Buffer February Update: $3,996,000 Revenue Run Rate, 1,383,000 Users

I’m happy to share our update for February which I just sent to Buffer investors. I hope the insights into our progress and processes are useful. Just leave a comment if you have any questions :-)

If you want to read our update from January, you can take a look here.

Traction update

• New users: 62,000 (Total: 1,383,000, from 1,321,000: +4.7%)
• Daily active users: 36,000 (up from 35,000: +2.9%)
• Monthly active users: 145,000 (up from 142,000: +2.1%)
• Overall revenue: $333,000 (Annual: $3,996,000 up from $3,900,000: +2.5%)
• Revenue from $10/mo Awesome Plan: $273,000 (up from $270,000: +1.1%)
• Revenue from $50+/mo Business Plans: $60,000 (up from $55,000: +9.1%)
• Cash in bank: $523,000 (last month: $361,000)
• Team size: 16 people across 5 continents

We’re happy to finish the month with growth in all areas, however we are keen to push for higher month-over-month growth rates in the future. One reason for the lower growth this month is 3 fewer days in February, another I’ve gone into more detail below. We have a number of product and growth initiatives in motion which we believe will help us keep a faster growth pace.

Growing the team is a key priority

Our biggest challenge right now is probably growing the team. We’re lucky that our revenues have reached a point where we’re profitable, which can be seen from the increase in the bank balance. We also thankfully have incredible validation on several areas which we know if we can double down on we can acquire more customers and grow our impact and the company. Our struggle is to find great engineers who are also a culture fit. We have been making a number of adjustments and bringing hiring into focus as one of our highest priorities. We’re excited to push forward here in the coming months and find some more reliable and repeatable processes to grow the team.

A mistake and our correction

One of the reasons we believe our revenue has not grown at as fast a pace as last month other than the fact that February has 3 fewer days is that we’ve been learning a lot about our trial-upgrade flow for Buffer for Business and making a number of adjustments.

During January we noticed that quite a number of people were asking for a refund for Buffer for Business (something we’ve approach with “no questions asked”). Looking into this further, we realized that we made it a little too easy for existing Awesome Plan customers to get onto a trial and automatically convert and be charged for Buffer for Business.

We didn’t want it to be a process with lots of friction for those who genuinely wanted Buffer for Business, however we realized by focusing on that goal we gave a lot of people a bad experience. We have given everyone refunds who accidentally ended up on Buffer for Business, and we’ve changed our trial flow to be much clearer for new users. In addition, we have started work on a new value to “Do the right thing” (for customers, readers, fans, team members), which is something we all care deeply about at Buffer.

Happiness team is crushing it

I’m happy to share that our Happiness team is doing an incredible job making customers and users happy. As reported in our February Happiness update, we exceeded our goals in the last month. We responded to 64% of all emails within 1 hour and 84% within 6 hours. That’s with a volume of 9,800 support emails. It’s really inspiring to see the Happiness team making this happen.

Leave a comment below with any questions, I’m looking forward to hearing from you :)