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.
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Being a distributed team as Buffer is has a few special challenges, many of which we’ve talked about here on the blog. :) Working out our office perks isn’t one we’ve
If you’ve ever tried to work on a few different elements of your life at once (say, exercise, eating well and learning a new language) you’ve probably found that it’s a delicate balancing act. Some days you’re really rocking one category while the other takes a backseat. Some days all are making incremental progress. And some amazing days, you make big strides in all your areas of change. Self-improvement can be like one big game of Whack-a-Mole that
May was a huge month for the Happiness Team at Buffer. We began the month answering 50% of emails within 1 hour and finished it answering 80% of emails within 1 hour. This results in a palpable difference in the happiness of our customers. Huge congratulations to the Happiness Team! How we keep in touch as a distributed team (meaning: no all-hands meeting) We each enjoy the luxury of living in the place that makes us the happiest , and we u
Reading is a part of the lifeblood here at Buffer — it’s engrained in our focus on self-improvement and a huge part of the employee perks . From Day One as a Buffer team member, you’re given access to a free Kindle Paperwhite and all the free Kindle books you like. Amongst the team, we love seeing what everyone is reading as new books are posted into our Hipchat room and Facebook Group. Many t
How would you like everyone on your team to see every email that you send? At Buffer, we love it! Our value of transparency extends all the way to the inbox. Every email is public within the team. Every bit of communication gets shared. Everyone knows everything. There are no secrets. If this seems like a radical idea, well, it kind of is. I came from a traditional office environment where email was as standard as it comes: You emailed only those people who needed to know. You cc’ed folks some
Last week we introduced y’all to Buffer’s weekly improvements on the blog for the first time. This week we’ll dive right in to see what each Buffer team member is working on! (We love chatting about each other’s improvements, too. See all of our comments here.) We love hearing your improvement goals, too—tell us about them in the comments so we can c
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie Once in Hong Kong I took a trip to the barber, since my hair was getting a little long. It ended up being one of the most fascinating times I’ve had my hair cut. The last few times I’ve been to this barber, they’ve always washed my hair in the sink before I’ve had my hair cut. The way they did it was to turn the chair arou
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Being part of a remote team has special opportunities and challenges. In this video, hear Joel and Leo talk about how Buffer started remote working, as well as all the different tools we use at Buffer to work closely together even though we’re physically far apart. Want a little more info on those tools? Here’s a deeper look at some of the products and servic
What an interesting month May was for Buffer content marketing! We did a lot of learning, brainstorming and evaluating this month (in addition to writing a lot of content!) As a result, some of these metrics may look different when we do this report next month. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a dive into the numbers! Buffer’s social media blog Our biggest content “hit” this month was 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts, followed by The Big List of The 61 Be
It’s a truly remarkable story when I think about how Rodolphe first reached out to us at Buffer and how he eventually became part of the team. If I were to guess the inspiring philosophy behind Rodolphe’s way of coming on board and also his general approach to making things happen, it’d be based on one of Mark Suster’s recent posts that I really enjoyed: “Be politely persistent.”
I’m pretty big on words. As Buffer’s content crafter, I guess that kind of comes with the territory. However, I’m not alone on this . Words are an extremely valuable component to the way we get work done at Buffer. As a distributed team , the words we use in our communication with each other carry extra significance. As a company focused on cultur
The entire Buffer team starts each week fresh with new goals—both work and personal. One of Buffer’s 10 values is a focus on self-improvement, and it’s a lot of fun to share our personal improvement goals and cheer each other on each week with our daily pair calls . Improvement goals can be almost anything, from exercise and eating better to home projects to learning a new language to listening more. Since we
We’ve updated our transparent salary formula since this post originally was published. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here . Joel and Leo discuss one of the best-known elements of Buffer’s culture—transparent salaries—in this Founder Chat. Here are a few more resources for additional information on Buffer’s transparent salaries: • Take
Live smarter, not harder. This principle is one of the 10 Buffer values that form the backbone of our company culture. We love experimenting with new ways to live out this value, and we’ve found productivity tips to be instrumental in this equation. What are some of our best productivity discoveries so far? We’ve written about a few before on the Buffer blog. • Ultradian rhythm and the 90-minute work cycle [http://blog.bufferapp.com/opti
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching . One of the key learnings for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. In fact, downtim
Anne Isabelle Ritchie coined a concept in the 1880s that we still use today. Modernized, it is: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The conventional wisdom is that it’s always preferable to teach someone how to fish. However, the Buffer support team has been thinking about this concept a lot lately. We’re learning that often there is a huge market for skipping the lesson completely. This can be a stretch for tech supp
The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent
One of the most important differences for me personally in how I run Buffer compared to the last one I founded has been how I treat the product at each stage of the process. With ideas such as the Lean Startup, there is a huge amount of pressure to ship very early, and rightly so—the sooner we can validate our assumptions and gain more understanding about how our users react to our product, the better. However, quotes such as the following can make us feel like we should believe our product is
In August 2012, my cofounders and I decided to pull the plug on Fancite , the startup I had been working on for over a year and half. Making that call was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. The days that followed were highly existential. Initially, I was relieved and excited about doing something new, however as a few days passed my (perceived) reality hit me: “I wasted all that time building somethi
Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. A
At Buffer we have a focus on self-improvement. We share what we are working on each week and get encouragement and tips from other members of the team. Here isa recent example .One of my improvements recently has been to get a software side project up and running. As I’m a programmer by trade, this shouldn’t present any particular difficulty—but software has this uncanny knack of
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson Around two years ago I stopped watching and reading mainstream news. I don’t read a single newspaper, offline or online, and I don’t watch any TV at all. I mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook , and it created a lot of discussion, so I wanted to expand on m
In most industries, including the tech world, “support” is a piteous word. Posts like this one , while written in jest, enforce the stereotype that working in support essentially sucks. We are known for getting abused by ranting, angry customers. We can’t take a day off, because the emails never stop flowing in. We must just be doing this to get trained with the company, right? Well, I’d like to offer a slightly different view
I’m excited to share the details for Buffer’s progress in April. Last month was an incredible time for Buffer with our third Buffer retreat, some huge product announcements, and continued MRR growth. Here is the update I just sent to our investors. If I can answer any questions or if something comes to mind, please share in the comments. :-) If you want to read our update from March, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users