Rodolphe Dutel
A collection of 25 posts
Buffer People Ops Report December 2016 * * All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Team members 78 Revenue in cash receipts $1.023m +2.9% MRR $1.058m +2.6% ARR $12.7m +2.3% Expenses $922k +0.6% Madrid: Here we come! Great news! We’ve decided on Madrid for our annual retreat in late February. In addition to our 80 team members, we’re also expecting many significant others, and could see a total of 120 people descending upon Madrid! We will be working from t
Buffer People Ops Report November 2016 All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Team members 78 Revenue in cash receipts $993k -3% MRR $1.03m +1.17% ARR $12.4m +1.6% Expenses $916k +14% After a tricky 2016, we’re headed to a more stable financial position with a bit more visibility on how 2017 will shape up. We’re also working hard on our skeleton model, as detailed in our previous report, to get better at exploring unit economics. Also,
Buffer People Ops Report October 2016 * All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Team members 79 Revenue in cash receipts $1.02m +2.7% MRR $1.02m +3.3% ARR $12.2m +3.4% Debits $822k +3.8% Profit $192k +57% Organizing our next retreat: Location, location, location As we continue organizing our next retreat, we’re excited to bring the team together in one of the three following locations: Lisbon, Madrid or San Diego! We find that takin
Buffer is a remote company; we are a team of 80 people operating in 11 different time zones, and we don’t own any offices! At Buffer, everyone gets to work from the place they feel the most comfortable in. This lifestyle opens up a lot of possibilities: Some team members decide to pack up and go traveling, while others embrace family life to the fullest from their home office. This freedom also requires us to be more disciplined when it comes to working together — particularly when it comes
Buffer People Report September 2016 * All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Team members 79 Revenue in cash receipts $996k +1.2% MRR $987k +4.6% ARR $11.8m +5.0% Debits $854.5k –6.1% Profit $122k –1.9% We have $1.56m in the bank as of September 30, which is a good signal! We continue to be cashflow positive, and plan to remain as such. In September, we’ve worked hard on a few topics, especially improving at forecasting o
Buffer People Ops Report August 2016 * Last month’s report * All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats: Net Revenue $983.7k +12.4% MRR $941 ARR $11.2m +0.9% Expenses 9,450 +11.8% Expenses 9,450 +11.8% August has been a month of continuing good trends: increasing revenue and remaining cash flow positive. We’re also examining a lot of our internal vendors, tools and team participation to ensure everything is in a good place. Here’s
See last month’s finance report → See all Buffer reports → People Ops Report July 2016 The Buffer team has changed a lot in the last few months, and our People Operations team is focusing on helping the team grow through creating new guidelines and recommendations and updating the ones we already have. Our People Ops team covers many roles to foster the daily operations within the company. This includes finance, hiring, internal processes, benefits and more! Important numbers to n
Last month we published the toughest news Buffer has ever shared—that a cashflow crisis caused by hiring too quickly forced us to make the hard decision to say goodbye to 10 teammates. Since we shared that news, we’ve been working to make many financial, accounting, and organizational changes and transitions needed to become stronger and more financially sound. We’re also actively searching for a finance director who can help us build a strong foundation and look toward the future with confide
Having a remote job has been a life-changing experience for me. I worked in traditional offices for a few years before I decided to start working remotely. Working from anywhere frees you from commuting; it also requires you to be organized and productive, everyday. There are so many benefits of remote work — it’s hard to name them all. I feel fortunate to have been given the chance to work from where I’m happiest and most productive. I’d love for others to get to experience the freedom of re
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. Buffer is a fully distributed team, which means that our teammates work from anywhere! Our official headquarters is in California, but we don’t have an office anywhere anymore. Although this is rare, it seems to be a growing trend. As we grow, it has been great to see how larger remote companies s
For the first time in October, we saw Buffer’s total team members (bootcampers and full time) rise above 60. The Buffer team has more than doubled since our last retreat in Iceland, and we’re always giving thought to how to better cultivate the Buffer culture. As a result, October’s hiring report focuses on some pretty big changes, including asking the whole team to give us a grade each month so we can keep improving. Read on for all the numbers, experiments and changes in hiring this month!
Making time to go offline is never easy. There’s almost never a “right time” to do it; you might lose opportunities or even business while disconnecting. And yet, if you don’t actively look for ways to disconnect, it’s not very likely to happen by itself. We have all accepted that eating well and exercising are important to be in great physical shape. We’re now also starting to take better care of our minds by managing our attention. Our own attention is a scarce commodity. Where we focus our
September was a great month at Buffer! We extended 6 offers for new team members to join us in Buffer’s bootcamp. As a result, we are now more than 50 team members (accounting for both full time team members and bootcampers—you can see the full list over here). September hiring conversations Here’s at look at the September numbers. Our “Total Conversations” are the number of email conversations we have open (we sometime have duplicates), “Customers” are our applicants and “New Conversations”
aAs the end of summer nears, we’re still excited to grow the team and are getting much closer to 50 Buffer team members – you can see the live list on our salary spreadsheet over here! We would love to share with you our hiring numbers, how Buffer Bootcamp has evolved, how we are currently set up for hiring, and what happened when we changed the name of our “UX Researcher” position. Let’s dive right in! We start September with 15 open positions, including a few new open positions we’ve recentl
I recently re-read two books that had a big impact on my upbringing: The Alchemist and The Little Prince. Those two novels capture a fascinating concept: Serendipity. I love how the characters embark on journeys where they learn a lot by trying to find their own path, through many chance encounters and learnings. Outside of the fantasy world and back in our own reality , I got to wondering what these concepts look like in my own life. We all want to maximize our productivity, and many of us t
My first day at Google in 2011 felt a bit like joining Hogwarts: you’re excited and not entirely sure what you’ll be doing! I was happy to do anything and learn in the process! For the next two years, I was lucky enough to train Google employees on Gmail and to pitch Gmail to companies of all sizes. Although I’m no longer affiliated with Google—I now work here at Buffer and on Remotive.io—I still use these 7 Gmail tips that have a daily impact on my work to this day. Tame Your Email: My 7 To
In June, we brought back the hiring report after a long absence. Throughout the summer, we’ve been working on growing the team. Today we have 13 open positions to fill! Now let’s look into a little more detail into what happened at Buffer in July. New teammates in July Last month, 11 amazing people accepted our offer to join the Buffer journey. :) Some of those new team members will be joining us in August and beyond. In July we welcomed Philippe (Front-End), Marc Anthony (Product) and Jus
In Buffer’s early days, the Lean Startup approach had a big influence on how Buffer took off. Joel blogged about this in 2011: “I reached something that would be truly valuable for people. It also taught me the value of customer development: to take advantage of those emails coming in by asking people questions.” Much of this mentality is reflected in the Buffer values today! Here is another illustration from Joel sharing his thoughts on how product management works with customer development:
In 2014, I became a full time remote worker. This year, I’ve been lucky to work and travel in Paris, Malaga, Copenhagen, Casablanca, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Barcelona… There’s one question that’s always in the back on my mind: How can I be as productive as possible remotely? I’ve tried many different experiments to do more in less time this year, and I thought I would share 5 tricks (and their accompanying tools) that have become part of my routine. 5 Methods for More Productive R
We’re bringing back the hiring report! The last time we reported on hiring was April 2014. Back then—15 months ago—Buffer had 20 team members. Fast forwarding more than a year later, the team now has 34 full-time team members and three new teammates who will be starting their Buffer bootcamp shortly. New team members Just this last month, Danny and Kat both graduated from Buffer’s bootcamp and have accepted to join us full time, hooray! In June, we also made four offers to candidates to
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
“Here I am, standing in the middle of nowhere in Poland holding a sign to hitch a ride…sweat dripping, car after car rushing by.. rain is coming in too. What the hell am I doing here…” Things didn’t look too good then. But let me tell you this story from the start: In April 2012, I bought tickets to Poland so that I could explore the country by myself, couchsurfing and hitchhiking for 10 days. Couchsurfing is the largest travel community online, allowing you to “surf” members’ couches. By th
Last year I decided to sail across the Atlantic. I previously had spent 3 months learning how to sail in South Africa and figured that learning should be put to good use–otherwise there’s no point, is there? After some quick research, I decided to join the 270 boats crossing the Atlantic with the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) in November 2013: “Every November since 1986 the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) has set sail from Las Palmas, bound 2,700 nautical miles westward across the Atlan
One night, I got a Facebook message about the 100 Happy Days challenge. So I clicked through and here’s what I read: “While the speed of life increases, there is less and less time to enjoy the moment that you are in: Every day submit a picture of what made you happy!” OK, fair point, we don’t take time to appreciate things anymore… I was about to click away and get on with my life, when I read that next sentence: “71% of people tried to complete this challenge,