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As a teenager I had a period of many years where I stopped reading books completely. I even remember a time where I couldn’t imagine reading books at all. After I graduated and started to be interested in business and startups, I realized the immense power and knowledge contained within books, and I started reading more and more. Today, I can’t imagine even a couple of days passing by without some time spent reading. As an introvert, I’m a reflective person. Sometimes that can be a challenge, s
About 2-3 years ago, I decided I wanted to start to declutter my life gradually. I went from one backpack and a carry-on bag to just one backpack. I count the following things as my belongings at this point: * 6 T-shirts * 2 sweaters, 2 hoodies * 1 coat * 2 pairs of dress-pant sweat-pants * 6 pairs of socks and boxer shorts * 1 backpack * An iPhone, a Kindle, 1 notepad and a MacBook Air (+ keyboard and mouse) * Gym shoes and gym shorts * Various toiletries like toothbrush, contact lens
There are many features of the world that I simply cannot wrap my head around, and one of these has always been time zones. Teammates I work with every day who live in Singapore and Australia are a whole day ahead of me in the USA. Wild! In addition to confounding my brain, time zones also provide some fun and interesting challenges when it comes to how we all work together at Buffer as a fully remote, distributed team. For instance, here’s a glimpse at what our team looked like a while back,
The other day, I was at the gym with my co-founder Joel and we started a short discussion about other products as part of Buffer’s product offering we might enjoy building one day. We went through various problems we’d enjoy solving, like online payments, social media monitoring and so forth. At one point, we got into some light brainstorming of one of the areas and the name of a related, prominent startup in the space came up. I said “I know the founder.” That line had nothing to do with the
I’m excited to write the very first Buffer update of 2015, which is also going to our new Series A investors following our transparent funding round. Welcome to our new investors, and thank you so much once again for joining us on this journey! The latest Buffer metrics: * 2,002,495 total registered users (+3.5%) * 168,455 monthly active users (-1.4%) * 40,430 average daily active users (-0.40%) * $421,787 monthly recurring revenue (+3.0%) * $5.06m annual revenue run-rate (+3.0%) * $2,0
To kick off the first #Bufferchat of 2015, the Buffer team joined in as guests for a chat focused on goal setting and tracking tips and tools. With personal improvement as one of our 10 company values, it is a topic near and dear to our hearts. Check out the full Storify recap here. What are your goals for 2015? * Sunil: “Personal goal for 2015: Would love to bring back meditation as a habit again. Last year was on and off for me. Also hoping to eat healthier, w/ more protein and reducing t
Towards the end of 2014, Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich came back to his family home in Austria for a visit and was able to join the coworking community space sektor5 for a fireside chat about Buffer’s culture, values, transparency and lots more. The audience at this event asked tons of smart questions, so we thought it would be fun to share the answers with you here. What’s Buffer? Where are you right now? Leo: We are a social media management tool. We help people to publish, schedule and an
For the last 2 to 3 years, about every day, I would wake up, open my laptop and type the letter “g” into the Google Chrome bar and hit enter. Chrome would auto-complete it to “growth.bufferapp.com”. It was like a daily ritual to check on Buffer’s growth numbers from a number of different angles. Revenue, new users, daily actives, monthly actives. Growing—increasing our monthly revenue, our traffic, our user base—was the No. 1 priority in my mind. It only hit me very recently, about four months
We find that self-improvement and reading go hand-in-hand. Many of the books we seem to grab at Buffer tend to be related to our current tasks, our new ideas, our passions and pursuits, or even just a nice sampling of good writing and entertaining topics to keep us tuned in and engaged. We end up reading a deep and wide assortment of inspiring stuff. As a team, we read 656 books in 2014. I’m happy to share the 19 most popular ones from our reading list. Note: One of the neat perks we have o
Hey there! Since this post was published, we’ve updated the Buffer values. See the updated values here. There are a few things I can count on when I tell someone about what it’s like to work at Buffer. If I stick to talking about what our social media scheduling tools do, I know I’ll probably have a fun conversation about the triumphs and challenges of social media. If I talk about Buffer’s culture and values a bit, a whole different conversation emerges. I’ve gotten a wide variety of reactio
About 3 months ago, we made a very exciting change at Buffer. Upon exploring our current setup as a company, and after Joel’s discovery of a truly transformative book titled Reinventing Organizations, we decided that we wanted to reinvent Buffer taking some inspiration from the book. At its core, we’ve switched to a fully self-managed, self-organized team. There’re no managers or bosses and everyone on the team is encouraged to work freely on projects they are most compelled to work on, that th
I have a lot of things I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. Some of them are really small things (like learning to make hashbrowns, a breakfast food that has confounded me for years) and some are really big, like learning to live a more minimalist life. In the past, I have begun each new year with great intentions but found following through really difficult—like many of those who create goals for the new year. I think that’s because change is hard. We all want to improve and become bett
A lot of thought, scheduling and tools go into making sure we give each Buffer customer and community as happy an experience as possible. Right now, there are a total of 7 Buffer Happiness Heroes and Weekend Warriors (plus our Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn) all across the world helping customers nearly 24 hours a day. And we’re looking to grow the team! That’s in addition to all our other team members, who usually devote at least a few hours each month to diving into delivering some custom
One of the things we’re incredibly excited about at Buffer is transparency. A big part of that is because being transparent simply feels like the right thing to do, intuitively. That by itself, seems reason enough to pursue it. We’ve seen some incredible things happen since we started to focus more on transparency in the last few years. Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork. To put things into perspective, here are a number of things that we’ve made transpare
“Those that get up at 5 a.m. rule the world.” – Robin Sharma Those who know me, know that I love my morning routine. I’m always making adjustments to it, and at its core it revolves around waking up early (before sunrise), working on something important for 90 minutes, and then hitting the gym. I recently shared my most recent routine in a blog post about creating new habits. Today, I want to share a couple of things about my routine that I’ve neglected to mention in previous articles. These t
Important update: We’re retiring the Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… One of the coolest things about working at a true startup like Buffer is how many jobs each of us gets to do in the course of a day or a project. I joined Buffer thinking that most of my time each day was going to be spent writing, and then I discovered that I could also be working in search optimization, paid ads, conversion optimization and lots more on any
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle I’ve been obsessed with thinking about, adjusting and building upon my habits for a long time now, and working on good habits is probably one of the things that’s helped me the most to make progress with my startup. In addition, it seems like habits are now becoming popular again. This is a great thing, and books like The Power of Habit are helping lots of people. Perhaps one of the things that is rarely
Since the beginning of Buffer, we’ve always shared all of our learnings and failures. Over time this developed into a more defined goal and principle as part of the values of the company. Since we defined our value of transparency within the culture, we have found many things within the company that we weren’t being completely open about, and we put them out there for the world to see. We’ve generally found that we are sharing a lot of things that are somewhat taboo or at least unusual to be sh
How do you define workplace culture? And how do you keep your company culture growing in the right direction? Buffer’s very own Chief Technology Officer, Sunil, and Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn, stopped by #Bufferchat recently to discuss these very big questions focusing on workplace culture. Here are some of the highlights. Catch the full Storify recap here. How do you define “workplace culture?” From Sunil: * “Tough one, it means different things. For me, it’s the *how* to go about
We had fun getting back to our customers faster in October due to a renewed focus on our goals. As we were all back in our respective timezones, this was a bit easier than September. October is usually the last “normal” month before the holidays kick off, so it felt great to focus fully on continuing to improve the customer experience during this time. We also questioned some of our processes and put an experiment into place to learn a bit about how all of our support channels interact. Let’s
When I first joined Buffer team, many hours a day were spent solo in either Australia or Sweden. This led to an obsession of scrolling through HipChat conversations to catch up on all the things happening in other timezones. As the happiness team grew, we started having regular syncs that proved to be super helpful to stay in touch and talk about bugs and customer happiness. Now it seems like we have almost added another touchpoint of communication for each new team member that has joined the t
For as long as we’ve run Buffer, we’ve had to send new team members some form of employment agreement. We’re currently in the middle of raising $3.5m in new funding and, as part of the due diligence in this funding round, we’ve been revisited these agreements. We’ve never felt completely comfortable about the agreements we send out, and it can often be a shock and in stark contrast to the style of the rest of our hiring process, where we try to take extra steps to show that we truly care about
We’ve talked lots on the blog about how we communicate and the tools we use to get work done as a remote team, but I thought it might be fun to give you a bit of a different view into the life of a Buffer team member. In this post, I’d like to tell you about the ways we communicate that aren’t so much about work. From GIFs in Hipchat to theme days on Sqwiggle to supportive notes on iDoneThis and even our UP apps, Buffer has a great variety of “virtual watercoolers” that keep us connected in wor
October and September (I’m lumping them together because I did not manage to get a Crafters report done for the month of September, so sorry!) were huge months for Buffer’s small team of Crafters. So big, in fact, that much of the “way we do things” has changed immensely over the past 60 days. It’s been incredibly exciting, and I’d love to tell you all about it. But first, let’s take a quick look at the numbers! Buffer Social analytics Traffic stats Our overall numbers have stabilized from