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.
See all past engineering reports → See all Buffer reports → Engineering Report July 2016 Welcome to our first innovation & engineering report! We’ll be sharing all the highlights from engineering and technical teams at Buffer. These includes snippets from our product engineering, data, systems and architecture teams. This past month has seen a major product launch, Redux building, diving deeper into service-oriented architecture and also internal webinars called “Snackchats.” Here’s
When you’re a fully remote team , all forms of communication take on much more importance. Since we don’t see each other face-to-face very often at Buffer, we have to think up other ways to express ourselves, so we focus a lot on our written communication , including emojis and lots of exclamation points, and of course, GIFs. The same applies for our wonderful Bu
How many goals have you achieved today? Setting goals is key to making progress in any area. We know that those who write down their goals are 95% more likely to achieve them and that two best practices for goal-setting include making them measurable and giving them a deadline. We’ve even explored a variety of formats for setting goals on the blog before. One format that has particularly intrigued us at Buffer is the practice of OKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results. A system that
Last month we published the toughest news Buffer has ever shared —that a cashflow crisis caused by hiring too quickly forced us to make the hard decision to say goodbye to 10 teammates. Since we shared that news, we’ve been working to make many financial, accounting, and organizational changes and transitions needed to become stronger and more financially sound. We’re also actively searching for a finance director who can help us build
Something really awesome happens when you search for images of an “entrepreneur” in Buffer’s super-simple social media image maker Pablo: We’re so delighted to add the Women of Color in Tech Chat photos into Pablo, to complement our other great photo partners including Pixabay and Unsplash. When you search Pablo using words like “entrepreneur,” “designer,” “developer,” “engineer,” “business,” “founder” and more, you’ll see these high-quality, free-to-use images from Women of Color in Tech Chat
We believe in bringing your whole selves to work. Many times, that might mean stepping away from work for a bit to celebrate and wholly focus on your family. This is a foundational pillar here at Buffer and we’re committed to supporting our team members in many different ways: perks, flexible time off and a fully-paid family leave. In our experiences as a growing startup, no two individual’s experience is quite the same—especially with family leave. So Buffer has a loose policy that recommends
What if bringing more diversity into tech could be as simple as having a coffee with someone new? At Atlassian , where Aubrey Blanche is the global head of diversity and inclusion, one successful program is just that simple: Women of Atlassian opt in, are matched randomly with a new teammate, and grow their professional network through an occasional latte. It’s just one example of the way Aubrey makes the tech industry’s diversity cha
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 Ma
Sometimes it seems like everyone in the world is learning to code . Coding jobs are plentiful, and coding bootcamps have become their own cottage industry. But coding isn’t the path to workplace happiness for everyone, and there’s a growing realization of the limitations of the “everyone needs to code” mentality. That’s where Ariel Lopez comes in. The entrepreneur and career coach founded 2020Shift (of whic
There’s only one shortcut in life, according to David Cancel . The serial entrepreneur (and sometimes Buffer advisor) is currently working on his fifth startup, Drift , which allows you to talk to your website visitors and customers in real-time, from anywhere. But his biggest passion—and his top secret to a great life—is continuous, voracious learning. It’s a topic he explores in his own podcast, Seeking Wisdom . (It’s
When you think about your coworkers, ask yourself: How many of them are happy? Who’s frustrated? Unchallenged? Looking for another job on the side? How do you gauge employee happiness, anyway, or turn what you learn into action? At Buffer, we’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with the employee engagement tools from OfficeVibe. Our friendly Slack bot (more on him later) asks teammates 5 questions each week, right from Slack, about how things are going at work. For some reason, it’s surprising
At Buffer, our workplace environment looks a bit different: our “water cooler” is Slack, we utilize transparent emails, we offer free, unlimited Kindle books and host monthly book clubs via Zoom. Customers are starting to care more and more about the company behind the product. And at Buffer, it’s part of our vision to create the most fulfilling place to work. In the past five-and-a-half years, where we’ve gone from 0 to nearly 90 employees, we’ve experimented with many aspects of our company
Angers activates. That’s the quote a friend shared with Christina Morillo, and it stuck in her mind. So when she set out to find some stock photos for the side project she had started with her friend Stephanie Morillo, she recognized what she was feeling when she couldn’t find them: Anger. The project, Women of Color in Tech Chat , is a community for women of color and non-binary people of color in tech. The goal was to build a simple splash page. “When we we
Productivity on its own can be a tough challenge for anyone, even if you work from the same space every day. And what if you’re jumping workspaces every week? Every day? Every couple hours? Digital nomads and remote workers have a very unique productivity puzzle to figure out. I’ve been fortunate enough to be working remotely full-time for nearly 6 months now, and my desk has sometimes changed every couple days — or even every couple hours! As I’ve gone from place to place, I’ve been jotting d
Ai Ching Goh didn’t know what kind of company she wanted to start. She just knew she wanted to stop having the “Monday blues.” So together with her husband, the experimental psychology student and former Procter & Gamble corporate exec founded Piktochart , a web app that helps non-designers tell visual stories through images and infographics. Today, Piktochart has grown from 4 people working in a small Penang-based warehouse to more t
The last 3 weeks have been challenging and emotional for everyone at Buffer. We made the hard decision to lay off 10 team members, 11% of the team. I’d like to share the full details of how we got here, and the way we have chosen to handle this situation to put Buffer in a healthier position. I believe most startup founders are, by nature, optimistic. We want to solve problems and we believe in going from nothing to something. The attitude of most successful founders is that something previousl
The CEO and founder of Clef is trying to get rid of passwords forever. But Brennen Byrne, better know simply as B, still found a few hundred extra hours to build Clef’s company handbook from scratch—even though the company is currently a team of 7. “We take building a company really seriously,” he told CultureLab. “Even as a small team, so much of what gets done at Clef isn’t me. It’s important to us to build a great company at the same time as a great product.” Clef pro
The transparent monthly reports from Buffer were one of my first introductions to the company, and I’ve loved them ever since. Before I joined the Buffer team, I waited like Christmas morning for a new report to come out so that I could take a peek behind-the-scenes into the way Buffer worked. Once I came on board, I eagerly anticipated each and every new report and the chance to share with and learn from the awesome folks who took time to read what we were up to. I’d love to get back on a reg
“Unconscious bias” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days. What does it actually mean? Who has it, and can we even fix it if we do? In this episode of Buffer CultureLab, I got the chance to chat with Natalie Johnson, who answers all our burning questions about bias. Natalie is an expert in unconscious bias, from analyzing potential bias in companies’ people processes to training employees and managers on how to manage and mitigate bias. As a former People Analyst at Google, Nat
In five-and-a-half years of Buffer (wow!), we’ve been fortunate to cross many milestones — 3 million registered users, 90+ team members, and most recently, $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Along this journey, we’ve been grateful for the support of the community and for the chance to gather new learnings along each step of the way. Some of these lessons we gleaned easily — others we learned the hard way. We’ve discovered the value of masterminds, data, and customer research. We e
I can’t believe we’re on Episode 5 of the podcast! Every time we get together for Buffer CultureLab it is both fun and educational, and this week is no exception. On this episode Carolyn and I talk about Millennials at work, and then welcome Buffer investor Kanyi Maqubela, who is a partner at Collaborative Fund. It’s a very different kind of investment fund that looks beyond traditional investing criteria to think about things like creativity, values and culture. Language alert! Things get a l
In the past couple of months, I’ve had a number of thoughts around the growth Buffer has experienced in the last year and some interesting challenges and paradoxes that seems to be bringing us. I’ve had a number of conversations with people in the team on this and I recently shared a version of what follows with the whole company to get their thoughts. It resonated with almost everyone, and as a result we’ve started to put in place some changes based on these realizations. I’d love to share it
Accessibility isn’t a topic that just affects some of us. As no less of an innovator than Google puts it , “the accessibility problems of today are the mainstream breakthroughs of tomorrow.” We at Buffer are delighted to have Neil Milliken (@neilmilliken ), Debra Ruh (@debraruh ), Antonio Santos (@akwyz ) of AXSChat
(Editor’s Note: Hi there! We’re experimenting with sharing the transcripts of our new podcast, Buffer CultureLab , on the Open blog. Would love to hear how this feels for you!) This is Buffer CultureLab, a podcast by Buffer – where we’re slightly obsessed with creating happier more human work. Here are your hosts, Courtney Seiter and Carolyn Kopprasch. Carolyn Kopprasch: Welcome to the show, this is episode 4. Courtney Seiter: Woohoo! Courtn