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.
Editor’s Note: Here’s part 1 in the series, A Transparent Look Inside Our Process For Creating Buffer’s Annual Budget. We believe that numbers tell a story and we hope that anyone looking at our budget for the first time will have a good idea of what we value based on how we’re planning to spend our money. Last month we shared our approach to creating a budget. Today, we’re excited to invite you to take a closer look at how that approach led to allocating dollars in our budget and how that inf
I love the little traditions that develop organically at Buffer. One of them is to welcome each new teammate with a long email chain of happiness that begins with that person’s introduction. More often than not, the introduction has a certain ratio: * 1 part what this person will do for Buffer and has done for work in the past * 2 parts who this person is in the world—a mom, a breakdancer, an ex-Marine I love this 1:2 ratio because it speaks to a simple truth we strive to recognize as a tea
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. We love conferences, and who doesn’t? They’re a great place to connect with like-minded individuals. Over the years as the Buffer team has grown, we’ve not only been attending more conferences, but we’ve started seeing more and more Buffer speakers as well. Speaking has so many benefits for the Buffer t
MRR $1,498,636 ARR $17,984,388 EBIDTA $1,340,654(+15%) Paying customers 79,665(-2%) Q2 Revenue $4,527,930(+6%) EBITDA Margin 29.61% This quarter was Buffer’s 9th company-wide retreat and it was a joy to get to see the entire team in Singapore for a week. Our People team did an incredible job of creating a relaxing and productive space for the team to gather and it was a week packed with insightful sessions and team-bonding. In addition to being able to spend time together, in Q2 were deep
Got a few minutes? Get ready to get more done. Researchers have discovered some quick ways to get you more focused and motivated at what you do so that you can work smarter, not harder. Some of these motivation tips take only seconds to do. Others require that you get out of your chair for a few minutes. All of them are derived from the results of recent scientific studies. For some simple tips and exercises to increase your motivation, we’ll start right now. 1. Strike a high-power pose for
There’s a really great saying about how we need to experience some bad times in life to give meaning to the good times. I like Dolly Parton’s take best: “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” I’m living a life packed with rainbows these days. My husband and I have just celebrated the biggest and most successful Pride in London festival, where I celebrated my community and my identity along with dozens of friends and thousands of allies. I work with a suppo
Prefer to listen? Here’s an audio version of this post. I still remember the setting: it was a little coffee shop in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. We were three and a half months into planning the company retreat and a few days into the scouting trip. Nicole and I were knee deep in our notes from a morning meeting with a potential vendor and ideas for the retreat were flying. By that time, we’d narrowed down our initial list of 18 potential retreat cities across the world to just three: Scottsdal
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post: Being a remote team and international company comes with a lot of things that are non-traditional, things like getting 80 people on remote all-hands meeting. We’ve talked about several aspects that are quite unique to the business side of an international company, too, like paying employees and when to give people holidays. In this post, we’re going to dive into another big part of working at and running Buffer, which is employee benefits
“We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them. If you’re willing to do that, then you’re well on your way to building a company culture that is in line with the brand you want to build.”– Tony Hsieh, November 15, 2010, The Huffington Post Buffer’s founder, Joel , set about identifying his values and the values of the 10 other employees in 201
I was once asked, “How often do you talk about your company values at Buffer?” I think the person I was speaking with was pretty surprised when I responded: “At least once a day!” At Buffer, our values are a blueprint for everything we do. We use them in hiring , in product decision making, in marketing, in overcoming company challenges and in many other situations. We work hard to make sure that our values aren’t just a plaque on the wall –for one, we
“I just sit in my office and read all day.” This is how Warren Buffett, one of the most successful people in the business world, describes his day. Sitting. Reading. He advises everyone to read more, and that’s certainly a goal we can all get behind. Our personal improvements at Buffer regularly come back to the books we read—how we aim to read more and make reading a habit. I imagine you’re in the same boat as well. Reading more is one of our most common ambitions. So how do we do it? An
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle is credited with saying these 15 famous words. And for most of my life…I didn’t believe him. I fought against cultivating good habits and routines because I didn’t want to feel like I had to live my life by other people’s rules. I wanted to be my own person and do my own thing. Besides, keeping a routine was hard work. Know what I discovered? Having no routine or structure is so much more draining mentall
Though to many, creating a budget might sound rather uninteresting and isn’t necessarily synonymous with the exciting fast-paced growth of a startup or scaleup , we believe it is, in fact, a core part of creating a sustainable and healthy company. (Which is what makes budgeting so exciting to us!) We haven’t always used a budget at Buffer to guide us towards financial health and our long-term g
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post: One of the biggest questions that comes up when exploring how to work as a remote team is a question of operations: How do all those people, in all those places, stay organized and productive? Since Buffer is one of those fully remote teams, we get the chance to try out many different strategies and tools [https://buffer.com/resources/remote-wor
Of the many ways that we engage with our audience — email, video, content, socks — one of our longest-standing traditions has been #bufferchat, our weekly Twitter chat where members of our Twitter community gather together to share questions, answers, insights, and GIFs about social media topics and workplace trends. We’ve been meeting together every Wednesday for the past four years — a to
Remote work is an amazing way of life for so many people and companies around the world, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges. Even with the wonderful perks — the flexibility, getting to work where you’re the happiest, focused work time, potentially traveling around the world, and more — it’s hard to avoid moments of loneliness with this work and lifestyle. As this is something many of us on the Buffer team experience from time to time, we wanted to collect as much advice as we
Language is one of the most powerful tools we have as humans. It binds us. Instructs us. When used well, it creates a common understanding. And it’s essential for creating an environment where everyone feels welcome and included. Historically, language has left many out. Individuals and groups have been marginalized and discriminated against because of their culture, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, socioeconomic status, appearance and more. We can do better. I
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! Disconnecting from devices is a challenge for most people. A study of Americans found they check their phones on average 80 times a day! For remote workers, it’s especially difficult if there’s no separation between work and home and your devices become your office. In fact, this is so much of a challenge that there is a law in France [https://www.npr.org
At Buffer we love working as a distributed team , but we also cherish the times we get to meet up in person . Since the early days at Buffer, retreats have been a core part of our culture and a part of why we’re able to keep working remotely as a company. In their current state, retreats at Buffer happen once a year. We set aside a budget [https://buffer.gho
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! Working remotely and having the opportunity to work from home, coffee shops, coworking spaces, or wherever else I might feel the most productive, means that I can design my own mornings because they don’t necessarily need to be spent commuting. I’ve gone through many different morning routines over the years, and I don’t believe there is one perfect routine for everyone or even just for me. My morning routine is constantly changing and e
MRR $1,478,344 ARR $17,740,128 EBIDTA $1,178,687(+38%) Paying customers 82,156(+5.12H%) Q1 Revenue $4,273,171(+3.62%) Cash in bank $6,285,455(+18.74%) Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! These first few months of 2018 have been very active for everyone in the social media space, and that was especially true at Buffer. In this report, we’ll go through how we’re dealing with API changes from Facebook and Twitter on our Product and Engineer teams. On the financial side,
Prefer to listen? Here’s the audio version of this post! All Hands, town hall, tea time — there are many names for the meeting where everyone comes together for company updates and announcements. For us, All Hands is not only an exciting time to see everyone’s smiling faces at once but also a big part of our value to default to transparency . Buffer’s All Hands meetings are a great place to openly communicate with the whole company at once. As a fully-remote c
No matter what we do or how well we do it, some criticism is eventually going to come our way. And those moments are often some of the toughest we all face in work and life. Hearing potentially negative things about yourself is probably not your favorite activity, and most of us would rather avoid the awkwardness that comes with telling someone else how they could improve. But what do we lose out on when we avoid these tough conversations? One of the fundamental skills of life is being able to
One thing that I noticed immediately when joining Buffer was our emphasis on cultivating positivity. If you take a quick look at our culture deck , you can see the high priority we place on this. Since I joined the team, positive thinking is something I’ve focused on a lot, and it’s been fun to see how spending time with positive thinkers rubs off on me. At the moment, some of us are experimenting with sharing one great moment we had at the end of each day. I’v
