Buffer Investors’ Report: $6.86M ARR, Sixth Retreat, New ‘Areas’ Structure

At the start of July, we had our 6th team retreat! Despite the substantial cost of this and growing the team faster than ever, we are still profitable and the bank balance has gone up since last month.

We are very happy with this slack we have and the health of the business, and at the same time we would like to grow the team faster and continue filling validated roles.

I’m excited to share the latest update of everything going on at Buffer:

Key metrics

• 2,592,194 total registered users (+3.2%)
• 208,667 monthly active users (+1.1%)
• 51,491 average daily active users (-1.4%)
• $571,532 monthly recurring revenue (+3.8%)
• $6.86m annual recurring revenue (+3.8%)
• $2,655,505 cash in bank
• 37 team members across the world
• 28 cities, 10 countries, 4 continents

We’re happy to keep our growth rate fairly steady around 3-4%, and we also have some plans which may help us grow a little faster.

Asks

• We’re continuing our fast pace of growing the team, and we’d love your help to spread the word about all our current open positions. Tweet or Buffer.
• The $7 Million Startup With Zero Managers: We were lucky to have a great writeup about the current state of self-management at Buffer on Inc. We’d love you to share the post. Tweet or Buffer.

Team

• 37 total team members
• 11 people accepted our offers to join the team in the coming weeks and months
• We received around 1,500 applications in July
• We are still growing the team fast, and have 13 open roles we are hiring for
• We also intend to put together listings and start inviting applications for an Android Developer and an Executive Assistant during August, bringing our open roles to 15

Retreat

• Our biggest retreat yet, with 31 team members present
• We all flew in from various corners of the world to meet in Iceland
• We also invited significant others for the first time ever
• It was a fantastic week with a balance of working within our teams, having higher level discussions and activities to bond
• Read an article about the evolution of the Buffer retreat and our learnings along the way

Company Structure

• Last month we mentioned a shift towards adding more structure and making roles and commitments explicit
• We have now made the transition to working in small teams of 4-5 people
• We are working based on areas of the product, customer segments, and other logical separations
• We have fully reintroduced mentorship as well as higher level strategy roles. We’ve re-established everyone in the team having a weekly 1:1 with someone who has significant experience both in their role and within Buffer and with our culture. Several of us in the team have shifted our focus to solving higher level challenges such as company structure, culture of different areas such as product, happiness and engineering, as well as other strategic tasks.
• Read an article from Leo where he shares all of our mistakes, learnings and new adjustments for self-management at Buffer

Product

• We’ve started an experiment testing allowing people to pay for the Awesome Plan in Euros
• We have continued our plan to sunset the Suggestions feature
• We’ve made some key speed and reliability improvements to Buffer for Business
• We have started to engage in sales conversations and set up customer success for larger business & enterprise
• We’re in the early stages of experimenting with a progress indicator in the onboarding flow
• We’re exploring ways to allow sharing multiple photos to Twitter and Facebook

Happiness, Community and Marketing

• We started to stream some talks from myself and Leo via Periscope and have had a great reception!
• We paused the blog and worked on many other initiatives, with some great results and learnings
• The Happiness team has also transitioned to working in separate areas, giving more ownership and freedom to innovate and progress in individual areas (e.g. Awesome Plan customers, Mobile support, Buffer for Business support)

Thanks again for being part of the Buffer journey. We’d be excited to hear have any thoughts you have for us!