Buffer in November: We’ve Acquired Respondly! Moving into Social Media Customer Service and Brand Monitoring

Joel Gascoigne -

We have some very exciting news to share in this month’s investor update: we’ve acquired Respondly, a social media customer service and brand monitoring tool!

With this move, we will reposition Buffer in the coming months to be a full social media solution for companies across both customer service and marketing departments.

Read on for more on this and all the other news from November…

Overall key metrics

  • 2,921,380 total registered users (+2.8%)
  • 220,988 monthly active users (-2.5%)
55,253 average daily active users (-0.4%)$677,552 monthly recurring revenue (+4.2%)$8.13m annual recurring revenue (+4.2%)62 team members across the world in 44 cities

*Transparency note: We’re holding off on disclosing our bank balance for a while to honor our agreement with Respondly and not make it easy to deduce the acquisition price. It will return in March 2016!

Product: Respondly, Pablo extension, Awesome 7-day trial

As mentioned above, we’ve acquired Respondly and are super excited to step into the social media customer service and brand monitoring space.

We believe Respondly has huge potential in terms of revenue growth and expanding our overall brand footprint. The product currently has $4k MRR. From our research in our due diligence process, we have found that many Buffer customers already also do social media customer service within their companies, and we are excited about this opportunity to expand our offering and also move into a new market with new customers too.

We expect to be able to quickly grow the revenue from Respondly towards something very meaningful for the company—which will also be our first revenue stream separate from Buffer. We already have a team within the company making swift progress on rebranding and launching the product in early January.

Request an invite at buffer.com/respond and we’ll welcome you to try Buffer Reply as soon as we have capacity.

In other product areas, we’ve continued to make good progress! Pablo has a dedicated extension now, and has seen weekly active users double from October to November.

The Awesome Plan now has a 7-day trial, building on the exciting Buffer Social Media Calendar launch. And we’re making the core product better too. We’ve made re-Buffering easier, finding that many marketers want to continue sharing their best content.

Our product areas are also focusing more and more on growth. This November, we’ve iterated on the landing page, trial experience, pricing page, messaging about Buffer for Business and more. We’re on track to have a 34% increase (491 in December) in the number of Buffer for Business trials from Awesome users, this month from last, for example.

We’re searching for more Product Creators as we run into 2016, too. (We have 3 now, and could easily see growing to 5 or 6.)

Team & Hiring: 10 new teammates, new salary formula

  • 62 team members
  • 44 cities
  • 11 timezones

In November, 10 teammates completed their bootcamp and joined us full time:

  • Jordan – iOS Developer
  • Kyle – Product Creator
  • Amy – Customer Hero
  • James – Product Designer
  • Ash – Content Crafter
  • Matt – Growth Analyst
  • Mike – Customer Development
  • Humberto – iOS Developer
  • Arielle – Community Champion
  • Deb – Culture Scout

Here’s the whole team in a November all-hands meeting (we’re making hashtag hand symbols!):

Another 4 teammates are scheduled to start their bootcamp in the weeks to come.

We looked into 2,734 hiring conversations in November (+37%). In December, we’re hiring across 15 open positions, listed on Buffer’s Journey page.

We also introduced our brand-new salary formula and calculator, which was kindly covered by TechCrunch, The Next Web, The Atlantic and more!

Happiness: 95% happiness rate, 76% replies within 6 hours

  • 10,719 replies sent
  • Customer Happiness Percentage: 95%
  • 57% of emails got a reply within 1 hour
  • 76% within 6 hours
  • 48% of Tweets got a reply within 15 minutes

In November we had a NPS score of 52 for our customers on Business plans with a 39% response rate.

The Happiness Team grew by a few smiling faces in November! One Customer Hero and three Happiness Heroes began Buffer Bootcamp, one of whom is focused entirely on Twitter. This is our first hire exclusively for the Twitter team, and we’re so excited for the difference this can make for that powerful support channel.

Marketing: Moving teammates into product teams

We started a significant change in November with moving 2 people from the marketing team into product teams to be more effective in achieving their goals.

Instead of contributing to blog marketing goals, they are now responsible for trial starts and conversion. This feels closer in line with how the most modern marketing team and product teams are setup these days and we’re excited to start reporting on numbers starting next investor update!

Thanks for your support this year, and happy holidays!

– Joel Gascoigne