Buffer in June: $10.8m ARR and an Update on our Financial Position

Editor’s Note: Every month we share an update with all of Buffer’s investors. We also publish that note in full for our Buffer Open audience in keeping with our value of transparency.

Hi Team,

Thanks for all your continued support. I’d love to share an update on what’s happening at Buffer:

Key metrics

MRR: $897.0
ARR: $10.8m
MoM: +4.9%

Further metrics:

• 60,413 paying customers (+3.5% from May)
• 256,882 MAU (+0.0% from May)
• 159,995 WAU (+1.5% from May)
• $1.22m cash in bank
• 81 team members across the world (down from 84 in May)

Note: We’re dropping “registered users” as a reported number. We feel it’s somewhat of a vanity metric and isn’t something we want to optimize for. We’ll instead focus especially on WAU, as it’s the most relevant indicator of receiving value from the product.

Our highest growth of the year

June ended with $897K (+4.9%) in monthly recurring revenue, our highest month-over-month growth of 2016. We’re excited to have ramped up the number of growth experiments we’re performing, which we believe impacted this number.

One significant change which impacted June revenue specifically was changing our trial length from 30 days to 14 days, an effort to bring alignment to our trial lengths across all paid plans.

Update on Buffer’s financial position

Last month we shared some difficult news, and I wanted to give you a full update on how we’re recovering from Buffer’s cashflow crisis.

We’ve made significant progress since May, firstly in defining a healthy goal for our recovery and future financial health. Through research and discussion, we have set a goal to keep 3.5 months of expenses in the bank. We are currently at 39% of that goal, and we plan to get to 50% by the end of year.

We decreased our expenses by 11% in June, even after paying an extra $30,000 in severance following May’s layoffs in order to honor departing teammates’ salary/equity choice. We’re predicting an even bigger decrease in the months to come.

Leo and I are holding weekly finance analysis sessions with our finance team, adjusting and recalibrating, to make sure we stay on track. We’re not quite fully where we’d like to be yet, but we are increasingly confident in our position and are so appreciative of all the advice and encouragement we’ve received.

Senior hiring

To really help us be in a totally solid position in the future, we feel we need to get someone on board who knows finance inside out and has been living and breathing it for years.

As part of that goal, we’ve made big strides towards finding great additions for Buffer’s leadership team. Leo and I have interviewed 5 candidates each for our Director/VP of Finance and Director of Product roles.

We’ve had a lot of assistance from Deborah, Rodolphe, Carolyn, Sunil and Courtney in the interview process and actual interviews. We also will bring in Mark Macleod, our advisor (and ex-CFO of Shopify and Freshbooks) to do an interview when we have a finalist finance candidate.

Who are the best financial or product minds you’ve ever worked with? If 1 or 2 people come to mind for our Director/VP of Finance or our Director of Product position, please let us know!

Thanks so much for your support!
– Joel Gascoigne