When our distributed team can be together on one live Zoom call, it’s a special experience. It’s more than simply a company-wide meeting; it’s an opportunity to see everyone’s faces, celebrate all of the accomplishments and life milestones across the team, feel united by the Buffer vision, and spot some furry friends or cute babies coming in and out of view. We also held two “All Hands Spotlights” where we highlighted one specific area within Buffer — this year, we shined a spotlight on our Customer Advocacy and Finance teams!

We love writing blog posts — a lot. This year, across three of our blogs, we published 205 posts! We shared our learnings and research about digital marketing, building a remote team, experimenting with work culture, and everything in between. Here’s the breakdown: 116 posts on the Social blog (about social media marketing), 67 posts on the Open blog (on our work culture) and 22 posts on the Overflow blog (from our engineering team).

The whole reason we are able to do what we love every day is because we have incredible customers using Buffer to power their social media marketing and grow their businesses. We are privileged to have had 32,991 people sign up for a paid Buffer plan this year (Buffer Pro, Business, or Buffer Reply) to bring our total number of paying customers for 2018 to 73,991.

In July of this year, we made a significant decision to set us on the path to long-term, sustainable growth — we spent $3.3M (about half of all the cash we had in the bank) to buy out our main venture capital investors. It was important for us to give investors a return, create better alignment within our shareholder base toward the path we are on, and do all of this transparently. Moving forward, we are committed to continuing to build great products our customers love, and cultivate a meaningful workplace culture of trust, freedom, and flexibility — all in our own unique way.