Leo Widrich
A collection of 186 posts by Leo Widrich - Page 2
We’ve been having a lot of fun hearing some of the amazing feedback on how many of you are using Buffer. One of the key areas that we heard about where we felt we could improve was our social media analytics area. We then reflected and brainstormed with many customers about how we could make analytics better. Today, I’m really excited to unveil one of a series of planned analytics improvements for paying Awesome [http://bufferapp.com/awesome?utm_source=socialblog&utm_medium=launchpost&utm_
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
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
The other day, I was at the gym with my co-founder Joel and we started a short discussion about other products as part of Buffer’s product offering we might enjoy building one day. We went through various problems we’d enjoy solving, like online payments, social media monitoring and so forth. At one point, we got into some light brainstorming of one of the areas and the name of a related, prominent startup in the space came up. I said “I know the founder.” That line had nothing to do with the
This post originally published on May 15, 2013. We’ve updated it here with the latest, newest information, screenshots, and videos. The retweet function has been a favorite way of ours to give appreciation and acknowledgment to the tweets we love. And we’ve often wondered: What happens when we love a lot of tweets? Or when we find an awesome tweet at an odd hour? Being able to schedule your retweets gives you an awesome opportunity to show your support and engagement for other people’s tweets—
For the last 2 to 3 years, about every day, I would wake up, open my laptop and type the letter “g” into the Google Chrome bar and hit enter. Chrome would auto-complete it to “growth.bufferapp.com”. It was like a daily ritual to check on Buffer’s growth numbers from a number of different angles. Revenue, new users, daily actives, monthly actives. Growing—increasing our monthly revenue, our traffic, our user base—was the No. 1 priority in my mind. It only hit me very recently, about four months
About 3 months ago, we made a very exciting change at Buffer. Upon exploring our current setup as a company, and after Joel’s discovery of a truly transformative book titled Reinventing Organizations, we decided that we wanted to reinvent Buffer taking some inspiration from the book. At its core, we’ve switched to a fully self-managed, self-organized team. There’re no managers or bosses and everyone on the team is encouraged to work freely on projects they are most compelled to work on, that th
If you look at our culture deck on Slideshare , you’ll quickly find that our first and likely most pronounced value is “Always choose positivity and happiness.” We have this as a very central theme in the way we work, live and how we hire here at Buffer. It’s one of the things that gives me the most fulfillment of working towards. It’s also one of the hardest and most aspirational values to live up to.
One of the things that has fascinated me most about ancient Greece and Rome has always been the idea of oracles. If you’ve seen the movie 300, you might remember the scene in which Leonidas has to consult the oracle, which will decide whether the Spartans will go to battle or not. You can almost grasp the frustration of the Spartan king. He’s not in control. He has to rely on the priests and only the priests are able to understand the oracle’s advice. He feels powerless, as he has to follow wh
A few months ago, Joel discovered a fascinating book that he shared with all of us on the team. The title of the book was “The Decision Maker ” and it proposed a radically different idea to how companies are run. In short, it put traditional management on its head. Instead of higher-ups making decisions, often far removed from the real problems that
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. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. At Buffer, we’ve recently made a big change to how we build products and use the Lean Startup methodologies much more closely. It followed what I’d call a phenomenon that Hiten Shah , one of our closest ad
It’s a truly remarkable story when I think about how Rodolphe first reached out to us at Buffer and how he eventually became part of the team. If I were to guess the inspiring philosophy behind Rodolphe’s way of coming on board and also his general approach to making things happen, it’d be based on one of Mark Suster’s recent posts that I really enjoyed: “Be politely persistent.”
April has been a very interesting month. MRR growth has slowed to around 7.08% increase, which is the lowest over the past few months. What’s interesting is that most of the growth came from Business plans, which grew MRR by 15.6% in April. Awesome plan MRR growth slowed to 4.6% in March, and was 8.3% in the month before. At the same time, churn has decreased by almost 2 percentage points to 5.28% on the Awesome plan (compared to 7% in March) and also to 5.99% on Business plans. Awesome numbe
I’m happy to announce that Steven Cheng is Buffer’s first growth engineer! Steven—who lives in Taipei, Taiwan—works on all things growth at Buffer, building out the growth dashboard, analyzing experiments and other data, and making recommendations to the product team. Steven has a ton of startup experience under his belt, spending 4 years at security startup Amorize Technologies through its acquisition 2013. He then worked in Beijing on a location startup, before joining Buffer earlier this ye
We’re excited to share with you an inside look at Buffer’s revenue and growth stats for the last month. If you read our monthly overview , you likely have an idea of the big-picture progress of Buffer, and we hope the revenue and growth stats here illuminate some of the finer details of our journey. Our revenue is earned primarily through two subscription sources: Awesome Plan and Business Plan. In the charts below, you can see how each o
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in March. The team is currently 20 people, compared to 17 in February . Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas: Applications overview We saw an incredible amount of 1,944 applications come in in March, which has been absolutely, positively overwhelming. Here is a breakdown of the different areas: Engineering Happiness Commun
Great news: Courtney Seiter has joined the Buffer team full-time as Head of Content Marketing! Courtney, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., wrangles the Buffer blog and Open blog, making sure they’re always full of useful content for Buffer’s audience. I remember when I first came across Courtney’s writing through her Marketing Land column over a year ago and I loved reading and following her posts there. In fac
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in February. The team is currently 17 people, with 3 new people who have started their bootcamp in February. There were also 3 more offers made in February and all 3 have accepted their offers and will join us in March. Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas: Applications overview We saw an awesome amount of 2,024 applications from some truly amazing candidates come in in February for the 10 positions we’re current
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in January. With the fantastic responses to previous reports on in revenue , customer happiness and content , we thought we might be able t
January has been an incredibly exciting month for the Buffer blog. We managed to increase our overall traffic by 32.6% compared to December. We expanded the team and we’re working more closely with the growth team to make the blog more data-driven. Let’s dig into the details! :) Quick summary In January, we had 654,126 Unique visitors (32.6% growth over December). There were 839,846 total visits, resulting in 1,061,032 page views. We had a total 59 Buffer for Business trial starts resulting
It’s been a very interesting month for the Buffer blog in December, 2013. We’ve made a few changes to the content we publish, how we work as a team and are hiring a new content crafter right now. Let’s dig into some of the most exciting things happening: Quick Summary In December we had 493,253 unique visitors, a little less than in November. Overall, that’s been an interesting trend to observe, which we’ve documented a bi
In November, we’ve seen some interesting developments for Buffer for Business . I’ve recently sent this email to the whole team and also included some thoughts and projections for the next month. I hope you’ll find them interesting! For reference, here are last month’s numbers . Revenue Monthly Recurring Revenue from June & July : $2100Monthly R
In October, we’ve been trying to push hard on the Buffer for Business front. Since we want to try and be as public and transparent about the things we’re doing, here are the full numbers about how Buffer for Business performed in October. I’ve also emailed a new section to the team titled “Outlook and Thoughts” at the bottom, that I’ve included here. I (For reference, here is the September report [https://buffer.com/resources/how-much-revenue-did-buffer-for-busi
The below are all the stats and actual revenue numbers from Buffer for Business. Buffer for Business was soft-launched a few weeks ago and we were lucky about the strong responses so far from users. As we default to transparency and want to try and help as many people as possible with our own learnings and failings, we thought about making these numbers public too! (Granted, this was a bit scary, but here we