Business and SaaS strategy - Page 2
A collection of posts on Business and SaaS strategy
On a recent flight to Hawaii, I tried a little experiment and did an “AMA in the Sky.” On a flight (sitting in a chair in the sky with wifi!) ✈️? Got a little time, ask me about @buffer / startups / anything and I’ll reply! — Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) February 20, 2016 It was incredibly fun and kept me busy for about 2.5 hours, nicely passing some of the flight time. I think I ended up answering
I’ve been fortunate to have many great mentors over the years, and as a result I try to spend a lot of time helping other founders. When Buffer was going all the way with our self-management experiment , I was meeting weekly with someone who championed this concept within her company and successfully got the team started in this direction. After several chats, Buffer hit a key phase of growth and I wasn’t able
As a social media startup, Buffer is constantly learning about what it takes to build great products. Whether it’s giving a unique role to our Product Creators or evolving the structure of our teams , we try to treat everything as an experiment with opportunities to continually learn and improve. One of our more recent sources of learning has been the launch of Pablo , our so
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. The makeup of the Buffer product team is constantly in motion. We’re always evolving in search of the ideal team structure that helps us move as quickly as possible and make the most impact for the community. I sat d
I have some great news: Buffer has acquired Respondly , a social media customer service and brand monitoring tool! We’re excited to bring this product into the Buffer family and move into a whole new market that many of you have been encouraging us to explore for years. I wanted to take a little time to share the full details about how we came to acquire this product and our overall vision for how we’ll grow our social media offerings to help you to deliver great ex
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. How do people work best together? It’s fun to think about. You may know some things about your own work style and productivity preferences—for example, do you prefer solo or team projects? Being in the middle of many tasks or finishing one before going on to the next? Now, take all those unique factors
Being a part of a company that is run according to a specific set of values brings a great amount of clarity into everything we do at Buffer. Looking to our values becomes particularly important when there’s a challenging decision to make—for example, how to move forward with a feature that hasn’t yet found its fit. When we practiced this reflection with Buffer’s Suggestions feature recently, we decided that they’ve reached the end of their journey. Beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off
Starting early this week you may have noticed some changes around how posting to Facebook works through Buffer. We could’ve been a whole lot more mindful around this and are so sorry for the confusion we’ve caused. Today I wanted to briefly give an update around these changes and create a place where we can keep you posted with any updates. A little background Earlier this week we were notified by the folks over at Facebook that a few flows within Buffer around how we suggest post content wer
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. The short history of how social media developed is still nothing short of incredible. When Facebook started in 2004, strictly for colleges, and Twitter in 2006, mostly for techies in the Bay Area, it was all about individuals connecting with each other. About a decade later, a lot of that has shifted. Wh
A while back, I met with a great founder who’s really hustling. We spent some time discussing his idea and I shared some of my experiences with Buffer. When we’d almost finished our 30-minute meeting, he had one last question: “Plan vs build. Where do you stand?” I thought it was a fantastic question. Clearly it’s not a binary choice, yet I think it’s also good to ponder which of the two you should focus on. What does it mean to plan? I believe planning is an essential part of making progre
I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to jump on board the path of building a startup. Having hit upon a product that solved a key pain for many people, Buffer has grown rather fast. The team is now 25 people and we’ve just crossed $4M ARR. When I reflect on how quickly things happened and what it has required of me, the first thing that comes to mind is Paul Graham‘s essay entitled How to Make Wealth. In particular, this part resonates with me: You can think of a startup as a way to compress
I’ve realized I am very much in a bubble. Everyone I know is building a company. Amongst my circle of friends, that is the norm. This, however, is mostly out of choice: I believe, in agreement with Seth Godin , that to be an outlier is an inefficient way to make progress: The easiest way to thrive as an outlier is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers. Surround yourself with p
During the journey of building Buffer , I’ve had some truly fantastic moments. I’ve reached some defining milestones. New doors have opened for me, and it has been great. Looking back to when I started Buffer , even though I had learned a lot from my past startup experiences, I truly didn’t know what I was doing and I approached everything with that mindset. I was out there to learn an
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching . One of the key learnings for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. In fact, downtim
One of the most important differences for me personally in how I run Buffer compared to the last one I founded has been how I treat the product at each stage of the process. With ideas such as the Lean Startup, there is a huge amount of pressure to ship very early, and rightly so—the sooner we can validate our assumptions and gain more understanding about how our users react to our product, the better. However, quotes such as the following can make us feel like we should believe our product is
At the core of how Buffer schedules posts is one line of a cronjob configuration that hasn’t been touched since the very start when Joel founded Buffer. We still rely on that single cronjob that runs every minute of every day. While this configuration is the same, everything else around it has evolved. Today, Buffer schedules on average 300 posts per minute and over 432,000 posts a day. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and iterations we’ve made to the core of wha
You may have heard some talk recently about the “Heartbleed bug.” That’s the scary-named vulnerability that was just discovered in the software library that protects many sites on the internet – including Buffer. We wanted to make sure to tell you exactly what we know and what we’ve done about Heartbleed at Buffer to keep your information as safe as possible. What is Heartbleed? The Heartbleed bug was just recently discovered on April 7th in OpenSSL, a kind of cryptography software that protec
Buffer was hacked on October 26th, resulting in several thousand spam posts appearing on Twitter and Facebook. Here is the impact on our numbers. Last Saturday I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop doing a few support tickets and writing a blog post when I opened Facebook and saw that the whole of my timeline was full of spam. The next thing I noticed was that all of the spam was “via Buffer”. I scrolled and scrolled and it was endless. We’ve written a lot about what actually happened [http
Update: This article was originally titled “Buffer has been hacked – here is what’s going on”. The hacking incident happened yesterday (Saturday) and below is a recap of everything that happened. Please ask us any questions you have in the comments below. If you’re reading this, the most important section for you is Update 7. We’ve discovered the source of the breach and closed the vulnerability. Keep reading for the full story. Update 9: We’ve discovered the exact details of how the Twitter