Buffer September Update: $2,088,000 run rate, 1,046,000 users

Joel Gascoigne -

Below is the monthly update email I have just sent this morning to all our investors. I hope you enjoy taking a read about the full details of our work on Buffer in the last month. I’m excited to hear from you in the comments if you have any questions about what we’re up to!

Traction update:

  • New users: 66,000 (Total: 1,046,000, from 980,000: +7%)
  • Daily active users: 30,000 (from 29,000: +3%)
  • Revenue: $174,000 (Annual: $2,088,000 up from $1,968,000: +6%)
  • Business revenue: $12,340 (up from $10,060; +23%)

September has historically been the only month of the year we have experienced negative % growth (this happened in September the last 2 years), so we pushed hard this month and a 6% positive MoM growth rate in revenue is a huge win for us.

New features: LinkedIn Company Pages & Twitter Autocomplete:

We aimed to have a higher quantity of launches than usual in September to push for positive % growth, so we launched support for LinkedIn Company Pages and Twitter Autocomplete. LinkedIn gave us a huge boost in people upgrading to the $10/mo Awesome Plan, due to the fact they would hit the limit if they had already connected their LinkedIn Profile. Autocomplete has been very highly requested and people are loving it.

1,000,000 users!

Amongst the feature launches, our other big announcement this month was the massive milestone of reaching 1m users. We also saw this as an opportunity to live to our “default to transparency” company value and shared many numbers and details from the journey. We got great coverage on Mashable and shared an infographic on our blog.

Buffer for Business

  • 137% MoM MRR growth of Buffer for Business (to $10,300)
  • 23% MoM total revenue growth (to $12,340)
  • Buffer for Business was 7.1% of total revenue in September
  • 164 total paying customers compared to 54 in August (303% increase)

Hiring

The team is currently 13 people, and we’re working hard on hiring right now. We are looking for 8 people: 2 customer support, 2 support engineer, 1 front-end engineer, 1 back-end engineer and 1 devops and 1 community manager. We know that this will be a long-term endeavor as we want to be super focused on culture-fit. I’ll keep you updated on team growth :-)

Let me know any questions you have on our progress, I’d love to answer them.