Buffer April Update: Cape Town Retreat, Brand New iPhone App, and 7% MRR Growth

I’m excited to share the details for Buffer’s progress in April. Last month was an incredible time for Buffer with our third Buffer retreat, some huge product announcements, and continued MRR growth. Here is the update I just sent to our investors. If I can answer any questions or if something comes to mind, please share in the comments. :-)

If you want to read our update from March, you can take a look here.

Traction update

• New users: 70,128 (Total: 1,477,128, from 1,407,000: +5.0%)
• Daily active users: 39,732 (up from 39,000: +1.8%)
• Monthly active users: 156,802 (down from 157,000: -0.1%)
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $263,148 (Annual: $3,157,776: +7.0%)
• Bookings revenue: $344,000 (Annual: 4,128,000 down from $4,224,000: -2.2%)
• Cash in bank: $585,000 (last month: $545,000)
• Team size: 23 people across 5 continents

We’ve seen some great growth in MRR this month. Our bank balance has been rising steadily the past few months, and we’ve now reached more cash in the bank than when we raised our seed round two years ago, which is very reassuring. We’re starting to add a lot more focus to active user numbers with some of our work on growth (more on that below).

Our 3rd Buffer Team Retreat in Cape Town, South Africa

In the first week of April, most of the Buffer team gathered in Cape Town. This was a chance for many of us to meet for the first time, and for others to be reunited again for a week. We worked together from three villas in the beautiful Camps Bay area, and at the weekend we went on safari together. Check out Andy’s photos and the incredible video he put together, too.

A new Happiness Dashboard and our First Community Champion

We built out some considerable new functionality for the growing Happiness team (now eight people!) to better understand how well we are serving customers. The dashboard gives us accurate response time breakdowns for Twitter and e-mail channels and additional information for Live Chat too. The other key area of progress for us in the Happiness Team is that towards the end of April we had our first Community Champion join the team. We’ll be sending out thank-you cards, stickers, and t-shirts to some of our awesome community members.

Continuing our Focus on Growth with New Metrics and an Improved Dashboard

We’ve had some big breakthroughs this month with our focus on a growth team at Buffer. Steven has been gathering some super useful insights, a key one being “user accounting.” This is a process by which we break down our total active users at any point by the following contributions:

• New Activated Users
• Retained Active Users (from previous month)
• Reactivated Users (who had gone dormant)
• Churned Users (who became dormant)
• Deactivated Users (who deleted their account)

It’s useful to break down our active user growth in this way because we can see exactly what is helping us or harming us. We are now taking further steps to break down each of these contributions by platform (web, iPhone, Android, API) to further help us. We are close to being able to act directly on this information to guide our a/b tests to grow each contribution, and hence active users.

Our Brand New iPhone App and Building a More Powerful Product

In April we launched our new iPhone App which had a completely redesigned interface (for iOS7) and added several powerful new features. Check out the full details in our launch blog post.

In the last few months, we’ve been adding a lot of power to the product based on our goal to become the simplest and most powerful social media tool. These improvements are helping us to become a social media tool businesses feel excited about using. We have expanded our focus on content and see this as a cornerstone to our growth and a solution for our long-running “blank page problem” when people sign up for Buffer and don’t know what to share. We have successfully added Content Suggestions to the product and are in the process of building out Feeds, to have blog content right within Buffer and a way to add the content to your Twitter, Facebook or other queues.

We’re excited to announce that Feeds launch today!

Thanks again for all your continued support! :-)

If there are any questions at all that we can help answer, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.