we implemented a new minimum vacation policy at Buffer to encourage employees to take at least three weeks off. In total the team took 1,106 days of vacation, which is an average of just over 15 days per person.
Learn about how minimum vacation works
2,173
Kindle Books
Our team does lots of reading (buoyed by a generous Kindle book perk). This year, the most popular book on our team was the The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team. As a result we spent lots of time thinking about artificial harmony at Buffer in 2017.
Check out all our top books from 2017
2,316
Swag Items
This year we sent 2,316 swags items — stickers, socks, shirts, and more — to our community and customers. The socks were a favorite!
Read more about how we think about swag
2,918
Dollars Spent on Learning and Development
This year we debuted a learning and development perk: $20 per month, per teammate. Teammates used the stipend for everything from books and courses to buying online kits and learning to crochet.
Read more about learning and development at Buffer
5,264
Updates to the Codebase
Our team has been busy updating code this year! Throughout the entire year there have been 5,264 pull requests across our private and open source repositories, last year there were 3,749 pull requests so 2017 was a 40 percent increase!
Read about how we empower engineers to build in the open
3,518
Bufferchatters
Every Wednesday we host #bufferchat in two separate timezones. This year we chatted about everything from Millennial Marketing and Customer Journeys, to Presentation Skills and Digital Nomading.
85,903
Support Tickets Solved
That's a lot of conversations and questions to have and our Customer Advocacy team loves making it happen! These tickets were put forward by 44,030 Buffer users and in total there were 106,859 emails sent by our team with 56 percent of inquiries getting resolved on the first email.
Read more about our customer advocates
45,906
New Customers
We welcomed 45,906 new customers to the Buffer family in 2017! We’re so grateful for each and every one of these new customers who make Buffer possible.
241,770
New Social Media Fans
As you might imagine, social media is a priority for us here at Buffer. We run various experiments and try to keep up a strong social presence. This year resulted in a total of 241,770 new fans and followers. Here’s the breakdown:
• 193,200 new Twitter followers
• 34,400 new Facebook fans
• 14,170 new Instagram followers
544,879
Podcast Downloads
2017 was the first full year of our podcast running and with 53 episodes this year we were thrilled to have over 544,879 downloads of those episodes!
1,050,000
Minutes on Zoom
As a remote team we rely really heavily on Zoom. In 2017, we had an average of 25 meetings per work day plus we spent a total of 1,050,000 minutes on Zoom. That’s over 729 days!
Read all about the tools we use to work remotely
2,317,400
Social Accounts Connected
With Buffer you can connect and manage multiple social media accounts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. This year we had 2,317,400 social media accounts connected to Buffer! (That’s a lot of social!)
Facebook: 1,135,127
Twitter 537,440
Instagram 390,299
LinkedIn 219,446
Google + 142,919
Pinterest 42,019
15,680,689
Revenue Generated
2017 was a big year for Buffer as we crossed $15 Million in annual recurring revenue (ARR)! The year before we were at $12.4 Million ARR.
See our transparent revenue dashboard
325,279,525
Posts Sent
Buffer users send out a ton of posts every year. In 2016, they sent 261,419,836 posts sent through Buffer, and this year the increase was 24.4 percent!
Facebook: 92,899,295
Twitter: 159,220,103
Instagram: 27,107,296
Pinterest: 3,087,144
LinkedIn: 19,340,236
Google+: 23,589,622
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