Joel Gascoigne
Founder CEO @ Buffer
A collection of 133 posts
After two years of losses, Buffer achieved profitability in 2024 with a net profit of $202,459. Learn about our journey back to profitability, our profit-sharing philosophy, and how we distributed 15% of profits among our 73 team members.
This post was originally published on joel.is. I'm delighted to share that we have introduced support for Bluesky in Buffer. This is an important moment for us as a company, and there are a number of reasons that adding Bluesky is personally meaningful for me. With Bluesky, we now support the three major social networks pushing forward a new era of decentralized social media: Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. We have been intentional about moving fast to add these channels to our tool. Supportin
The decision to integrate Threads came directly from you — our community. We received over 7,000 requests for this feature, and each one was a reminder of why we do what we do at Buffer.
Buffer has been in business for 13 years now, and we’ve had transparent salaries for 10 of those. This means that for over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been publicly viewable, and we’ve shared our approach to salaries and the formula we based them upon openly. We’ve maintained transparent salaries through significant market (and world) changes and through ups and downs in our performance as a business. I’m proud of the fact that we never took away that transparency, internally or external
Read all about the idea behind Build Week, what it means, and how we're approaching it.
We eliminated two of our lower cost-of-living bands in our salary formula at Buffer. Here's my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall.
Today, we’re launching Start Page by Buffer for anyone who wants to create a beautiful, mobile-friendly landing page in minutes and update it in seconds, and it’s free.
I'm happy to share that Caryn Hubbard was recently promoted to Buffer's VP of Finance. 🎉 Caryn has been on the Buffer team for over five years now and has made huge contributions in her time on the team, both as the leader of our Finance team and as a member of our Executive team. She was instrumental in our $3.3M buy back of VC investors , in helping us navigate the turbulence of the financial impact of the pan
I’m happy to share that Tyler Wanlass recently became Buffer’s VP of Design. 🎉 Tyler has been on the Buffer team for over five years now, initially joining as a Product Manager before he transitioned to our first Head of Design. Throughout 2020, while we were hiring for a new Product leader, Tyler took on that role in the interim and did an incredible job. I’ve been impressed with how he’s juggled so much, operated at a high level, and contributed at layers from
Since we first kicked off a 4-day work week in May 2020, people have had a lot of questions about it. What day are we taking off? How long will we continue this practice? Is everyone really working four-days a week or are some people working more? Some of the answers to these questions have changed over the last few months, and I’m sure some will continue to change and evolve as we learn more about operating within a four-day work week. A little while ago, I decided to answer questions about o
This post was originally published on Joel.is . Sometime in late 2018, the concept of having a support network clicked for me. This was the year that I started working with Mandy, my second Executive Assistant. Caryn, who I worked with in that capacity for around a year and a half, had transitioned to lead Finance. The gap without this type of support helped me to reflect on the most ideal setup. The journey to a support network The first time around that I w
In July, we shared that we were looking for a product leader to help us take Buffer forward in our next phase. After speaking to an incredible group of talented folks in product, I’m happy to share that Maria Thomas has joined us as our new Chief Product Officer. We’re now a 10-year old company , and in the past year, I’ve done a lot of reflection on the purpose of the company an
Today marks ten years since I launched the first version of Buffer. What started as a landing page to gauge interest, and then a very basic product that I worked on alone, has become so much more. Buffer is now a leading social media management platform and a team of nearly 90 people working remotely worldwide, with our own approach and culture. Reaching this milestone means a lot for me, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on each year of the Buffer journey. As you’ll see, things
We've been building Buffer for coming up to ten years now. We’re currently a 90-person fully remote team with over 70,000 paying customers and $20M in annual revenue. We’re proud to be a leader in the space of social media management, and to operate long-term as an independent and profitable business. As a company, we’ve rallied around serving small businesses. We’re also passionate about challenging suboptimal approaches to how work happens and how employees are treated. Our current 4-day work
As April comes to a close, and we look ahead to another month where our global team is living in various forms of lockdown and isolation, I decided that for the month of May, Buffer will operate under a 4-day workweek (at full pay) across the whole 89-person team. We’re in a period of time where there’s a layer of added anxiety and stress in all of our lives. At Buffer, we’ve been encouraging taking time off, and relaxing productivity expectations, in addition to shifting internal deadlines, bu
“When spring comes, snow melts first at the periphery, because that is where it is most exposed”Andy Grove This quote comes from Andy Grove , Intel’s former CEO, and which I was reminded of in the most recent book I finished reading, Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath. The idea is that snow melts first from the edges, at the periphery. This is where the first c
In 2015, we made Buffer’s most significant acquisition and acquired Respondly , which became Reply, our solution to help businesses deliver fast and responsive customer support on social media. We originally acquired it intending to diversify Buffer’s core product offerings. While it served that purpose, it has become clear over time that Reply is better suited for larger organizations and is not the best product for Buffer’s core custome
Ever since the world got turned upside down by COVID-19, it’s been “business as unusual” for everyone – Buffer included. I sent this update out to Buffer’s investors one week ago. I hesitated on whether to share it more widely, as I know a lot of companies have been impacted more severely in these times. That said, I believe it makes sense to lean into our company value of transparency, since there may be some companies this could help, and it shows Buffer customers that we will be around beyon
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote this blog post about the next step in Buffer’s social media journey . I described Buffer’s multi-product vision of the future, which included Reply and Analyze . This idea was such a huge vision and change for us as a company, and it’s taken a few years to fulfill it. But now, looking back the vision in that blog post, it’s our current reality at Buffer. W
In mid-2017, I hit burnout in a really big way and wound up taking a 6-week break to recharge. I want to fully share my story here and include some things I wish I’d done differently in the hope that this can help anyone else experiencing burnout. How it began: A year of change, stress, and loss Looking back, the lead-up to my burnout goes back to the end of 2015. My co-founder and I were growing apart on our vision for Buffer’s future, which continued throughout 2016 despite several in-perso
Buffer is a fully remote team . It’s a decision I made at the end of 2012, when Buffer was in its infancy, and it’s interesting to reflect on that decision now. I am happy to report that I am in love with the choice we made to be distributed all across the world. When I say that we’re a remote, distributed team, I mean that we’re literally spread across the whole world. Buffer is a team of 79 right now , and we have teammates on a
Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Starting the conversations, negotiations, and process of this buy out was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in the Buffer journey so far, and it was the culmination of more than a year of work. This is a key inflection point for Buffer that puts us truly on a path of sustainable, long-term growth. Here is the full journey of how we decided on t
MRR $1,498,636 ARR $17,984,388 EBIDTA $1,340,654(+15%) Paying customers 79,665(-2%) Q2 Revenue $4,527,930(+6%) EBITDA Margin 29.61% This quarter was Buffer’s 9th company-wide retreat and it was a joy to get to see the entire team in Singapore for a week. Our People team did an incredible job of creating a relaxing and productive space for the team to gather and it was a week packed with insightful sessions and team-bonding. In addition to being able to spend time together, in Q2 were deep
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! Working remotely and having the opportunity to work from home, coffee shops, coworking spaces, or wherever else I might feel the most productive, means that I can design my own mornings because they don’t necessarily need to be spent commuting. I’ve gone through many different morning routines over the years, and I don’t believe there is one perfect routine for everyone or even just for me. My morning routine is constantly changing and e