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.
Recently Joel and I were talking about the new Jawbone UP3. I had just gotten one for free as part of Buffer’s perks program, and I complained that I found the closing buckle a bit fiddly and let off some steam about how I struggled to charge it. At the end I remember saying something like “Oh, but it’s cool that I know my resting heart rate now, though.” It’s kind of ironic how much I focused on the small challenges and gave the fact that I could now track my health much more intelligently on
We’re bringing back the hiring report! The last time we reported on hiring was April 2014. Back then—15 months ago—Buffer had 20 team members. Fast forwarding more than a year later, the team now has 34 full-time team members and three new teammates who will be starting their Buffer bootcamp shortly. New team members Just this last month, Danny and Kat both graduated from Buffer’s bootcamp and have accepted to join us full time, hooray! In June, we also made four offers to candidates to
We’re officially halfway through the year. Very excited to share the latest update for Buffer: Key metrics 2,511,292 total registered users (+3.2%) 206,464 monthly active users (+1.5%) 52,229 average daily active users (+6.2%) $550,529 monthly recurring revenue (+3.4%) $6.61m annual recurring revenue (+3.4%) $2,578,881 cash in bank 34 team members across the world 25 cities, 10 countries, 4 continents Here’s a graph of our MRR growth over the last 3.5 years: The change in trajectory around
Being a part of a company that is run according to a specific set of values brings a great amount of clarity into everything we do at Buffer. Looking to our values becomes particularly important when there’s a challenging decision to make—for example, how to move forward with a feature that hasn’t yet found its fit. When we practiced this reflection with Buffer’s Suggestions feature recently, we decided that they’ve reached the end of their journey. Beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off
I have some great news: We’re welcoming Kat Zien to the Buffer team as a back-end developer. Kat is based in Bristol and has been helping out with all things engineering, including some cool stuff with oAuth and retweet with comment (coming soon!). Here’s how she described her bootcamp experience: “I love the team and how helpful and friendly and positive everyone is! It makes me smile a lot throughout the day :) I wish I could spend all day reading the Open blog and so many personal blogs of
“What gets measured, gets managed.” This well-known quote is often applied to business situations like marketing or product creation. But the basic truth is applicable to almost any situation: When we really want to focus on something, we pay close attention. We want details that can help us make good decisions. And at Buffer, we want the details that can help us grow as an inclusive and diverse team. We want to be conscious of how we grow: With a focus on the values that guide us, and with a
One of my favorite things to do is to help others who are at an earlier stage of the startup journey. I had a lot of false starts before Buffer. I enjoy sharing my lessons from those failed attempts, and I also enjoy getting my mind back into those early days challenges, now that Buffer is almost 5 years old. In the past few weeks, I’ve had 5 sessions (typically around 30 minutes, in person or via Hangouts) where I’ve tried to help someone. I was surprised to hear the same challenge came up in
In May, we continued our strong revenue growth, and we’re also growing the team faster than ever before. Here are the latest insights and numbers about Buffer: Current Buffer metrics * 2,432,382 total registered users (+3.4%) * 203,449 monthly active users (+1.7%) * 49,202 average daily active users (-1.1%) * $532,350 monthly recurring revenue (+4.6%) * $6.39m annual recurring revenue (+4.6%) * $2,267,067 cash in bank * 34 team members across the world * 25 cities, 10 countries, 4 co
Starting early this week you may have noticed some changes around how posting to Facebook works through Buffer. We could’ve been a whole lot more mindful around this and are so sorry for the confusion we’ve caused. Today I wanted to briefly give an update around these changes and create a place where we can keep you posted with any updates. A little background Earlier this week we were notified by the folks over at Facebook that a few flows within Buffer around how we suggest post content wer
In December, my friend and co-worker Brian casually mentioned to me that he would love to explore Asia. I love Asia. I lived in Japan as a kid for 3.5 years, and I lived in Hong Kong for 6 months in 2012. It was a no-brainer for me to jump on the opportunity and travel around Asia with Brian. I had been in San Francisco about a year and was craving exploring again, having done a lot of travel in the 4.5 years since starting Buffer (which even contributed to us becoming a distributed team). I
One of Buffer’s values is working smarter, not harder, and the #bufferchat community gathered to offer tips and ideas on living smarter. How do you manage your energy throughout the day? What are your go-to productivity tips? Are there certain times of the day you produce your best work? Our community shared their thoughts with us! Catch the full recap here. What does “working smarter, not harder” mean to you? * “”Work smarter, not harder” for me means maximizing efficiency. W/ high levels
At the start of 2014, I decided I need to make some changes in my life. I was working in an office in one of the coolest startups in Cape Town. I had worked in an office pretty much all of my career. I was also commuting to work and back, taking about an hour and a half of my day. Commuting has always been part of work for me too. I have a beautiful family; my wife who works from home and away on weekends shooting as a wedding photographer, my four-year-old son and my baby daughter, who had ju
What does it mean to bring your whole self to work? As part of Buffer’s evolution into self-management, we’ve been exploring this question a lot. We’ve long considered the Buffer team a family all its own. Because we’re a small, distributed team, we form a close bond through shared experiences and values, digital tools and our regular company retreats. But the entirety of the Buffer family goes beyond the team members we see on Sqwiggle every day—it also includes spouses, partners, parents, c
Having the ability to work from anywhere in the world has led to lots of travel adventures for members of the Buffer team. Niel toured Asia while working remotely. Rodolphe sailed across the Atlantic. Joel recently toured 11 cities in 3 months, and Octa is on a month-long cruise (with wifi!) as I write this. And the beauty of a remote team spread around the world where you make your own schedule is that you don’t even have to travel the world to reap the benefits. Remote work can mean spendin
When we wrote previously about how we hire at Buffer , one key component was that everyone we hire have usage of and experience with the Buffer product. That’s still the case today. In the past we have asked folks to use the product for at least 2-3 months consistently before we would consider them for a role. This feels a bit limiting, and discounts the fresh perspective a newcomer to a product can bring. Today we are a bit more flexible with this r
In the book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell provides a unique blueprint to understanding the success of such monolithic figures as the Beatles and Bill Gates. In one section, Gladwell illustrates the life of a Jewish immigrant family who came to New York after fleeing the Nazis in Europe. Despite such difficult circumstances, they found tremendous hope and meaning in starting a garment business together: “When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired, but he was his ow
April was a fun month for the Buffer team, with Buffer for Pinterest being a key big task and milestone for us as a company. Here are the latest numbers: Buffer metrics in April 2,351,405 total registered users (+3.6%) 200,125 monthly active users (-3.3%) 49,728 average daily active users (-1.6%) $509,161 monthly recurring revenue (+4.0%) $6.11M annual recurring revenue (+4.0%) $2,165,528 cash in bank 32 team members across the world 23 cities, 9 countries, 4 continents The big news in terms o
Like millions before me I read How to Win Friends and Influence People and was blown away by the power of this book. I can’t believe that I hadn’t read it until recently and feel like I have wasted some precious opportunities to optimize certain situations in life. Some of the stories in the book were so incredible that they seemed almost too good to be true. I finished the book with two questions: * Will this work for me
When I joined Buffer a few months ago, I figured my best chance to add value to the team would be to use my background in statistics, data and growth. But I recently had the opportunity to drop what I was working on and spend one of the final weeks of my Buffer boot camp solely on customer support for an entire week. It wasn’t a mandatory assignment; more a proposed journey to a different side of the company that could give me a new perspective of Buffer as a product and organization. Because
A few days ago, I was in bed, getting ready to fall asleep. Often when I’m lying in bed, I listen to a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on SoundCloud. I find his voice and insights very soothing and it helps me calm my thoughts down and go to sleep gently. That night again, I was listening to one of his talks called “The 4 Qualities of Happiness.” It started off with a great intro and ideas around how to live a happy life by grounding yourself and how to do it. It talked about what true freedom means,
Our customers are the true heart of all we do here at Buffer — and we want to make sure the community knows it. We work on this in lots of ways—from striving for excellent customer support to hosting meetups to sending hand-written notes, swag and special gifts. From the very beginnings of Buffer, our founder and co-founder, Joel and Leo, sent hand-written thank-you cards and stickers to customers. They recognized the value of one-on-one relationships and how going an extra step can help show h
For most business owners, the thought of telling the world all of your financials is intensely frightening. The prospect of the whole world seeing and analyzing your every business move is enough to put even the most seasoned entrepreneurs in the corner crying. But as we’ve seen with companies like Buffer, that sort of transparency and openness is becoming less and less of an outlier. For many, it’s actually part of the very foundation of their existence! More and more startups are finding be
The change towards self-management at Buffer is our biggest and most fascinating challenge to work through right now. March found us evolving in quite a few areas including self-reviews, self-managed salaries and more—all while growing our user base and team throughout the month. Here is the latest update: The latest Buffer metrics in March * 2,171,877 total registered users (+4.5%) * 207,035 monthly active users (+9.4%) * 50,538 average daily active users (+5.4%) * $488,771.05 monthly r
Optimizing one’s day for maximum productivity—and creativity!—is one of our favorite topics to research and think over. We’ve written on the blog before about morning routines, creativity routines, the routines of successful entrepreneurs and even ways to maximize your lunch break. But we haven’t managed to share any of our own daily routines, until now. Recently we were honored to be asked by the team at inbound.org to do an “Ask Me Anything” session, answering questions from their smart com