Buffer’s June Investor Update: 7% MRR, Introducing Daily and More

Joel Gascoigne -

June was a great month, here’s the latest:

Traction update

  • New users: 60,530 (Total: 1,598,049, from 1,537,519: +3.9%)
  • Daily active users: 39,752 (up from 39,559: +0.5%)
  • Monthly active users: 158,894 (down from 160,241: -0.8%)
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $303,000 (Annual: $3,636,000 up from $3,396,000: +7.0%)
  • Cash in bank: $715,000 (last month: $653,000)
  • Team size: 25 people across 5 continents

We’ve been super happy to keep up consistent MRR growth, with 7% growth again this month. We also broke past $300k in MRR, which is a big milestone for us to reach. We’re excited to keep pushing forward here. The bank balance is also continuing to grow, which is very reassuring since we still have no plans to raise further funding at present.

A renewed focus on our browser extensions

The Buffer browser extension is pretty neat. It lets you share a page with friends and followers with the click of a button, and we do all the work to figure out the text for the post, create a short link and even grab images to attach if you like.

It’s always driven a lot of the shares that originate from Buffer. For example, this is one recent day, where the extensions drove 33% of all shares:

With this in mind, we’ve renewed our focus on consistently improving the Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions and finding ways we can help users even more with these extensions. One example is the recent Share Image button we’ve started overlaying on images when you hover. This has been used over 100,000 times since we added it.

Getting better at experimentation with a new framework

We’ve doubled down on being data-driven and a/b testing everything in the last few months. A key area of progress in June here was that we built out a brand new experimentation framework we internally call seamless, which now helps us to much more easily create new a/b tests and track them in our internal growth dashboard. It’s been a great success and we’re continuing to build upon it. We’re already able to run more simultaneous a/b tests as a result.

Happiness team: 9 people and growing, replying to 80% of emails within 1 hour

The happiness team has been a huge inspiration for me within Buffer. We made “setting the bar for great customer support” half of our vision, and Carolyn has pushed forward with this vision in the last year.

It recently occurred to me that a year ago the team was only 2 people and now we have 9 people in the happiness team. They’ve been crushing it and are on a streak of over a month of hitting Inbox Zero every day for customer emails. We also answered 81% of support emails within 1 hour in June.

Making content a core part of Buffer

In the last few months, we’ve gradually increased our focus on content, beyond simply sharing. It’s been a logical step for us and we’re acting on one of the hunches we had a while ago, which is that people know they want to share more, and Buffer can help with that, but often people don’t know what to share or don’t always have something in mind.

Especially when people sign up, we’ve always had a slight “blank page” problem where there is a composer and they don’t know what to share right at that moment. This always caused a lower activation rate than we wanted, and suggested content has helped us to improve that.

Daily: our new iPhone app for super easy content sharing

In line with our increased focus on content, in June we launched a brand new iPhone app called Daily. We built it on top of our content suggestions, and it lets you add a suggestion to your Buffer Queue quickly just by swiping it to the right. Swipe left to discard the suggestion. This has been a success and we’re already seeing thousands of shares a day from it.