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.
How do we know what features to work on next for Buffer? A few months ago, we had the opportunity to test out a method of investigating which types of social accounts Buffer users would be most interested in using next. Here’s the tool we used to find out which type of account was most-wanted, and how we followed up with everyone who sent us a request. What we did Here’s our current Connect page: The Connect page didn’t always look like this, however. Just a few months ago several of these
April has been a very interesting month. MRR growth has slowed to around 7.08% increase, which is the lowest over the past few months. What’s interesting is that most of the growth came from Business plans, which grew MRR by 15.6% in April. Awesome plan MRR growth slowed to 4.6% in March, and was 8.3% in the month before. At the same time, churn has decreased by almost 2 percentage points to 5.28% on the Awesome plan (compared to 7% in March) and also to 5.99% on Business plans. Awesome numbe
Picture this: It’s your first month on the job as a Customer Happiness Hero. A core piece of your company’s app stops working. And 16 of the 20 team members of the team are on flights across the world. That’s exactly what happened to our newest two sweet, unsuspecting Happiness Heroes when Buffer stopped shortening links for a few days in April. (Both new heroes have since completed Buffer Bootcamp and come on board despite this. :) Sorry about that, Patrik and Dave! Lesson learned about all tr
I’m thrilled to announce that Patrik Ward has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Happiness Hero! One of the most immediately noticeable qualities about Patrik is that he seems to exist with a laugh always just under the surface. Even when focusing, he is one conversational shift away from splitting into a huge, encouraging grin that spreads to every face and lifts every nearby spirit. It has an ef
Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer. We really stepped up our game on the security front. We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked • Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features • No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups • 1 new offer made, and 6
I’m thrilled to announce that Dave Chapman has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Weekend Warrior! Chats with Dave are one of the things I look forward to all week. He approaches his work, his teammates, and his self-improvement efforts with a level of passion that is simply inspiring. Since he has come on board for Buffer Bootcamp, he has read several books, run more every week than the last, se
April was a really exciting month for Buffer’s content marketing efforts. We tried some new things on both of our blogs, published a lot of content that seemed useful for people and—as always—had a lot of fun learning and experimenting. Let’s take a dive into the numbers! Quick summary of the Buffer blog In April we saw nice steady growth over March’s totals . (Full disclosure: Since April has only 3
Recently, I religiously tried to follow a new routine I created for myself: a 7-day work week routine. The idea was quite simple: I would work 7 days a week, rest 7 days a week, go to the gym 7 days a week, reflect 7 days a week. This was less about working lots, much more about feeling fulfilled every day, feeling stretched during the day but also rested. I aimed to work less each day, and replace two hours of work with a long break in the middle of the day. The biggest thing I wanted to do
Heads up! This is an older post and we’ve since retired the Buffer bootcamp . Feel free to see the latest information here , including all the reasons why we made this change! We’re Retiring The ‘Buffer Bootcamp’ Period For New Teammates – Here’s Why Some call it a trial. Some call it a probationary period. We call it the Buffer Bootcamp. Our intro period fo
At the core of how Buffer schedules posts is one line of a cronjob configuration that hasn’t been touched since the very start when Joel founded Buffer. We still rely on that single cronjob that runs every minute of every day. While this configuration is the same, everything else around it has evolved. Today, Buffer schedules on average 300 posts per minute and over 432,000 posts a day. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and iterations we’ve made to the core of wha
One of my favorite “happiness hacks” has been to attempt to remove the word “actually” from my vocabulary. This has been remarkably hard to do, and I still have to struggle not to let it past my lips or fingers. At Buffer , we have found that there is a small band of words that takes away from your message, and “actually” is their leader. It almost doesn’t matter how good the news is; if it comes after “actually,” I feel like I was somehow wrong about something. Con
I’m thrilled to introduce Kevan Lee as Buffer’s newest Content Crafter—but for those of you who frequent the Buffer blog, he hardly needs an introduction. So many of you have already grown to know and appreciate Kevan from his thoughtful, thorough and impeccably researched posts on the Buffer blog over the past 6 weeks. Thanks to his open, personable and honest writing, we’ve all watched as Kevan grew his Twitter account from newbie status [http://blog.bufferapp.
I’m so excited to announce that Dan Farrelly is Buffer’s next engineer! Dan now lives in San Antonio and has been tremendous in helping us further our front-end. The thing that amazes me the most is how Dan is completely self-taught. He started in Civil Engineering, previously working in construction management and made the switch to web development. He worked at Slated, a startup that connects independent filmmakers with investors, before joining Buffer. In Dan’s short time at Buffer he’s
In August I was given the amazing opportunity to join Buffer as a front-end developer. At that time I was living in Taipei teaching English. Buffer is a distributed company so while I coded for them I was able to continue teaching. At the end of October, I left my teaching job because I just couldn’t do both jobs for much longer. It left me exhausted with no time for side-projects.
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. For me, one of the most exciting parts of the culture we’ve developed at Buffer is our international retreats. Three times a year (for now) we gather the whole company together. Previously, we took a team of 10 to Thailand and we’ve just returned fr
I’m happy to announce that Steven Cheng is Buffer’s first growth engineer! Steven—who lives in Taipei, Taiwan—works on all things growth at Buffer, building out the growth dashboard, analyzing experiments and other data, and making recommendations to the product team. Steven has a ton of startup experience under his belt, spending 4 years at security startup Amorize Technologies through its acquisition 2013. He then worked in Beijing on a location startup, before joining Buffer earlier this ye
We’re excited to share with you an inside look at Buffer’s revenue and growth stats for the last month. If you read our monthly overview , you likely have an idea of the big-picture progress of Buffer, and we hope the revenue and growth stats here illuminate some of the finer details of our journey. Our revenue is earned primarily through two subscription sources: Awesome Plan and Business Plan. In the charts below, you can see how each o
March was an incredible month for the engineering team at Buffer. Looking back, it’s pretty exciting to see what all we’ve accomplished for moving the ball forward and how we’ve executed on some of our engineering goals. Here are some stats and tl;dr for March: * 1 person converted to full-time (yay Dan Farrelly !) * 6 “5 whys” conducted * 1 new open source project started * 15 minutes of system wide downtime * Switched to New Relic for platform monitor
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in March. The team is currently 20 people, compared to 17 in February . Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas: Applications overview We saw an incredible amount of 1,944 applications come in in March, which has been absolutely, positively overwhelming. Here is a breakdown of the different areas: Engineering Happiness Commun
Ever since we established the Buffer values that are at the heart of our company culture, we’ve been continuously on the lookout for new ways to live those values every day – particularly our important value of defaulting to transparency. Last year, Buffer shared all of our salaries and the formulas behind them. We
March was a really amazing month for us at Buffer: 10% MRR growth and awesome increases in daily and monthly active users, too! I’m happy to share with you our update for March that I just sent to Buffer investors. Let me know if I can answer any questions about this. :-) If you want to read our update from February, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users: 71,000 (Total: 1,407,000, fro
You may have heard some talk recently about the “Heartbleed bug.” That’s the scary-named vulnerability that was just discovered in the software library that protects many sites on the internet – including Buffer. We wanted to make sure to tell you exactly what we know and what we’ve done about Heartbleed at Buffer to keep your information as safe as possible. What is Heartbleed? The Heartbleed bug was just recently discovered on April 7th in OpenSSL, a kind of cryptography software that protec
Today, we are thrilled to announce the newest version of Buffer’s iOS app , which represents a major upgrade in design, code, and features. We’ve gone through many iterations, and we’re hoping you like what we’ve come up with. The end product was more than five months in the making, and we thought it might be neat to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the development process. Design The first thing you’ll notice with most iOS
March was an incredible month for the Buffer blog, not only in terms of traffic but also in terms of change—so much so that calling this update the Buffer Blog Report doesn’t seem to do the month justice. At the very least, we’d have to call it the Blogs Report (plural on blog; more on that below). Big changes were afoot in March: blog strategies, audits, goodbyes, and so much more. It’s exciting to share this all with you and see what you think. So without further ado … Quick summary of the B