Join us as we share what we’re learning as we build a company that approaches work from a fresh perspective. We write about workplace culture, our finances, and our business decisions and strategies.
What it was like to join a fully remote team like Buffer, and how going on the company retreat so early on helped shape my journey in ways I hadn’t imagined.
If you’ve followed Buffer for a while, then you know we have a few uncommon approaches to teammate benefits and compensation. The example I’ll dig into today is our “Dependent Grant,” which we launched in 2016. Our Dependent Grant is separate benefit, outside of salary, that we grant teammates who are taking care of and supporting family members. It’s an extra $3,000 USD per year per child, up to four dependents total. This has been one of our most unusual (and at times controversial) benefits
It can feel incredibly challenging to hire, and hire well. For one thing, hiring is usually a significant time investment for our small team — we once had 1,500 applications in just over a week for a content role (!!) — but beyond that, we are so intentional about the ways that we collaborate. Buffer is a fully remote, global, and culturally diverse company operating with a four-day work week. Finding someone who will thrive in our work environment, and is also highly skilled in the areas we’r
We’ve always had teammates who have side projects in addition to working at Buffer. Working on new projects, building, experimenting, and self-improvement are built into our DNA as a company. So it's quite common to be speaking with someone only to find out they own a small business outside of Buffer that started as a side project. We also have several published authors and many apps built by Buffer teammates. We believe this entrepreneurial spirit and creative drive not only enhances our indiv
Here's why we're introducing a $250 stipend for AI tools and how we expect it to impact our work.
After two years of losses, Buffer achieved profitability in 2024 with a net profit of $202,459. Learn about our journey back to profitability, our profit-sharing philosophy, and how we distributed 15% of profits among our 73 team members.
Every year since 2016 we've closed Buffer for a week at the end of the year. It’s like a reset, except across the whole company.
Nine years ago, we decided to launch a new free product alongside Buffer. We called it Pablo, and it was a huge hit in our community. Within just seven months of its launch, half a million photos were created using Pablo. Similarly, we had the initial ideas for Stories Creator and Remix many years ago now. All three of these tools have been an important part of Buffer’s story. They’ve taught us lessons and helped us connect with a wider audience. In Pablo’s case, the idea for this tool happene
If you use Buffer, you might have experienced us having more downtime than usual recently. We want to start with an apology for not sharing more transparently along the way what’s been happening. We’ve been caught up in the work and haven’t invested enough in communicating with our community, and we’re so sorry about this misstep. We know some of our customers have had a frustrating time using Buffer recently and we need to do better by you. This past August and September were the months we’ve
As part of our commitment to transparency and building in public, Buffer engineer Joe Birch shares how we’re doing this for our own GraphQL API via the use of GitHub Actions.
How the Buffer Customer Advocacy Team set up their book club, plus their key takeaways from their first read: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.
In this article, the Buffer Content team shares exactly how and where we use AI in our work.
The Buffer team is heading out on our first retreat since 2019! I asked the retreat veterans for advice on making the most of the trip as a newbie.
How can we keep creating a unique customer support experience even as we get an increasing number of messages from customers? This is a question that is always on my mind. Delivering exceptional customer support has always been at the core of Buffer’s mission. Over the years, we've taken pride in our unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction and our dedicated support team's ability to go the extra mile. What we have found is that as your volume and team size scale, it can be trickier to
When I tell people how long I’ve been at Buffer — eight years today — people generally have a lot of questions. But one of the most common is, “Why have you stayed so long?” Eight years is an unusually long time to be at one company in tech. It’s also an unusually long time among most of my friend group except those who work in more traditional jobs, say in teaching or in government. So why have I stayed? My short answer is usually the same — it’s the people and the product. I truly enjoy wor
Buffer has been in business for 13 years now, and we’ve had transparent salaries for 10 of those. This means that for over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been publicly viewable, and we’ve shared our approach to salaries and the formula we based them upon openly. We’ve maintained transparent salaries through significant market (and world) changes and through ups and downs in our performance as a business. I’m proud of the fact that we never took away that transparency, internally or external
Buffer, as a company, closes the last week of the year every year, and historically, as an engineering team, we’d do a code freeze for the week before we’re closed so nothing broke heading into the holidays. (Pretty smart of us.) This year, we did something different, and it still worked out. We used the last week of the year as a “fixathon” for our whole engineering team. Fixathon = a week where our 29-person engineering team spent a whole week focused on fixing bugs. By the end of the we
As a new Bufferoo, I asked my teammates how to thrive at the company. Their guidance will stay with me for the rest of my career — and it might help you, too.
With so many years of being remote, we’ve experimented with communication a lot. One conversation that often comes up for remote companies is asynchronous (async) communication. Async just means that a discussion happens when it is convenient for participants. For example, if I record a Loom video for a teammate in another time zone, they can watch it when they’re online — this is async communication at its best. Some remote companies are async first. A few are even fully async with no live ca
Like many others, I read and reply to hundreds of emails every week and I have for years. And as with anything — some emails are so much better than others. Some emails truly stand out because the person took time to research, or they shared their request quickly. There are a lot of things that can take an email from good to great, and in this post, we’re going to get into them. What’s in this post: * The best tools for email * What to say instead of “Let me know if you have any questions” a
How I was onboarded to the fully distributed, remote team, along with a couple of things that have really surprised me about life at Buffer.
I’ve been a Customer Advocate at Buffer for nearly five years. Throughout that time, I've worked hard to find the best way to guide customers to unlock the full potential of our platform to help them achieve their goals. I found a specific passion for our customers in the onboarding part of their journey by helping them look for the right plan to meet their needs, ensuring they have the necessary documentation to allow their company to move forward with our platform, and empowering them through
We’ve shared a number of parts of Buffer’s business transparently over the years — and one piece we’ve always wanted to expand on is where your money goes when you pay for a Buffer subscription. We shared a post about where your money went when buying a $10 Buffer plan back in 2014 — but it was well time for an update. A lot has changed over the last nine years, and we want to share some of the learnings and insights gained from looking back at our numbers. We’re also happy to share a more su
For many years, as a small startup, we did not do any sort of formal performance reviews. Instead, we did regular one-to-one meetings between managers and teammates, usually on a weekly basis. We also gave feedback to each other openly and regularly. (We even experimented with doing feedback transparently, but we went away from that practice — one of the few times we’ve scaled back a transparency experiment!) And lastly, every teammate had a regular mastermind with another team member, which oft