Buffer in May: $6.4M ARR, Product Advancements and Self-Management Work

In May, we continued our strong revenue growth, and we’re also growing the team faster than ever before.

Here are the latest insights and numbers about Buffer:

Current Buffer metrics

• 2,432,382 total registered users (+3.4%)
• 203,449 monthly active users (+1.7%)
• 49,202 average daily active users (-1.1%)
• $532,350 monthly recurring revenue (+4.6%)
• $6.39m annual recurring revenue (+4.6%)
• $2,267,067 cash in bank
• 34 team members across the world
• 25 cities, 10 countries, 4 continents

In terms of our active user numbers, we’ve started a large focus on this and also on churn in the last few weeks.

Team: Hiring for 10 positions

• 32 fully on-board team members
• 1 new person has finished bootcamp and fully joined the team: Jim, Product Creator.
• 2 people are currently in bootcamp and will finish during June.
• 2 more people have been made offers and will join us in the coming weeks/months.
• We’re speaking with several more promising candidates.
• We’re hiring for 10 different positions.
• A key team member on Product is leaving the company to pursue another opportunity

Product: Future queue, video upload, Pinterest updates

• We made great progress on “Future Queue,” a project to allow users to add content to any schedule slot in the future of their queue.
• We have been working on allowing users to upload video to Buffer and share it natively on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• We’ve started work to support the new “Retweet with Comment” feature that Twitter recently rolled out.
• We added support for Pinterest to iOS and Android apps.
• We’re working on a new iteration of Buffer for Pinterest to allow you to easily Pin images from the page.
• We’ve put together a task force to keep working on Pablo and launch some validated features.
• We’re building in support for in-app subscriptions for iOS to allow us to generate much more revenue from iOS than we currently do.

Self-management: More structure, coaching and mentoring

In the last month we’ve realized that self-management is something that we need to be actively working on much more, in order to get it right and find a way of working that is in line with our values around self-management and is also effective. Leo and I especially decided that we wanted to work more directly on this, and the two of us have started to work daily on this now.

Specifically, we have been working on adding much more structure to the systems we use to organize ourselves as a company, and make everything more explicit. The goal is for us to each feel more committed and take on more responsibility for the areas we choose to work on.

In addition, we have also reflected and started to feel that self-management doesn’t remove the need for higher-level thinking, coaching and mentoring. These are all things we’ve started to bring back, in ways that still feel self-managed.

Asks: Self-management resources, help us grow

• We’re still figuring out what self-management means at Buffer. We recently spoke with someone who was a big part of the move to Holacracy at Zappos. If you know anyone leading self-management changes at other companies, we’d love to speak with them. We’re especially interested in speaking with Medium and Valve.
• We’re trying to grow faster than we ever have before and see huge opportunity ahead for growth. We’d love for you to share our jobs website.