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.
In October, Buffer announced a new funding round, launched the new Buffer for iOS 8 and iPad, and laid the groundwork to hire for many new positions! Here are our latest numbers as of the end of October: * New users: 76,973 (Total: 1,861,443 from 1,784,516: +4.3%) * Daily active users: 43,231 (up from 41,647: +3.8%) * Monthly active users: 174,121 (up from 166,511: +4.6%) * Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $390,752 (ARR: $4,689,024: +6.9%) * Cash in bank: $1,004,862 (last month: $846,145)
There are a lot of ways to have a great day at Buffer. Between our value of positivity , our awesome team , our be-your-own-boss decision maker structure and our pro-naps policy , it’s downright tough to have anything but a good day. And exactly what that day looks like i
You might have noticed that we’re big fans of tools at Buffer. We’ve written about tools for mobile marketing. Tools for Facebook. Tools for SEO. Of course, we make tools for social media management, so there’s a chance we could be a bit biased. But we see online tools and apps as a key part of our philosophy of working smarter, not harder. It’s also a lot of fun to find a great new tool! So when the tool-finding team at Product Hunt asked us at Buffer to curate a list of our top tools for re
“You choose to be at the single place on earth where you are the happiest and most productive, and you are not afraid to find out where that is.” This beautiful sentiment comes from the Buffer culture slidedeck , the document that defines the values behind everything we do at Buffer. One of the 10 Buffer values is to “Live smarter, not harder,” and this involves finding that single place on earth where you can be your best. A few months a
If you look at our culture deck on Slideshare , you’ll quickly find that our first and likely most pronounced value is “Always choose positivity and happiness.” We have this as a very central theme in the way we work, live and how we hire here at Buffer. It’s one of the things that gives me the most fulfillment of working towards. It’s also one of the hardest and most aspirational values to live up to.
Update: We closed a first syndicate on AngelList today, October 27th. We have opened a new one with VegasTechFund now here. Update 2: All our public AngelList syndicates have been oversubscribed and are now closed. The full $3.5m is now committed. What’s left is for us to finish the due diligence process with our lead investor (Collaborative Fund) in order to hopefully close out the funding, then have the money wired. We’ll update you once this is all done. Than
Since the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, I have been working hard on our iOS 8 update. And now, the new Buffer for iPhone and iPad is live to all our customers! Not only have we added support for the amazing new features available to us in iOS 8, but we’ve added universal support for iPad for the first time. Download the free app for iPad and iPhone! [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buffer-for-
One of the things that has fascinated me most about ancient Greece and Rome has always been the idea of oracles. If you’ve seen the movie 300, you might remember the scene in which Leonidas has to consult the oracle, which will decide whether the Spartans will go to battle or not. You can almost grasp the frustration of the Spartan king. He’s not in control. He has to rely on the priests and only the priests are able to understand the oracle’s advice. He feels powerless, as he has to follow wh
Happy October! In September, our entire team traveled to New York, NY, to work and play all together for our semi-annual company retreat. (Retreats occur every 5 months, so that they fall on a different month each time. This alleviates one of the challenges of scheduling everyone to travel. This way, if retreat falls over an important personal date or event like a family member birthday, it will change the next year.) Similarly to April, this put a big dent on our customer service numbers. We f
A few months ago, Joel discovered a fascinating book that he shared with all of us on the team. The title of the book was “The Decision Maker ” and it proposed a radically different idea to how companies are run. In short, it put traditional management on its head. Instead of higher-ups making decisions, often far removed from the real problems that
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. At Buffer, we’ve recently made a big change to how we build products and use the Lean Startup methodologies much more closely. It followed what I’d call a phenomenon that Hiten Shah , one of our closest ad
On September 10th, with all of the Buffer team members gathered in New York for our working retreat, the team of Happiness Heroes joined forces to lead a #bufferchat discussion on customer service (and cute animal gifs). Connect with the dynamic individuals offering support and smiles to Buffer’s community every day: (in order of photo, left to right) Dave , Colin (the Happiness Engineer), Adam , Nic
The other day I was discussing with my teammate and friend Carolyn how it had been months since the last time I attended a yoga class. I’ve been thinking about it occasionally and getting annoyed with myself for not practicing—almost feeling stressed. Like many other things—for example, blogging —I often ind it incredibly hard to get back to things that I “should” be doing. The str
A while back, my co-founder Leo gave me an interesting suggestion: he said I should try disabling all notifications on my iPhone. I find this suggestion especially interesting because it is one that goes against the normal phone setup. It’s so usual to stick to how things are, and with iPhone apps the easiest thing to do is to “allow” all those notifications. It seems almost odd to even consider doing things any other way. I chose to go along with Leo’s suggestion, although I was admittedly q
Rest, and think. What does your ideal day look like? When do you wake up ? Who do you spend time with? What do you do? What does your ideal work look like? What do you create? How does it make you feel? Where are you [https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-optimize-your-environment-for-creat
Note: Updated Sept. 18 based on more details from Google’s John Mueller in the comments. Thanks again, John! We’re so grateful for Google’s help and guidance in solving our mystery and fixing our errors so quickly! The month of August gave the Buffer Crafters an unexpected SEO mystery to solve. When Google announced that https would become a ranking signal , we switched our Buffer Social blog over to https—and sub
Have you ever discovered a life hack just when you needed to hear it? The timing and the solution perfect, and the next step so obvious that you acted immediately and have stuck with it ever since? When it comes to health, sweeping life changes are especially difficult to implement and even harder to sustain. But in my experience, it’s the small changes you adopt, maintain, and love that add up to a meaningful long-term difference. I’ve been collecting a list of these kinds of fitness, diet, h
In February, my husband and I jumped head-first into urban farming — starting our summer garden from seeds. It then developed into an even larger endeavor when we added 13 chicks into our home. And then four ducks. And then three more chickens… The past several months have been a blur between brooding chicks, building coops, free-ranging, fixing fencing, gardening and finding eggs. As I look back upon these summer months, several distinct themes come to mind — and boy, do they ripple beyond ou
In August I think we really found our stride in a lot of ways, and hitting $4M is a huge milestone. At the same time, our MRR growth the last two months has been a lot lower than we’d like – 5% or 6% is not ideal for us. I’m confident with our hard work and new teams set up we can pull that up. (I also want to share some of July’s numbers—I went on vacation right at the start of the month and let the update slip by.) Traction update July * New users: 65,712 (Total: 1,663,761, from 1,598,049
My world at Blinkist revolves around books : self-help books, psychology books, books on business and marketing and persuasion. They’re full of colorful anecdotes and tried-and-true strategies for making just about anything in life easier or better. While having multiple options for mastering a skill [https://blog.bufferapp.com/why-practice-actually-makes-perfect-how-to-rewire-your-brain-for-better-
Five or more hours of sedentary sitting, according to Dr. David Agus , is the health equivalent of smoking a pack and a quarter of cigarettes. Yikes. Yet, sitting around is something we get plenty of practice at. Reading and writing and creating on a computer makes for big chunks of sedentary time. If you’re reading this post right now, are you sitting down? How long have you been sitting? It’s a topic that I think of often
I’m so happy to announce that Mike San Román will be joining our team as our next web developer! Mike will be focusing on our Buffer for Business offering. In the short time Mike has been working with us, he’s accomplished quite a lot. Mike focused on understanding our Business customers through survey forms and running various experiments. He’s also implemented some key performance improvements including client side caching with IndexedDB. Since launching our
I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to jump on board the path of building a startup. Having hit upon a product that solved a key pain for many people, Buffer has grown rather fast. The team is now 25 people and we’ve just crossed $4M ARR. When I reflect on how quickly things happened and what it has required of me, the first thing that comes to mind is Paul Graham‘s essay entitled How to Make Wealth. In particular, this part resonates with me: You can think of a startup as a way to compress
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I learned to tie my shoes. It came up because of a tweet from my friend Jeff. I thought of a study that I remembered from college; kids who were told that it’s hard to learn to tie shoes persisted longer than the ones who were told it was easy. Jeff’s point, of course, directly relates to customer service , which is where I spend a lot of