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Great news: Courtney Seiter has joined the Buffer team full-time as Head of Content Marketing! Courtney, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., wrangles the Buffer blog and Open blog, making sure they’re always full of useful content for Buffer’s audience. I remember when I first came across Courtney’s writing through her Marketing Land column over a year ago and I loved reading and following her posts there. In fac
Hey team! I’m excited to share a few bits of awesome people and numbers news this month. Let’s dig in. :) Numbers We set our sights on a big jump this month. :) It’s been really fun crashing toward these new highs! Goals set for March: * 76.5% within 1 hour (February was 64%) * 91.5% within 6 hours (February was 84%) * 189 live chats (February was 105) Actual numbers for March: * 67% within 1 hour (Missed the goal) * 93% within 6 hours (Exceeded the goal!) * 1% over 24 hours (Forgot t
From the moment you join the Buffer team, you are encouraged to read. In fact, the welcome email implores you to read early and often, and you receive a Kindle Paperwhite and free Kindle books just to make sure there are no obstacles to reading as much as you want. (Sound like something that might interest you? We’re hiring! ) And once you are part of the team, you continue to see the deep impact that reading has on the goals and improvements of all of us. When we s
We recently realized that we have been miscalculating our true monthly and annual recurring revenue. I wanted to write up some of the details around this and also apologize for accidentally misleading as a result of getting it wrong. With our commitment to transparency (and the fact we’re rare in sharing our revenue numbers at all) I felt it’s even more important to share our error. We’ve always reported “Annual revenue run rate” and “Revenue” for the month in our investor updates [https://buff
It is a great day in the land of Buffer. Daniel Feeney has completed his Buffer Bootcamp and come on board as our very first “Weekend Warrior” Happiness Hero, answering customer questions and keeping track of product feedback (not to mention impressing us with his biking) on Fridays through Tuesdays. Daniel has pioneered the “Weekend Warrior” position for us. Several months ago, we determined that customers weren’t having a very happy or consistent experience when they needed help on the weeken
It’s with very mixed emotions at Buffer that we bid farewell to Belle Beth Cooper , Buffer’s first Content Crafter. Today her final post appears on the Buffer blog. We’re happy because she’s going on to something really special: her own startup, Exist – a quantified self app that digs up insights from hidden connections in your data. (You can learn more about Exis
When Buffer was in its very early stages, just a couple months after the product launched, we applied to be part of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program. We were rejected. Since then, we’ve been keenly aware that this experience is one that many fellow startups have encountered and one that many more will eventually face. When Karen Cheng, CEO of GiveIt100, shared the story of her Y Combinator rejection, it struck a chord with readers. Rejection stories don’t get told nearly often
While this is a bit overdue, I am still so happy to share that in February, Zach Flower has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp and accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time! Zach lives in Boulder, Colorado and in the past has worked at Mocavo and PhotoBucket. In such a short time Zach has had a huge impact on the Buffer backend. He has improved our internal metrics framework, implemented real-time Twitter analytics for our business customers using Site Streams [https://dev.tw
We’ve looked at a few different strategies to help remember the names of people you meet on the Buffer blog before, but there’s lots to say about memory. It turns out that science is continually finding new connections between simple things we can do every day and an improvement [htt
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. A lot of people have asked us how we hire at Buffer and how to go about getting an interview for one of our open positions. I hope I can shine some light on it here! The best candidates for us, we’ve found, have all four of these attributes: I’d love to share a bit more about each of these 4 attributes. The 4 qualities that create a match 1. Alignment wi
Important update: We’re retiring the Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… Overcoming writer’s block. Curating great content. Sharing on social media many times a day for better engagement. These are topics we talk about often on the Buffer blog, where our daily focus is making you smarter and more productive. So when we realized that Buffer could go one step further and actually begin to solve these challenges for our customers, w
February was an exiting time for the engineering team at Buffer. Here are some of the numbers at a high level. * 2 new engineers joined the team (1 Growth Engineer, 1 Front-end) * 10,243,834 updates were posted to social networks in February * 0 mins of system wide outage (woohoo!) * 10 minutes of web dashboard outage * 405 ms: Our average api response time SSL and other security improvements We continued with our momentum with our security improvements in February. The Hall of Fame [htt
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in February. The team is currently 17 people, with 3 new people who have started their bootcamp in February. There were also 3 more offers made in February and all 3 have accepted their offers and will join us in March. Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas: Applications overview We saw an awesome amount of 2,024 applications from some truly amazing candidates come in in February for the 10 positions we’re current
I’m happy to share our update for February which I just sent to Buffer investors. I hope the insights into our progress and processes are useful. Just leave a comment if you have any questions :-) If you want to read our update from January, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users: 62,000 (Total: 1,383,000, from 1,321,000: +4.7%) * Daily active users: 36,000 (up from 35,000: +2.9%) * Monthly a
We had a fantastic February, reaching exceeding our goals due to the very hard work from the Heroes. Read on for some of the changes we made and lessons we learned! Numbers Speed Our goals for February were to hit 55% within 1 hour and 80% within 6 hours, a sizable but feasible improvement from January. At the end of the month, we reached: • 64% of emails within 1 hour • 84% of emails within 6 hours Volume We sent 9,800 replies in February, roughly the same as January, in order to assist 5,40
February was a month of big transitions for the Buffer blog. Our overall traffic decreased 8% compared to January (read on for our theory as to why) as Leo trained the new girl (that’s me!), Belle cut back on her posting schedule as she works on her own start-up and we worked on expanding the team further – more on that in a minute. Let’s take a look at the details!
I have some really exciting news to share: Brian has become our Product Manager. He’s been in this role for 2 weeks now and even after 1 week he was doing a better job running Product than I ever managed to do. It’s been incredibly fun to work with him and help him thrive in the role, and now it’s time to make things official. How the idea of stepping away from Product came about During our retreat in Thailand I had a chance to spend some time thinking on a hig
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in January. With the fantastic responses to previous reports on in revenue , customer happiness and content , we thought we might be able t
Hi team! I’m so excited to tell you about January. This was a really exciting month for us as we tried several experiments to still deliver lots of happiness during higher than ever volume. What a luxury that Buffer is growing so fast that we can barely keep up with customer emails! Exciting people news I was thrilled to share that Mary and Adam have completed their 45 day Buffer Bootcamp periods and have come on board with us full time [https://buffer.com/resources/two-more-happiness-heroes-jo
I’m delighted to share a strong update for our first month of the new year. I wanted to take a second and publish the email I just sent to our investors this morning. I hope you enjoy the insights into what we’ve been working on at Buffer in the last month and the results we’re seeing. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have any thoughts or questions about what we’re up to! If you want to read about how December went, you can take a look here [https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-d
As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer. We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing. As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer!Let’s start off with a brief summary: * We had 355 people apply for engineering positions at Buffer * 2 new engineers joined the team and 2 more offers were made * We launched 1 new Open Source project with Share.JS * There were
January has been an incredibly exciting month for the Buffer blog. We managed to increase our overall traffic by 32.6% compared to December. We expanded the team and we’re working more closely with the growth team to make the blog more data-driven. Let’s dig into the details! :) Quick summary In January, we had 654,126 Unique visitors (32.6% growth over December). There were 839,846 total visits, resulting in 1,061,032 page views. We had a total 59 Buffer for Business trial starts resulting
I just hit send on the following email to the Buffer team to give them a glimpse into what the Happiness Team worked on and achieved in December! Hi guys! December was an awesome month of focused efforts on goals, syncing up as a team and individually a lot more, and some personal bests. Here are the highlights. 1. We launched LiveChat! On December 18th, we launched “live chat” as our third tool (with Olark). In order to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, we kicked off with no set
I am thrilled to share that Mary Jantsch and Adam Farmer have both recently completed their Buffer Bootcamps and have accepted offers to come on board with us as official, full-time team members. These two have made such a massive difference at Buffer that we can barely imagine life without them now. Here’s a bit of background on each. Mary is from Spokane, Washington. (This means she spends most of her time on the West Coast,