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.
“Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” — Ben Horowitz Buffer has recently grown to more than 50 people during our fastest 2 months of growth ever. I’ve found that a lot changes when you grow to this size, and any time the team grows quickly. There are a bunch of challenges and it’s also invigorating. It might be the most exciting and toughest phase of build
September was a great month at Buffer! We extended 6 offers for new team members to join us in Buffer’s bootcamp. As a result, we are now more than 50 team members (accounting for both full time team members and bootcampers—you can see the full list over here). September hiring conversations Here’s at look at the September numbers. Our “Total Conversations” are the number of email conversations we have open (we sometime have duplicates), “Customers” are our applicants and “New Conversations”
One of the first blog posts I ever wrote at Buffer is this beginner’s guide to SEO. When published originally, it had the title “Beginner’s Guide to SEO Even Your Mom Can Understand.” Holy casual sexism! When I think of all the amazing women and moms I know in search optimization and search marketing (here’s a primer on just a few), I am still super embarrassed to have made this giant mistake even nearly 2 years later. I’d like to think I and the whole team at Buffer have come a long way sinc
The psyche of a writer bounces wildly, hourly, from confidence to self-doubt, certainty to fear, love to angst. Wild times like these call for reassurance. Here are some of the reminders I keep for myself, 36 quotes to remind myself that writing is completely worthwhile, entirely fulfilling, and all the best kinds of difficult. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. – Walter Benjamin Annie Dillard has said that da
It seems you can learn a lot about someone by looking at their phone: the apps they use, the folders they create, and the pictures they’ve added. We’re excited to share a glimpse into our phones (and our lives!) here at the Buffer team. A lot of what you might see here are some of the tools we use at Buffer like Hipchat, Trello, UP, and of course the Buffer app itself. A few other themes that pop up: Lots of great social media apps and tools and many apps focused on self-improvements like medi
There is a myth in entrepreneurship that many newcomers believe, and it could be a key reason why many others don’t even “try.” The myth is that you need to know how to do everything, and you need to do everything perfectly. When you look at successful startups, it’s easy to believe that they did all the right things. The reality is often far from that. In fact, I think it’s very healthy to have a good dose of naivety while building something new. The scale anticipation fallacy One prime ex
If it weren’t for online tools, there’s no way we could do what we do at Buffer. (OK, technically Buffer wouldn’t exist either, itself being a suite of online tools … but you get what I mean.) The power to gather our remote, spread-out-all-over-the-world team to talk face-to-face, discuss what we’re working on and connect with our community is incredible, and we love sharing about the tools that make it possible. Previously on the blog we’ve discussed some of the tools that connect us acr
We’re delighted to hit almost $7.5M in annual recurring revenue and be fast moving towards the big $10M ARR milestone. As a company, we’re starting to feel that some of our recent team growth and structure adjustments in the last few months are starting to take effect. Here are all the latest numbers and updates from all corners of what’s going on in the Buffer team! Key August metrics * 2,673,418 total registered users (+3.1%) * 211,520 monthly active users (+1.4%) * 50,489 average dail
aAs the end of summer nears, we’re still excited to grow the team and are getting much closer to 50 Buffer team members – you can see the live list on our salary spreadsheet over here! We would love to share with you our hiring numbers, how Buffer Bootcamp has evolved, how we are currently set up for hiring, and what happened when we changed the name of our “UX Researcher” position. Let’s dive right in! We start September with 15 open positions, including a few new open positions we’ve recentl
Creating company culture and company values isn’t a static exercise—it’s a constant evolution. Lately we’ve been excited to begin growing the Buffer marketing team (see the roles we have in mind!). With this growth comes the great opportunity to share with new teammates how we currently think about marketing at Buffer. And what we found in thinking ahead to these great conversations is that our understanding of Buffer marketing is rather quite implicit. As never larger than a team of three, w
We’ve been lucky at Buffer to receive a number of acquisition offers along our journey so far. When I mention this to people, a key question that often comes up is “how did you decide not to sell?” The earliest offer we had for Buffer was not long after we had started, and it felt fairly easy for us to say no, simply because we felt we wanted to see where further our current path leads. In many ways, the reason we haven’t accepted an acquisition offer is in order to continue on our path. How
I recently re-read two books that had a big impact on my upbringing: The Alchemist and The Little Prince. Those two novels capture a fascinating concept: Serendipity. I love how the characters embark on journeys where they learn a lot by trying to find their own path, through many chance encounters and learnings. Outside of the fantasy world and back in our own reality , I got to wondering what these concepts look like in my own life. We all want to maximize our productivity, and many of us t
I like to think of myself as a “doer”—someone who can make things happen by himself. On occasion, I neglect the role that help from others has played and over-estimate the things I’ve achieved himself. Often, when I catch myself thinking like that, I’m a bit disappointed and I wish I was instead more connected to reality and the people around me. The most recent time I pondered on that topic, I decided to go through my life and re-collect the many incredible offers of generosity I was able to
A prevalent concept is the idea that as a CEO or executive of a company, you need to shield your team from bad news, the risks of a startup, and other negative aspects that are inevitable on the startup journey. I believe this concept could actually be quite dangerous. One of our core values at Buffer is to default to transparency. This means absolutely everything in the company is shared knowledge. It was scary at first, not least because the idea goes very much against the grain. I found m
What does it mean to have a “startup mindset”? We’ve always tried to offer as much insight as we can into how we hire at Buffer. With Buffer’s core value of transparency, it feels like the right thing to do. In the past, we’ve often shared this diagram with teammates working in hiring and with potential candidates, showing the four main components that we’ve grown to believe make for a great fit at our startup. Lately we’ve been giving the “strong startup mindset biased toward action” quadran
My first day at Google in 2011 felt a bit like joining Hogwarts: you’re excited and not entirely sure what you’ll be doing! I was happy to do anything and learn in the process! For the next two years, I was lucky enough to train Google employees on Gmail and to pitch Gmail to companies of all sizes. Although I’m no longer affiliated with Google—I now work here at Buffer and on Remotive.io —I still use these 7 Gmail tips that have a daily impact on my work to this day. Ta
We’re always working to make Buffer better—whether it’s through big new features like Buffer for Video or smaller changes to existing features. Our customer development process is so important no matter the size of the change. In this post, I would love to share an improvement that we made to the Feeds feature in Buffer and how it happened based directly on feedback from you, our awesome customers. Digging into our Feeds feature We recently made an exciting move towards more structure at Buf
At the start of July, we had our 6th team retreat! Despite the substantial cost of this and growing the team faster than ever, we are still profitable and the bank balance has gone up since last month. We are very happy with this slack we have and the health of the business, and at the same time we would like to grow the team faster and continue filling validated roles. I’m excited to share the latest update of everything going on at Buffer: Key metrics * 2,592,194 total registered users (
Sometimes people ask us: “Do you think there are any downsides of being so transparent in the way that Buffer is?” Usually, I can only think of the amazing things that have happened to us through being transparent and open. Recently, however, there was one learning that taught us that transparency isn’t a blanket solution for absolutely everything. For a few months we experimented with completely transparent feedback—even for those things that might be potentially difficult to hear or say, as
In June, we brought back the hiring report after a long absence. Throughout the summer, we’ve been working on growing the team. Today we have 13 open positions to fill! Now let’s look into a little more detail into what happened at Buffer in July. New teammates in July Last month, 11 amazing people accepted our offer to join the Buffer journey. :) Some of those new team members will be joining us in August and beyond. In July we welcomed Philippe (Front-End), Marc Anthony (Product) and Jus
In Buffer’s early days, the Lean Startup approach had a big influence on how Buffer took off. Joel blogged about this in 2011: “I reached something that would be truly valuable for people. It also taught me the value of customer development: to take advantage of those emails coming in by asking people questions.” Much of this mentality is reflected in the Buffer values today! Here is another illustration from Joel sharing his thoughts on how product management works with customer development:
When Buffer first moved to a self-management model, we moved to a completely flat structure. We just let loose and the message was “everyone go figure out what you want to do and work on, without too much guidance or leadership.” We talked about some of those challenges recently here. In short, to describe what “flattening” an organization means exactly, here is what we did: * Removed all managers that would help decide what someone would work on * Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions
We’re a fully remote team at Buffer, so we’re used to connecting with one another via video, chat, and other collaborative, remote work tools. Working this way is a lot of fun—and it means the times we get to spend together, all in the same place, are extra special. Not only do team retreats give us a full week to work (and play) together as a team, they also give us some time all together to reflect on the future of retreats as we continue to grow. (Our open roles are listed here.) So far, t
In 2014, I became a full time remote worker. This year, I’ve been lucky to work and travel in Paris, Malaga, Copenhagen, Casablanca, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Barcelona… There’s one question that’s always in the back on my mind: How can I be as productive as possible remotely? I’ve tried many different experiments to do more in less time this year, and I thought I would share 5 tricks (and their accompanying tools) that have become part of my routine. 5 Methods for More Productive R