We recently started a small project to clean up how parts of our systems communicate behind the scenes at Buffer.

Some quick context: we use something called SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service. These queues act like waiting rooms for tasks. One part of our system drops off a message, and another picks it up later. Think of it like leaving a note for a coworker: "Hey, when you get a chance, process this data." The system that sends the note doesn't have to wait around for a response.

Our project was to perform routine maintenance: update the tools we use to test queues locally and clean up their configuration.

But while we were mapping out what queues we actually use, we found something we didn't expect: seven different background processes (or cron jobs, which are scheduled tasks that run automatically) and workers that had been running silently for up to five years. All of them doing absolutely nothing useful.

Here's why that matters, how we found them, and what we did about it.

Why this matters more than you'd think

Yes, running unnecessary infrastructure costs money. I did a quick calculation and for one of those workers, we would have paid ~$360-600 over 5 years. This is a modest amount in the grand scheme of our finances, but definitely pure waste for a process that does nothing.

However, after going through this cleanup, I'd argue the financial cost is actually the smallest part of the problem.

Every time a new engineer joins the team and explores our systems, they encounter these mysterious processes. "What does this worker do?" becomes a question that eats up onboarding time and creates uncertainty. We've all been there — staring at a piece of code, afraid to touch it because maybe it's doing something important.

Even "forgotten" infrastructure occasionally needs attention. Security updates, dependency bumps, compatibility fixes when something else changes. This led to our team spending maintenance cycles on code paths that served no purpose.

And over time, the institutional knowledge fades. Was this critical? Was it a temporary fix that became permanent? The person who created it left the company years ago, and the context left with them.

How does this even happen?

It's easy to point fingers, but the truth is this happens naturally in any long-lived system.

A feature gets deprecated, but the background job that supported it keeps running. Someone spins up a worker "temporarily" to handle a migration, and it never gets torn down. A scheduled task becomes redundant after an architectural change, but nobody thinks to check.

We used to send birthday celebration emails at Buffer. To do this, we ran a scheduled task that checked the entire database for birthdays matching the current date and sent customers a personalized email. During a refactor in 2020, we switched our transactional email tool but forgot to remove this worker—it kept running for five more years.

None of these are failures of individuals — they're failures of process. Without intentional cleanup built into how we work, entropy wins.

How our architecture helped us find it

Like many companies, Buffer embraced the microservices movement (a popular approach where companies split their code into many small, independent services) years ago.

We split our monolith into separate services, each with its own repository, deployment pipeline, and infrastructure. At the time, it made sense: each service could be deployed on its own, with clear boundaries between teams.

But over the years, we found the overhead of managing dozens of repositories outweighed the benefits for a team our size. So we consolidated into a multi-service single repository. The services still exist as logical boundaries, but they live together in one place.

This turned out to be what made discovery possible.

In the microservices world, each repository is its own island. A forgotten worker in one repo might never be noticed by engineers working in another. There's no single place to search for queue names, no unified view of what's running where.

With everything in one repository, we could finally see the full picture. We could trace every queue to its consumers and producers. We could spot queues with producers but no consumers. We could find workers referencing queues that no longer existed.

The consolidation wasn't designed to help us find zombie infrastructure — but it made that discovery almost inevitable.

What we actually did

Once we identified the orphaned processes, we had to decide what to do with them. Here's how we approached it.

First, we traced each one to its origin. We dug through git history and old documentation to understand why each worker was created in the first place. In most cases, the original purpose was clear: a one-time data migration, a feature that got sunset, a temporary workaround that outlived its usefulness.

Then we confirmed they were truly unused. Before removing anything, we added logging to verify these processes weren't quietly doing something important we'd missed. We monitored for a few days to make sure they were not called at all, and we removed them incrementally. We didn't delete everything at once. We removed processes one by one, watching for any unexpected side effects. (Luckily, there weren't any.)

Finally, we documented what we learned. We added notes to our internal docs about what each process had originally done and why it was removed, so future engineers wouldn't wonder if something important went missing.

What changed after clean up

We're still early in measuring the full impact, but here's what we've seen so far.

Our infrastructure inventory is now accurate. When someone asks, "What workers do we run?" we can actually answer that question with confidence.

Onboarding conversations have gotten simpler, too. New engineers aren't stumbling across mysterious processes and wondering if they're missing context. The codebase reflects what we actually do, not what we did five years ago.

Treat refactors as archaeology and prevention

My biggest takeaway from this project: every significant refactor is an opportunity for archaeology.

When you're deep in a system, really understanding how the pieces connect, you're in the perfect position to question what's still needed. That queue from some old project? The worker someone created for a one-time data migration? The scheduled task that references a feature you've never heard of? They might still be running.

Here's what we're building into our process going forward:

• During any refactor, ask: what else touches this system that we haven't looked at in a while?
• When deprecating a feature, trace it all the way to its background processes, not just the user-facing code.
• When someone leaves the team, document what they were in charge of, especially the stuff that runs in the background.

We still have older parts of our codebase that haven't been migrated to the single repository yet. As we continue consolidating, we're confident we'll find more of these hidden relics. But now we're set up to catch them and prevent new ones from forming.

When all your code lives in one place, orphaned infrastructure has nowhere to hide.

A company's homepage is sometimes the first introduction a potential customer will have to that brand. It's a pretty important space. In early 2025, we redesigned our homepage as part of an overall website redesign.

Our old homepage hero technically showed all the platforms we support — but it felt overly corporate, like a feature list wearing a trench coat.

The previous hero featured an animated headline that rotated through Buffer's supported social media platforms. While it did the job, it didn't feel very "Buffer-y." We wanted to make a stronger first impression — something with more liveliness and delight.

So, we got to work on designing and engineering a new homepage hero that we would validate with a simple A/B test. Here's what that looked like in practice.

Developing the design concept

The primary design goal with the new hero section was to still demonstrate how many social media platforms Buffer supports, but with some added fun and interest.

Kate Baldrey, our incredibly talented marketing UX designer, came up with the idea of floating tiles arranged on a grid (a subtle nod to social grids) at various depths.

These tiles would feature various social media platform icons, as well as emojis to evoke the experience of social media engagement.

With early design ideas in place, we immediately began engineering the real thing.

Building the design

We heavily rely on designer-engineering pairing for all buffer.com projects.

This means that instead of formally creating high-fidelity designs in Figma, then handing them off to engineering to be built, we spend our time together on calls talking through design ideas, exploring approaches, working through challenges, and making refinements.

This practice reduces temporary design artifacts and handoff, which saves a lot of time and results in higher-quality work.

To facilitate pairing, we have a live preview of the local development environment running from the start of the project. This gives us a shared, real-time URL of the work that updates on every code change and treats the final medium (the webpage) as the single source of truth.

Breaking down the design

The hero section design features a number of “tiles” positioned on a grid behind the hero section content.

Some of these tiles have emojis and add depth to the design by being smaller, less opaque, and slightly blurred to give the impression that they’re further away or underneath the other content.

The remaining tiles have the icons of the various social media channels Buffer supports, including Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X (Twitter), and YouTube. These tiles are larger, more opaque, and have no blur to appear closer to the viewer.

The visual grid establishes “cells” that are the size of the channel tiles, and is centered within the hero section.

Accessibility-first design and engineering

I follow a process I call accessibility-first design and engineering. This means our work begins with an accessible foundation that we preserve throughout the design and build process.

For this hero section, the visual grid and tiles are decorative, so we hide them from assistive technology to avoid them from being announced to people who are trying to discover and interact with important content and features. This is achieved by wrapping the decorative design with aria-hidden=”true”.

Next, this design features animation and interaction, which can cause discomfort for people with vestibular disorders or motion sensitivity. To avoid this, all animation is off by default, and we enable it only if we detect prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference in CSS and JavaScript.

With this approach in place, we’re ready to start on the layout and animation.

Achieving the grid layout

Achieving this layout proved to be an interesting challenge, as the grid needs to be responsive to all screen sizes by allowing us to position the tiles based on the available space. It also needs to have horizontal symmetry reflected from the center of the hero section.

To pull this off, we actually create two separate CSS Grid containers, one for each horizontal half of the hero section, which we’ll refer to as the “leading” and “trailing” containers.

Each of these containers will have auto columns and rows set to the size of the tiles. To make this easy to manage, we create a CSS custom property (variable): --_tile-size: 3rem; (the underscore prefix is a convention we use to indicate that this variable is private to this class and not a global variable/design token). This variable also allows us to change the tile size across breakpoints for responsive design. We can then use this variable in our CSS Grid:

.decorationGrid {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, var(--_tile-size));
  grid-template-rows: repeat(auto-fill, var(--_tile-size));
}

The repeat(auto-fill, var(--_tile-size)); declaration will create as many columns/rows as possible of a set size (in this case, our tile size).

With these two CSS Grid containers, we have an issue: CSS Grid respects the page’s text direction. For English, the writing mode is “ltr” (left-to-right), but this varies by language and culture.

This means that our “leading” grid has empty space on the right if it can’t perfectly fit additional columns. This empty space ends up in the middle of the hero section and makes the layout asymmetrical.

To solve this, we can use the direction property in CSS. Because we’re using aria-hidden=”true” for this decorative visual  content, it’s safe to change the direction without affecting actual text content. First, we’ll set direction: ltr; on the .decorationGrid to prevent the direction from changing if the page is translated. Next, we’ll set direction: rtl; on our leading grid, which allows the grid to start from the right edge and place empty space on the left. This creates the mirrored horizontal symmetry we need.

Placing the tiles

With our symmetrical, auto-growing grid in place, we can place our tiles into dedicated cells.

Since our grids are mirrored, this causes grid-column to be mirrored as well. With our leading grid, grid-column: 2; would place an item in the second column from the center of the hero section.

To avoid confusion, we can create a --_column-from-center variable to use with our tiles:

.tile {
  grid-column: var(--_column-from-center, 0);
}

This variable makes it easy to specify the desired column for each tile, and we can use grid-row as expected for the row position.

Responsive design

We start mobile-first with our responsive design, and begin placing the tiles based on the available space. We hide many of the tiles by default, prioritizing the social media icons, and then carefully place the visible tiles to avoid interfering with the text content and email form in the hero.

As the screen size increases, we simply add a new media query breakpoint in CSS, make more tiles visible, and rearrange them as space allows.

Once we arrive at our largest breakpoint around 1344 pixels, all the tiles are visible and have a dedicated position that won’t change for larger screens.

Animation and interaction

As we paired on the design and build, we discussed possible animations for the hero section and tiles. We arrived at the idea that the tiles would react to the cursor by being pulled towards it as the cursor moved across the hero section.

To validate this idea and the technical approach, we first prototyped the animation and interaction for a single tile.

To achieve this, we defined an “activation zone”, or how close the cursor needs to be to a tile for the tile to start moving towards the cursor.

When the cursor is within the activation zone, we then animate the tile towards the cursor using a spring animation. A spring animation mimics a physical spring in real life, which allows us to define parameters for how stiff or loose the animation feels, a max distance for the tile to travel, and how quickly the tile returns to its original position if the cursor leaves the activation zone.

Prototyping this with a single tile allowed us to visualize and quickly tune these parameters until things felt right and we were confident the technical approach would work.

With a single tile working, we componentized this functionality to apply it to the other tiles. With everything in place, we could enjoy the full animation across the hero section with everything moving and reacting gracefully.

Considering non-cursor interaction

Because the animation relies on a cursor, it depends on a mouse, stylus, or similar input device. Luckily, the activation zone also works on click events, meaning taps on a touchscreen will also activate the animation.

For touch-screen devices, this allows people to discover the interaction when they tap on the email input or the get started button. It’s also a fun, hidden detail that people might accidentally find at first.

Creating the visual grid lines

The final detail we incorporated was grid lines that visually anchor the arrangement of the tiles. We needed the grid lines to match the tile size and scale gracefully with the responsive grid used for the tile layout.

To achieve this, we created a repeating linear gradient background with some clever sizing tricks. The linear gradient creates a 1px line along the bottom and a single side of the background, which creates a square grid when repeated. It also makes use of the --_tile-size variable to ensure it’s the same dimension as the tiles:

.decorationGridLinesLeading {
  /* 1px side and bottom grid lines */
  background-image:
    linear-gradient(to left, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem),
    linear-gradient(to bottom, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem);
  /* Match the repeating background to the tile size */
  background-size:
    var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size),
    var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size);
  /* Position the background in the top right (center of the hero section) */
  background-position:,
   right top,
   right top;
}

The other half of the grid is mirrored, so we simply swap the left and right keywords.

To finish things off, we wanted to fade the edges of the hero section grid to blend with the rest of the page. We can achieve this with additional linear gradients that go from transparent to the page’s background color:

.decorationGridLinesLeading {
  /* Add top, side, and bottom fades */
  background-image:
    linear-gradient(to top, var(--background-color) 0%, transparent 20%, transparent 80%, var(--background-color) 100%),
    linear-gradient(to right, var(--background-color) 0%, transparent 20%),
    linear-gradient(to left, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem),
    linear-gradient(to bottom, var(--grid-color) 0.0625rem, transparent 0.0625rem);
  /* Stretch the fades to 100% of the element's size */
  background-size:
    100% 100%,
    100% 100%,
    var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size),
    var(--_tile-size) var(--_tile-size);
  background-position:
    initial,
    initial,
    right top,
    right top;
}

And with that in place, we have our completed hero section:

Results

As mentioned at the start of this article, we rolled out this new hero section design as part of an A/B test to validate the impact of the new design and interaction.

After running the experiment for 2 weeks, we were thrilled to find the new design resulted in increased signups and even some celebrations on social media. Confident in our new direction, we rolled out the new homepage hero section to 100% of traffic.

This project was a joy to work on in close collaboration with Kate, and pushed my design engineering skills further with many interesting layout, animation, and interaction challenges.

This design remains in place today, but we always have new ideas cooking and will keep iterating from here.

A few weeks ago, we completed our seventh profit share at Buffer, distributing $377,005 to 75 teammates.

This represents more than a dollar amount. It reflects a real turnaround in our growth and in where we are headed.

Just a few years ago, we were not in a position to do this at all. We went through two years of net losses, made hard decisions, and focused deeply on rebuilding a healthy, sustainable business. There were moments when profitability and profit sharing felt far away.

So returning to this practice in 2025, with an average share of $5,095 per teammate, feels especially meaningful. It reflects the resilience of our team, the care people have put into their work, and the progress we have made together.

In this post, I’ll share more about this milestone, why profit sharing is so meaningful at Buffer, and detail how our formula works.

Why we share profits

At Buffer, profitability is not just a financial milestone. It’s what gives us the freedom to operate as an independent, long-term company.

We are now in our 15th year of business. Staying profitable allows us to continue investing in our product, our customers, our team, and our mission without compromising our values.

Our founder and CEO, Joel Gascoigne, often talks about how, if Buffer grows and succeeds, we should grow and succeed together. Profit sharing is one of the most tangible ways we put that belief into practice.

When the company does well, our teammates benefit directly. That creates a strong connection between our collective effort and real, meaningful outcomes in people’s lives. It also reinforces something we care deeply about: building a company where success is shared.

For me personally, profit sharing is a reminder that sustainable growth and people-first values do not have to be in tension. When done thoughtfully, they strengthen each other.

Our profit-sharing history

We started profit sharing in 2017. Here's a look at our profit shares since then:

2017: Net income: $1,418,604 | Profit share pool: $300,000
2018: Net income: $3,418,352 | Profit share pool: $394,997
2019: Net income: $2,392,409 | Profit share pool: $368,051
2020: Net income: $1,940,828 | Profit share pool: $243,047
2021: Net income: $216,557 | Profit share pool: $89,828
2022: Net income: -$1,109,745 | Profit share pool: $0
2023: Net income: -$743,936 | Profit share pool: $0
2024: Net income: $156,244 | Profit share pool: $30,369
2025: Net income: $2,513,367 | Profit share pool: $377,005

Looking at this history, you can see a clear story.

We had several strong growth years, followed by a sharp decline in 2021. In 2022 and 2023, we were not profitable and did not issue a profit share. In 2024, we began rebuilding, but at a modest pace.

2025 represents something different. It is our second-largest profit share to date and a meaningful milestone after two challenging years. It reflects the work our team has done to stabilize, refocus, and rebuild a strong foundation for the future.

How Our Profit-Sharing Formula Works

We distribute 15 percent of our annual net profit using a formula designed to balance fairness, transparency, and impact.

Here’s how it works:

40 percent distributed equally

Every teammate receives the same amount from this portion, regardless of role or tenure.

40 percent based on salary

Each teammate receives a share proportional to their salary as a percentage of total company payroll. This reflects our broader compensation philosophy and our investment in building a thoughtful, transparent salary system.

20 percent based on tenure

This portion is based on how long each person has worked at Buffer relative to the total months worked by all teammates.

For 2025, this resulted in:

• Net profit: $2,513,367
• Profit share pool (15 percent): $377,005
• Team members: 75
• Average profit share: $5,095

Each part of the formula serves a clear purpose.

The equal distribution ensures that everyone shares in our success. The salary-based component reflects responsibility and scope. The tenure component recognizes long-term commitment and contribution.

We have learned over time that compensation systems only work when people understand them and trust them. That is why we prioritize simplicity and transparency. Our goal is to create a system that feels fair, consistent, and aligned with our values.

Looking Ahead

Completing our seventh profit share has been a meaningful moment for me.

It reflects the dedication of our teammates, the strength of our culture, and the belief that building a healthy company is a collective effort. It also reminds me that setbacks do not define us. How we respond to them does.

Profit sharing is not just a financial outcome. It is a reflection of trust, resilience, and shared ownership in what we are building together.

Over to you

If this post sparked questions for you about profit sharing or how we operate at Buffer, I would love to hear them. We are always learning, and we are grateful to be building this company alongside such a thoughtful community.

I’ve been fortunate that we've closed down for the last week of the year for the last eight years that I’ve been at Buffer. We kicked off this at the end of 2016 and have kept up every year since then.

Closing down for the last week of the year is an opportunity to pause and recharge. It’s like a reset, except across the whole company. I love telling people about this practice at Buffer because they have so many questions about how we continue to operate while closing down for a week.

As we work with many small businesses and creators who can sometimes struggle with working over the holidays, it feels especially important to share how we’re going about this.

So in this post, I’ll cover what it means to close down for a week as a business whose customers are always using it, why we do it, and specifically how our largest teams manage this time off while still caring for our product and our customers.

Let’s dive in!

What does it mean to close down for a week?

At the end of every year, we close down for the year's final week. The exact definition of “closed down” varies from company to company – some businesses will completely shut down operations while others will only close particular sections of their business.

This gives everyone at the company some extra time to rest, and it creates an environment where no one is worried about missing out on projects or updates while they’re offline because we’re all offline. We’ve done this sort of thing before, closing down for an extra long weekend in the summer, and it’s always been refreshing for our team.

When I say that we’re closed, that means that most of the company is off (I’ll elaborate in the next section), we aren’t releasing new features or changing our product at all, we aren’t publishing new blog posts, and it is intentionally a time of rest.

In our business, creating tools for small businesses and creators building a brand online, this time of year is also reliably slow. So unlike some other industries that may pick up over the holidays, we can lean into rest by closing the company during a naturally slower period.

What does this look like in practice?

For most teams at Buffer, closing for the holidays means a full disconnect. Our two largest teams, Engineering and Customer Advocacy have to create systems where we can still serve our customers and ensure Buffer is operational while also making space for additional rest. So here’s how Engineering and Advocacy tackle the week off.

How our Advocacy team handles a week closed

Our Advocacy team is a group of absolute pros who are taking care of our customers. This year, they’ve helped solve over 50,000 customer support requests and sent over 105,000 replies with an average first response time of just four hours, 38 minutes (business hours).

Over the years that we have been closing, they have figured out the right balance to ensure we can still help customers while also giving our Advocates that extra rest.

To start, we take steps to make this period visible to our customers. They post a clear message stating that we’re shut down for the holidays in all the main channels where we communicate with customers. Those include a banner for people who are in Buffer, an auto-reply to customer support email, a pinned tweet on our account, and several other places.

This year, the message reads:

The Buffer team is observing a company-wide holiday shutdown from December 24 to January 1. While our response times will be a little slower than usual, a dedicated crew of Customer Advocates are working as quickly as possible to respond to customer messages. Happy Holidays! ✨

Each Advocate is working one full day or two half days. We stagger our coverage across the close-down period to ensure we have the optimal number of people online on the days we expect to be busiest.

This year, we have people online on Dec 24, we have a few hours of coverage on Dec 25, and we have people online on Jan 1. We ask all Advocates to work full weeks (five days) in the two weeks following the holiday period to ensure we kick off the new year with the inbox in great shape and customers being helped as quickly as possible.

The team has in place a clear schedule, expectations when people are online with how to prioritize their work and get back to customers, and guidelines for emergencies. (We have those guidelines in place all the time, but it’s always good to review ahead of the holidays.)

How our Engineering team handles a week closed

Similar to Advocacy, for our engineers, we need to have some coverage of engineers who are on call in case something happens.

For Engineering, their break looks different because they are on call, meaning they are available if something breaks, rather than fully online during this time. That means that the load of being on call can be spread among fewer people because the likelihood of them needing to be online is lower.

The way that the on-call schedule works is that there are several specialized or senior members of the team who are immediately placed in all of the on-call spots. Then we ask for volunteers from the rest of the engineering team to be on-call throughout the week.

A few questions from our community about closing down for a week

We reached out on social media to see what questions people had about closing down for a week, and we got a few good questions. Here’s our response:

Do clients find this frustrating or ever complain?

We haven’t heard major complaints or frustration about this in the past, and if ever things have not gone as planned, we’ve adjusted our plan for the following year. We make sure to be very transparent that we’re taking this time off across our communication channels. We still have our Advocacy team spending some time online and can reply to anything urgent.

Did this impact your bottom line at all?

No, we intentionally choose a slow time for us to be closed. So it’s the right time to take a break without any major impact. In addition, since the Advocacy team is still monitoring for urgent customer requests and the Engineering team is on call, we can still jump on any issues that pop up, and our customers still have support.

I’d love to know about the benefits your company has seen and how it positively impacts employees!

The biggest benefit we’ve seen from closing down for the holidays is that our team is more rested and refreshed. It’s a unique opportunity for everyone at Buffer to take a break, rather than it happening in spots throughout the year. It means the energy levels in the first few weeks of the year are always really high for us.

Taking this week off for all of us at once also gives us a greater opportunity to relax because no one needs to think about projects that are moving forward without them or missing out on team communication. After all, we’re all offline. This is great for us as a team, which translates into being great for our product and our customers.

Do you take breaks from work or your business, and if so, what’s your approach? We’d love to hear from you on Bluesky or Discord.

Great experiences rarely come from one big moment. They’re built through hundreds of small details that add up over time.

That idea guided how we spent some time this year focusing on customer experience at Buffer.

Customer Experience Week was our first dedicated, cross-functional sprint centered entirely on how Buffer feels to use. We took advantage of the natural slowdown at the end of the year to form small teams, each focused on one improvement they believed they could meaningfully ship in a short window.

This wasn’t our first experiment with focused building time. We’ve run initiatives like Build Week in 2022 and 2023, where teams explored new ideas and shipped experiments. Last year, we also ran an Engineering-only Fixathon to tackle bugs and technical debt.

Customer Experience Week builds on that foundation, but with a wider lens. Instead of focusing primarily on new features or technical wins, this week centered on the everyday moments customers experience across the product, our content, support workflows, and internal systems.

This year, 17 teams each worked on a dedicated project. By the end of the week, they shipped improvements across the help center, in-product experiences, onboarding, billing, analytics, and even a highly requested new integration.

Every project started with real customer feedback drawn from support conversations, feature requests, and patterns we see every day. The shared goal was simple: make Buffer clearer, smoother, and more supportive, especially during the moments that matter most.

Here’s everything we worked on this week, grouped into five categories of improvement.

1. Expanding what customers can do with Buffer

Some projects focused on extending Buffer’s capabilities — not through large platform changes, but through additions that unlock new (often highly requested) workflows.

n8n integration

Project: Automation-minded customers often rely on tools like n8n to connect content workflows across their stack, but until now, there was no direct way to create content in Buffer as part of those workflows. This project focused on making it possible to create ideas and posts in Buffer automatically, while keeping the core product simple and uncluttered.

Team: Joe B., Adnan, Steven, and Hannah

The team built a direct integration between Buffer and n8n, allowing customers to create Buffer ideas or posts as part of an n8n workflow. In practice, a trigger in n8n can send structured data to Buffer, where it becomes content ready for scheduling, review, or refinement — without manual copy-pasting.

Rather than prescribing a single ‘right’ setup, the n8n integration is designed to support workflows that range from simple triggers to more advanced systems, meeting automation-focused customers where they already work.

What you can do with the integration:

• Create Buffer ideas automatically from new Notion database entries
• Turn form submissions into posts using AI-generated or refined copy
• Publish posts when new videos are added to Google Drive, complete with generated captions
• Pull in and filter RSS content to create curated ideas
• Schedule posts through multi-step workflows that combine data from multiple tools

The integration isn’t yet available in the n8n store. It’s currently live for Buffer’s API Closed Beta users who run a self-hosted n8n instance. A broader release is planned to align with the Buffer Public API moving into Open Beta, at which point the team aims to expand the available actions and triggers.

Support reposts and quote posts for Threads

Project: Creators wanted a way to reshare and reference existing Threads posts through Buffer, but early platform documentation made it unclear how reposts would actually work. This project focused on supporting the right Threads post type, enabling creators to participate more fully in conversations on the platform.

Team: Amanda, Dinos, Cheryl, and Mw

As the team explored repost support, they discovered that Threads’ documentation didn’t behave as expected. Instead of forcing an incomplete solution, they adapted quickly when Threads introduced support for “ghost posts” — a post type that enables repost and quote-style sharing.

The team shipped support for ghost posts as a new post type for Threads in Buffer’s web composer. This gives creators a way to reshare and reference Threads posts directly from Buffer, aligning the publishing experience more closely with how Threads actually works.

This update helps creators engage more naturally on Threads, especially when responding to or amplifying conversations already happening on the platform. The team is continuing to explore follow-up improvements, including expanding support beyond web.

2. Making everyday product interactions clearer and easier

This category focused on reducing friction in the moments customers interact with Buffer most often — composing posts, previewing content, and navigating analytics.

The goal was to make existing experiences feel more intuitive, trustworthy, and aligned with how platforms actually work.

Projects in this category addressed areas where small mismatches or missing context could lead to confusion, second-guessing, or unnecessary support requests.

Simplify our analytics feature

Project: Parts of our analytics feature had become cluttered with deprecated metrics and unclear distinctions that made it harder for customers to understand their performance. This project focused on simplifying Analyze today while laying early groundwork for a clearer, more actionable approach to insights in the future.

Team: Brandon, Mike SR, Joel, and Dave

The team removed references to metrics and data we no longer have access to, including outdated Facebook Page and audience insights. With that clutter gone, they repurposed space in our analytics feature to clearly explain the difference between Overview and Posts metrics — a long-standing point of confusion for customers.

Alongside this cleanup, the team began shaping a future-facing Insights experience designed to help customers better understand engagement and adjust their strategy over time. They built and refined a working prototype, using Instagram as an initial test case, and made progress toward a production-ready version intended for early user testing.

Rather than treating cleanup and innovation as separate efforts, this work makes our analytics features clearer today while setting a foundation for how insights can become more useful, actionable, and aligned with how creators actually make decisions.

Refresh channel previews in the composer

Project: Buffer users rely on post previews to catch formatting issues before publishing, but outdated styling and missing interactions made some previews hard to trust. This project focused on bringing Buffer’s channel previews closer to how posts actually appear on each platform, so you can schedule with more confidence.

Team: Ismail, Maya, and Mel

The team refreshed previews across multiple platforms, starting with a rebuild of LinkedIn previews to better match real-world behavior. This helps creators spot issues before a post goes live, rather than discovering them after publishing.

They also added key interactions that were previously missing. You can now click “See more” to expand longer posts directly inside the preview, and scroll through every image in Instagram carousels or stories before scheduling — including using arrow keys for faster review.

Beyond individual improvements, the team updated the overall look and feel of previews across Mastodon, TikTok, X, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, and Bluesky. These were small, deliberate changes, but together they make creating, reviewing, and approving posts feel clearer, more accurate, and more modern.

Getting previews right required hands-on testing and iteration. Social platforms don’t document preview behavior, and results can vary by context, but getting closer meaningfully improves trust — especially in high-stakes publishing moments.

Show previously used Threads topics in Composer

Project: Frequent Threads posters often reuse the same topics, but having to retype them every time created unnecessary friction. This project focused on making topic selection faster and easier during post creation.

Team: Diego C., Ben, and Daisy

The team added a smart dropdown to the Threads composer that surfaces previously used topics, sorted by recent usage. Instead of starting from scratch, creators can now select a topic with a single click.

The dropdown shows up to five recent topics at a time and includes an option to search that filters as you type, making it easy to find the right topic even as your list grows. It’s a small interaction, but one that adds up for frequent posters, leading to fewer interruptions and smoother publishing.

The feature is currently deployed behind a feature flag and in internal testing, with the team continuing to refine the experience before a broader rollout.

Instagram in-app guidance

Project: Instagram has some of the most nuanced requirements and edge cases, which can make posting feel confusing or fragile — especially when errors appear without clear next steps. This project focused on adding clearer, more proactive guidance so creators can set up and publish Instagram posts with more confidence.

Team: Daniel P., Esther, and Jess

The team improved several key moments in the Instagram experience, starting with a redesigned connection screen that helps customers more clearly understand the difference between Personal and Professional accounts. By clarifying this early, creators are more likely to connect the right account and avoid issues later.

They also refined composer alerts when attaching media to Instagram posts. The updated alerts use clearer language and more consistent styling, guiding customers toward the right next step instead of feeling like hard errors or blockers.

Finally, the team introduced a proactive alert mechanism that can be toggled on during known Instagram video error spikes. When issues are detected, creators uploading videos are guided toward a more stable connection option before a post fails — helping prevent frustration rather than reacting to it after the fact.

Together, these changes make the Instagram experience feel calmer, clearer, and more supportive — especially in moments where confusion or errors are most likely to occur.

An in-app changelog to share updates more easily

Project: Customers want a clear, reliable way to understand what’s changing in Buffer — without needing to hunt for updates or piece together announcements. This project focused on creating a more transparent, consistent, and accessible changelog experience directly inside the product.

Team: Kateryna, Carlos, Juliet, Åsa, and Mike E., with support from Sofía

The team built a fully custom changelog system inside Buffer that allows updates to be created, edited, and published directly in the app. Each entry includes a live preview, rich formatting, and optional cover images, making it easier to share product changes clearly and consistently.

Customers now see a subtle in-app notification when there’s something new, without being overwhelmed. The system tracks which updates have been seen, supports different audiences (alpha, beta, or everyone), and brings historical changelog entries into one place for continuity.

Beyond the tooling itself, the team also established guidelines and templates to keep changelog entries clear, useful, and on-brand — along with a regular cadence for sharing updates. Together, this work strengthens Buffer’s commitment to transparency and helps customers stay informed about how the product is evolving over time.

3. Reducing support friction with better tools and data

Support teams often spend time solving the same problems repeatedly — not because the answers don’t exist, but because the information is scattered across tools, docs, and systems.

This category focused on giving our Customer Advocates faster access to the right context, smarter tools to diagnose issues, and cleaner data to spot patterns earlier.

AI-powered tool to diagnose failed posts

Project: When a post fails to publish, it’s often frustrating and time-consuming to figure out why — both for customers and for Advocates. This project focused on reducing that friction by making failed post errors easier to understand and troubleshoot, ideally before a customer even needs to reach out for help.

Team: Danny, Jose, and Mick

The team built a new AI-powered diagnostics tool that helps explain failed posts more clearly and suggest next steps. Instead of leaving customers with a generic error, the tool surfaces likely causes and relevant guidance directly from the error message inside the Buffer dashboard.

Alongside the customer-facing experience, the team also created an internal tool for Advocates that pulls in raw post data and context to speed up troubleshooting. Together, these tools reduce the time it takes to diagnose issues and make support conversations more focused and less repetitive.

The long-term goal is to help customers resolve common issues on their own, while giving Advocates better tools for the cases that do require human support. By bringing clearer explanations closer to the moment something goes wrong, this work helps make Buffer feel more supportive — especially in moments that can otherwise feel stressful.

Customer friction analysis

Project: Patterns in support conversations hold valuable insight into where customers get stuck, but that information was previously manual to gather and difficult to access. This project focused on automating how support friction is categorized and making those insights easier to see and act on.

Team: Adam, Eric, Peter, Jenny, and Julian

The team automated the process of extracting support conversations and analyzing them to identify common friction points. Conversations are now processed automatically, categorized, and logged in a shared system rather than living in hidden or manual workflows.

To make these insights more useful over time, the data is now connected to broader customer context and surfaced in a dedicated dashboard. This makes it easier to spot trends, track changes month over month, and understand where product, content, or support improvements could have the biggest impact.

While this work is internal, it directly supports a better customer experience by helping teams identify recurring issues earlier and prioritize improvements more confidently. By turning scattered conversations into visible signals, the project helps ensure customer feedback informs decisions more consistently.

Homegrown customer feedback widget

Project: In-app feedback is one of the most direct ways customers share what’s working — and what isn’t — but our existing widget made it hard to capture detailed context or act on responses meaningfully. This project focused on rebuilding the feedback experience so customers can share richer input and teams can review and follow up more effectively.

Team: Nathan, Julia, Hailley, and Jakub

The team rebuilt Buffer’s in-app feedback widget to support more thoughtful and actionable responses. Customers can now categorize their feedback, write freely without character limits, and upload images or videos to better show what they’re experiencing.

On the receiving end, feedback is automatically routed to a shared Google Sheet, making it easier to review, collaborate, and spot patterns over time. This removes friction from the feedback loop and helps ensure customer input doesn’t get lost or siloed.

Beyond the UI changes, the team also established a recurring product review process so this feedback is treated with the same level of care as feature requests and support conversations. While the new widget isn’t live to customers just yet, it’s complete, low-risk, and moving toward beta — setting a stronger foundation for listening and learning at scale.

4. Helping creators succeed, not just use the product

Many customers come to Buffer with a clear goal: they want to grow as creators. This category focused on supporting that goal more directly — through education, guidance, and reusable systems that make consistency easier.

Rather than treating content success as separate from the product, these projects bring creator support closer to where customers already are.

Connecting blog content to the Help Center

Project: Buffer users often visit the Help Center looking for answers, but the solution isn’t always technical. This project focused on connecting strategic blog content with Help Center articles so customers can find deeper guidance — such as planning, strategy, and interpretation — when they need it.

Team: Kirsti, Kelly, and Pierre

The team audited high-traffic Help Center articles and mapped them against existing blog content to identify where a blog post could meaningfully support someone already looking for help. The goal was to surface the most relevant educational resources without asking customers to search for them.

By the end of the week, they added 3 to 5 curated recommended resources to 47 Help Center articles, giving readers a clear path to go deeper into topics like content planning, posting strategies, and analytics interpretation.

To make this work sustainable, the team also created systems behind the scenes — including a Notion database of evergreen blog posts organized by category, automatic UTM generation for tracking links, and clear documentation so future connections can be added consistently. They also set up a dashboard to track weekly traffic from Help Center articles to blog posts, creating visibility into which resources are actually helping customers move forward.

New Creator Crash Course

Project: Many creators want to grow consistently, but most advice online focuses on hacks, virality, or chasing trends. This project focused on creating a calmer, more sustainable resource that helps creators reduce decision fatigue, build intentional habits, and learn from their work over time.

Team: Sabreen, Suzanne, Alicja, Simon, and Amaan

The team created The Creator Playbook by Buffer, a practical, people-first course designed to support creators at every stage. The course walks through choosing a clear focus, building sustainable posting rhythms, repurposing content thoughtfully, developing recognizable formats, using AI responsibly, and learning from results without spiraling or burning out.

The playbook provides a repeatable system that creators can return to as their goals, capacity, and platforms change. It also sets a strong foundation for how Buffer can continue building high-quality educational resources grounded in lived creator experience — not trends or shortcuts.

Template Library campaign system

Project: Running community and content campaigns through the Template Library often required custom setup and repeated engineering work. This project focused on building a reusable system that makes it easier to launch, manage, and rotate template campaigns — without starting from scratch each time.

Team: Tami, Eduardo, Andreas, and Kate

The team introduced a more intentional release system for the Template Library, starting with three clear release states that reflect how templates are actually published. Each state has defined behavior and consistent banner designs across light and dark modes, helping releases feel more predictable rather than one-offs.

They also built a dedicated campaign database with simple setup logic, making it possible to manage ordering, timing, and visibility in one place — without ongoing engineering support. When no focused campaign is running, the system now surfaces underused or less-seen templates by default, giving more of the library a chance to be discovered.

Alongside this, the team refined how programs and collections work, including clearer labeling, cleaner transitions, and better handling of overlapping releases. To support future use, they shipped an explainer that walks through how a template release flows from setup to live, laying the groundwork for teams to run campaigns end-to-end on their own.

AI-generated alt text for images

Project: Most images shared on social media don’t include alt text, which makes content less accessible for people who rely on assistive technology. This project explored whether AI could help generate meaningful alt text — reducing the effort required from creators while improving accessibility for their audiences.

Team: David, Martín G.M., with support from Dave, Nathan, and Esther

The team improved the alt text experience in Buffer by making it clearer and easier to save manual updates, and by introducing AI-assisted alt text generation as a progressive enhancement. The goal wasn’t to replace human judgment, but to support creators in adding alt text where it might otherwise be skipped.

Early work focused on handling nuance — such as distinguishing between decorative and meaningful images, and understanding when an image adds value in context. In promising cases, the AI can recommend leaving alt text empty when an image doesn’t meaningfully contribute, helping avoid noise as well as omission.

This exploration also informed broader improvements to how AI is used within Buffer, opening the door to more flexible model choices over time. Overall, the project supports a more inclusive social experience while keeping accessibility practical and approachable for creators.

5. Creating smoother onboarding and re-engagement moments

First impressions matter — but so do second chances.

This category focuses on improving how customers experience Buffer when they return, join a team, or interact with billing and account workflows. The goal was to make these moments feel clearer, more relevant, and more human.

A smoother reactivation experience

Project: When customers return to Buffer after some time away, the first few moments matter. This project focused on reducing visual clutter and interruptions in the dashboard so returning users can get oriented quickly and get back to what they came to do.

Team: Ross, Sofía, and Rathes

The team improved how banners and announcements appear in the Buffer dashboard, especially for returning customers. They reduced the number of pop-ups users have to dismiss, removed outdated banners, and introduced clearer prioritization so important messages don’t stack or compete for attention.

They also added smarter logic to banners, including expiry dates and account-based visibility, so messages feel more relevant and timely. With the new in-app changelog handling feature announcements, the dashboard experience is now calmer and more focused — making it easier for customers to jump straight into their work.

Alongside these improvements, the team explored future ideas for reactivation, including a more intentional “welcome back” moment that highlights what’s changed since a customer last used Buffer and guides them toward a clear next step. Together, this work lays the foundation for a more thoughtful, supportive experience when customers return.

Team onboarding improvements

Project: New team members joining a Buffer organization were often running into small but meaningful friction during onboarding — especially around permissions, access, and what to do next. This project focused on making team onboarding clearer, more supportive, and better aligned with how people actually build a posting habit together.

Team: Maggie, Darcy, and Raf

The team refreshed the entire team onboarding email series to reduce confusion and improve relevance. The updated flow mirrors Buffer’s Free and Trial onboarding more closely, with a stronger emphasis on habit formation alongside team-specific collaboration features.

They also added smarter personalization and action-based logic to improve timing and reduce redundant messages. Roles and permissions are now explained more clearly, helping teammates understand what access they have — and how to get more — without needing to reach out to support.

To raise the bar on customer care, the series now comes from the Customer Advocacy team and ends with a personal check-in that only sends if signals suggest someone might be stuck. Together, these changes create a calmer onboarding experience that helps new team members get value faster while reducing avoidable support friction.

Billing quick wins

Project: Billing issues tend to surface during high-stress moments — payment failures, renewals, or finance handoffs — where even small friction can create outsized frustration. This project focused on reducing that friction by making billing communication clearer and easier to manage.

Team: Nate, Jacob, Kyle, Mau, with support from Maggie and Amaan

The team shipped several targeted improvements aimed at making billing interactions feel calmer and more predictable. Customers can now use a dedicated billing email address, separate from their account email, making it easier to route invoices and payment notifications directly to finance or accounting teams without manual forwarding.

They also improved billing error messages so customers get clearer guidance on what went wrong and what to do next when a payment fails. This helps reduce confusion and back-and-forth with support during moments that already feel urgent.

While attaching Stripe invoices directly to emails turned out to be larger in scope than CX Week allowed, the groundwork laid during this project sets the stage for safer, smoother invoice delivery improvements in the future. None of these changes are flashy, but together they remove friction at moments that matter most — and make Buffer feel more reliable when it counts.

—

We’re incredibly impressed with everything our team built this week, and we're really looking forward to continuing to shape Buffer into the best tool possible for our customers. We hope these improvements made a difference in your experience. Reach out to us anytime on social media or in our Community with any thoughts or questions!

Delivering consistent mobile experiences is hard.

Between iOS and Android's distinct design languages, different versions of native components, and Buffer's own design language, mobile apps can sometimes feel fragmented. Designers and developers end up speaking different languages, duplicating work, and shipping experiences that feel inconsistent across platforms.

At Buffer, we really felt this friction. Our mobile design workflow wasn't as efficient as it could have been. We spent too much time reinventing the wheel, manually patching together screenshots, and playing catch-up with our web app counterpart. We knew we needed a better way.

So we built one.

Meet 🍿 Popcorn To Go

Buffer's new mobile design system for iOS and Android. It's our answer to the chaos, and it just passed its first major test: helping us ship our iOS app with Apple's new Liquid Glass design language the moment iOS 26 launched back in September 2025.

Let's dig in. 🍿

Why we built it

Before Popcorn To Go, our mobile development process had some painful friction points:

• Miscommunication between design and engineering. Without a shared design language, handoffs were slow and error-prone. Our iOS app ended up with 300+ colors, most of which were slightly different shades of the same color. No source of truth existed.
• Design decisions made on the fly. With no source of truth, engineers were left to improvise and take on-the-fly design decisions to make things work.
• Inconsistent and inaccessible UI. Minor differences crept in between platforms, and even between different screens on the same platform. Our apps didn't feel as polished as they could be, and we weren't fully using the accessibility features built into native components.
• Dated look and feel. With all these things piling up, it became harder to adopt the latest native components or implement changes to Buffer's general look and feel.

These problems started to hold us back. Our vision for Popcorn To Go was simple: create a system that delivers efficiency, consistency, accessibility, and future-proofing, without sacrificing the unique character and advantages that native components bring to a small mobile team like ours.

The goals of Popcorn To Go

We set out with four clear goals:

1. Efficiency for engineering and design teams through standardized components and smart use of native platform components.
2. Unified design language that reduces miscommunication and speeds up iteration.
3. Accessibility baked in by inheriting best practices from iOS and Android's native components.
4. Readiness for platform evolution, like iOS 26's Liquid Glass, so we can move fast when the platforms do.

How it works

At its core, Popcorn To Go is built on two key concepts: tokens and component kits.

Tokens are the design decisions that define your visual language — things like colors, spacing, typography, and border radii. Think of them as the ingredients in a recipe. Instead of hardcoding "use brand green #8FC67D," we define a token like fill-brand that automatically adapts across light mode, dark mode, and different platforms. This means less chance of the wrong color being applied at any point.

Component kits are pre-built UI building blocks (buttons, cards, navigation bars) that use those tokens. They live in Figma for designers and are implemented in code for engineers, creating a shared source of truth.

The tricky part? Balancing platform specificity with cross-platform consistency.

iOS and Android have their own design languages: Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and Google's Material Design. We didn't want to flatten everything into a generic "lowest common denominator" experience. Instead, Popcorn To Go respects each platform's native patterns while maintaining a cohesive Buffer feel.

This approach comes with a bonus: we get to use ready-made components that are stress-tested by the native platforms for accessibility and cross-device compatibility — a huge asset for a two-person mobile engineering team.

Here's how we structured it in Figma:

Token relationships between Figma files across the Web and Mobile design systems

• Mobile/Styles: Our foundation layer with primitive colors and platform-specific tokens. We used Material 3 naming for Android and custom naming for Apple. The primitive colours mirror those in our web app.
• Mobile/Android M3: Components built with Google's Material 3 Expressive language, fully linked to our Android tokens.
• Mobile/iOS & iPadOS 26: Native iOS 26 components using Apple's Liquid Glass design language linked to our Apple tokens.
• Mobile/iOS & iPadOS 18: A lighter-touch kit for the previous iOS version (since we support one version back).
• Mobile/Custom Components: Buffer-specific components that don't exist natively on either platform.

Design operations challenges we solved

Getting this system working smoothly meant tackling some gnarly design operations challenges:

• Figma linking: The biggest challenge we faced was linking primitives. In an ideal world, the primitive colors would come directly from our main design system, Popcorn, and Popcorn To Go would simply map these to Android or Apple-specific tokens. However, Figma's current feature set doesn't support this. We had to create a new primitives file for Popcorn To Go that manually mirrors the web's primitives.

• Token naming: Creating a naming system across web, iOS, and Android that is somewhat streamlined whilst respecting platform-specific conventions.

• Kit styling: Applying our tokens to platform-specific kits while maintaining flexibility for future updates. This required using several handy plugins like Figma Tokens and Variables Importer.

Honestly, it's not the perfect, smoothly connected & humming system every designer dreams of when setting up a design system.

Apple's component kits, in particular, are complex and sometimes inconsistent, whilst Android's token naming is very specific and tricky in its own way. But we landed on pragmatic solutions that work for everyday use and achieve the goals we set out to achieve.

Strategic timing: The iOS 26 test

We launched Popcorn To Go with intentional timing. iOS 26 was on the horizon, bringing Apple's new Liquid Glass design language: a fresh, modern aesthetic with frosted glass effects, refined animations, and elevated visual polish.

By building Popcorn To Go before iOS 26 launched, we positioned ourselves to:

• Be ready from day one when iOS 26 dropped
• Leverage the latest platform capabilities immediately
• Ship our app's visual refresh alongside Apple's new design language for maximum impact.

And it worked. When iOS 26 launched in September, we were ready. Our updated iOS app shipped with both Liquid Glass and Buffer's refreshed brand aesthetic, delivering a polished, modern experience that feels native to the platform while staying distinctly Buffer.

What's next

Popcorn To Go is live and working, but we're just getting started. Here's what's on the roadmap:

Short-term:

• Applying to Android and refining based on feedback on both platforms.
• Expanding token coverage beyond colors (spacing scales, border radii, typography scales).
• Improving discoverability with better documentation.

Medium-term:

• Building out our custom component library with Buffer-specific patterns.
• Creating comprehensive usage guidelines for the system.
• Evolving with platform updates as iOS and Android continue to iterate.

Long-term:

• Keeping pace with platform evolution (iOS 27 and beyond, Material Design updates, etc.).
• Exploring opportunities to bring learnings back to our web design system, Popcorn.

Why it matters

For our designers and engineers, Popcorn To Go means smoother collaboration, faster prototyping, and less time spent on repetitive work. Instead of getting stuck on which colour to use where, teams can focus on solving more complex problems and crafting better experiences.

For Buffer users, it means more polished, consistent, and accessible apps. When design systems work well, users might not consciously notice — but they feel it. Interactions are smoother, the UI is more predictable, and everything just works better.

Raising the bar

Building Popcorn To Go wasn't just about solving today's problems but about setting ourselves up for the future.

Mobile platforms are constantly evolving. Design trends shift. User expectations rise. By investing in a solid foundation now, we're making it easier to keep pace, ship faster, and maintain quality as we grow.

This project was a true team effort: designers, iOS engineers, Android engineers, and product leaders all collaborating to make it happen. It's the kind of work that doesn't always get the spotlight, but it's what enables everything else we build.

We're proud of what we've created, and we're excited to keep building on it. If you want to see Popcorn To Go in action, download our iOS app and check out the new Liquid Glass experience.

Not on an Apple device? Keep an eye out, Popcorn To Go is coming to Android soon!

Here's to smoother collaboration, better apps, and a little more consistency in the chaos. 🍿

Countless nonprofits are doing meaningful work every day, and at Buffer, we want to play a small part in helping them share their stories and amplify their impact online.

To do that, we offer nonprofits a 50% discount, something we've done since the early days of Buffer. While our pricing is already designed to be accessible for everyone, the additional nonprofit discount helps make content creation even more attainable for these organizations focused on the public good.

I'm one of the Buffer teammates who review requests from organizations applying for our nonprofit discount. And, I gotta tell ya, these organizations are incredible! Every time I connect with them, I leave in awe of the incredible impact these organizations are having on their communities.

If you’re curious to learn if your nonprofit is eligible for this discount, head on over to buffer.com/nonprofits. We share what documents you’ll need to send our way. And once you submit the form, you’ll hear back from me, my teammate Nate, or one of our incredible Customer Advocates!

Expanding our nonprofit discount to include libraries

Recently, we received a few nonprofit requests from libraries. Unfortunately, they didn't have the documentation we required in order to receive the nonprofit discount. While I always feel for the organizations that don't meet our criteria, something about libraries being ineligible felt distinctly non-Buffery.

Libraries are deeply aligned with Buffer’s values. After becoming profitable and growing again, we reviewed our non-profit discount. After a quick gut check with our VP of Finance and Operations, Jenny, we agreed that expanding our nonprofit discount to include libraries felt like a natural next step.

We want our customers to feel welcomed and special. This discount can hopefully enable more libraries to use Buffer, which might mean they can reach more folks in their communities about events, books, or other updates, so they can continue to operate.

There are a few reasons this decision was such an easy yes. Let's get into them.

Libraries and books play an integral part in the lives of all Buffer teammates

We're a fully remote company at Buffer, and several teammates choose to work from their local libraries as part of their remote routines.

Additionally, our Founder and CEO, Joel Gascoigne, read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie early in Buffer’s journey. The book had a huge impact on Joel’s life and what Buffer would become. We have based several of Buffer’s values directly on the principles outlined in this book.

And as a remote team, one of the ways our remote team connects is by swapping recent reads in our #culture-books Slack channel.

Libraries embody a core Buffer value: Improve Consistently

One of our six company values is to Improve Consistently. Learning is part of how we operate as a team, and it’s also at the heart of what libraries make possible for their communities. They offer access to information, inspiration, and opportunities to grow — all core to why we see them as natural partners.

Books are woven into our culture

One of Buffer’s long-standing benefits is our unlimited free books program. Books enrich our team, our work, and our curiosity — and libraries make that enrichment possible for everyone.

While teammates can be reimbursed for e-books or physical copies, we also encourage borrowing from local libraries. You can browse what the Buffer team is reading any time at buffer.com/books.

Do you know a library that’s looking to amplify its reach online?

We know many public libraries are doing important work to reach their communities online.

If you know a public library that could use support with its social media efforts, send them here.

We’d love to partner with them and offer a 50% discount to help them keep supporting their impact in the world. 🤓 📚

As an Engineering Manager at Buffer, I write a lot — Slack messages, proposals, code, documentation, and feedback. And as AI tools became part of my workflow, I found myself writing even more.

I've always been slow at typing, and I think better by talking than by writing. It never felt like a big limitation before, but with AI tools, I started feeling it more and more. I'd keep prompts short even when I knew I should add more detail, because typing it all out felt tedious.

Then I tried ChatGPT's voice feature and something clicked. I could include all the context and nuance that I'd normally skip. I wanted that experience everywhere, not just in one app.

So over the last year, I tested four AI-powered speech-to-text tools in my daily workflow. They differ a lot in speed, accuracy, and features. Read on to learn more about how I used each tool, how much they cost, and how I integrate dictation into my workflow.

Superwhisper: Powerful but needs tinkering

Free plan: 15 minutes of dictation per month

Paid plan: $8.49 per month

For over a year, I used Superwhisper and was quite happy with it. It's a solid tool with a lot of customization - you can configure different AI models, custom prompts, and modes for different applications, so it applies different presets in Slack versus a coding IDE, for example.

The subscription was affordable at less than $10 per month, and for a while, it worked well enough. But I ran into two issues. The accuracy wasn't great for my accent (I'm not a native English speaker), and I often needed to make heavy edits after dictating, especially with technical terms. It was also fairly slow - I'd dictate something and then wait for it to process, which interrupted my flow.

I realized I didn't want a tool I needed to tinker with and customize heavily. I wanted something that just worked better out of the box. That's what prompted me to try other options.

VoiceInk: Low-commitment way to try dictation

$25 one-time payment

I tried VoiceInk next, based on a teammate's recommendation. It's a one-time purchase of $25, and it's open-source, which I love supporting.

The user experience is clever - it integrates directly into the macOS notch. It's also fully local, so all processing happens on your device, which is excellent from a privacy standpoint. It has some customization options and was noticeably faster than Superwhisper.

For my needs, the accuracy still wasn't quite there with my accent and speaking style, which is why I kept looking. But if you're new to dictation tools and want to experiment without a subscription commitment, this is a very solid choice. The price point makes it low-risk, and for occasional use or if you have different accuracy needs than I do, it could work really well. Many folks at Buffer use VoiceInk.

Wispr Flow: Fast, feature-rich and polished

Free plan: up to 2,000 words per week

Paid plan: $15 per month

Wispr Flow is the tool I'm currently using.

It's significantly more expensive than the previous options, but the accuracy is noticeably better. It catches technical terms reliably and automatically saves words I've corrected, so it gets better over time.

The biggest difference is speed. It processes your audio while you're still speaking, so the transcription appears almost immediately after you finish. This has been transformative for my workflow - I can stay in flow and context switch much less frequently.

It also handles multiple languages smoothly, which many other tools don't. I occasionally need to switch between English and Ukrainian (my native language), and Wispr Flow manages this without any issues.

At $15/month, it's the priciest option I tested, but the performance and reliability have been worth it for daily professional use.

Willow Voice: Great quality, but fewer features

Free plan: up to 2,000 words per week

Paid plan: $15 per month

Willow Voice is similarly priced to Wispr Flow and has many of the same benefits - it's quite fast and has pretty good accuracy. For my particular use cases, it was slightly slower and slightly less reliable than Wispr Flow, but not by a huge margin.

It feels like they're a bit earlier as a company, and some features I expected weren't there yet. I'm keeping an eye on it, but I settled on Wispr Flow since it was slightly better in most of the aspects that mattered to me.

✏️ One thing to note: for tools like Superwhisper and VoiceInk that run locally, speed depends on which AI model you choose. Larger models tend to be more accurate but slower to process.

How I'm using dictation in practice

Dictation quickly became a daily part of my work. Here are the ways it has been showing up in my work in practice:

AI prompting

For the most part, I've stopped typing AI prompts when using AI agents for coding or in chat interfaces. This has been the biggest unlock and time saver for me.

It's also made my prompts more nuanced and detailed compared to when I type them, which has improved the AI outputs as a result. When typing, I tend to keep things brief out of convenience. When dictating, I naturally provide more context and explanation.

Brain dumps and note-taking

When I have something on my mind, I typically dictate it quickly to save the context and come back to it later. This could be project ideas, reflections after meetings, or problems I'm thinking through.

I'm not trying to create polished writing in these moments - just capturing thoughts in a format I can revisit. The speed of dictation makes this practical in a way that typing often isn't.

Messages and quick replies

I sometimes dictate shorter messages*,* too, though this varies. Dictation works particularly well for longer explanations where I need to provide context. For very short replies or messages with lots of formatting and links, typing is usually still faster.

Custom workflows

I've also developed some specific workflows around dictation. I have a few custom AI commands in Raycast that process dictation and then format it in different ways.

One use case I've found particularly valuable is for interviewing. We've been on a hiring push at Buffer, so I've been doing a lot of interviewing. After an interview, I have an AI command in Granola where I dictate my thoughts and impressions, and it structures them as written feedback for the internal notes. This has streamlined that process significantly.

Reflections and recommendations

I've learned a lot throughout this process. Here are a few reflections and recommendations if you're just getting started with dictation or if you're looking for a new tool:

• Speed has a much bigger impact on usability than I anticipated. Those few seconds of waiting for processing add up quickly and break your flow in ways that aren't immediately obvious until you experience a faster tool.
• I generally process things by talking about them. Dictation tools help me think through problems and find the right words a lot faster than typing does. If you're someone who thinks out loud, this might be transformative for your workflow as well.
• This isn't about replacing typing entirely. Different contexts call for different tools. I've found dictation most valuable for AI interactions, capturing thoughts quickly, and longer-form explanations. For quick replies, formatted text, or collaborative editing, typing often remains more efficient.
• If you're curious about trying dictation tools, I'd recommend starting with VoiceInk, given the low commitment. If you find yourself using it regularly and the limitations become frustrating, Wispr Flow has been worth the investment for daily professional use for me.

If you give any of these tools or tips a try, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

P.S. This post was, in big part, dictated 😉

At Buffer, we build with customers, not just for them. If you’ve seen my LinkedIn posts asking for quick chats, that’s why. Real conversations sharpen our product thinking, so whenever we start exploring a new idea, we talk to the people using Buffer every day.

As a product manager focused on how our users create content, these conversations are particularly helpful in understanding how users come up with ideas and where Buffer fits into their workflows.

As we explored improvements to Buffer’s content creation and scheduling experience, I spoke with 30+ users across industries and goals: solopreneurs, team managers, and creators growing personal brands. We wanted to understand how they plan, create, and publish, and where Buffer fits in that flow.

These conversations clarified our users’ needs and reminded us that behind every post is a person balancing creativity, consistency, and chaos. Below are the big themes we heard and how we’re using them to shape Buffer’s roadmap.

Many people still view Buffer just as a scheduling tool

Across interviews, one theme that came up again and again is that people love Buffer for its reliability and ease of scheduling. It’s what keeps them coming back, even as their social strategies evolve.

That’s great to hear, but it also reveals an opportunity. Scheduling is a strength of ours, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. We’re working to evolve Buffer from a scheduling app into a true social workspace. 

Imagine opening Buffer to brainstorm post ideas, collaborate with teammates, draft captions, plan campaigns, and review performance — all in one tab.

For many of the creators we spoke to, that kind of connected workflow is exactly what they’ve been piecing together manually using multiple apps. Our goal is to make that experience seamless within Buffer, and something we'll be working towards in the coming months.

Organizing content is harder than it should be

A recurring theme across nearly every conversation was content organization. Creators often have a mix of ideas, drafts, and scheduled posts, but finding what they need can take effort.

People told us things like:

• “Sometimes I can’t remember if I already published an Idea.”
• “I wish I could search all my content in one place.”
• "I thought I saved a draft, but I have no idea where it went."

We’ve felt this ourselves. We have added a lot of powerful features to Buffer over the years, but they don’t always feel as connected as they could be, and sometimes it can be hard to keep track of your content. We’re exploring ways to make organization smoother and reduce friction between related concepts like Ideas and Drafts.

Our vision is to make Buffer not only the single source of truth for your content, but one that’s easy to navigate, organize, and understand.

External tools are part of every workflow

For many users, there’s always another tool in the mix, like Notion, Trello, Canva, or even a simple Google Doc.

Many creators plan or brainstorm elsewhere, then bring content into Buffer to schedule. And honestly, that’s okay! The best creators build systems that work for them. Rather than trying to replace those tools, we see this as an opportunity to meet users where they already work, through better integrations and smarter import options.

That’s one of the reasons we’re investing in our public API. We want Buffer to sit at the intersection of the tools you use, helping you seamlessly connect to and share your content from wherever it resides.

Imagine being able to pull an idea from your Notion database straight into Buffer, or automatically import a design from Canva into a media library. The goal isn’t to trap your content inside Buffer; it’s to help it move more freely between the tools you love, and share with the world what you've made.

If you’re reading this and have an app, system, or workflow you’d love to connect to Buffer, we’d love to hear from you. These conversations are exactly how new ideas, and new integrations, begin.

Visual clarity wins over complex features

We’re currently working on updates to the look, feel, and flow of our composer. When we showed users early prototypes, one thing stood out immediately: simplicity and visual clarity matter more than complex functionality.

That doesn’t mean we’re abandoning advanced workflows or customization. But we’ve learned that power shouldn’t come at the cost of usability. 

At Buffer, we’re committed to supporting individual creators and small businesses. Many of our users are just getting started with social media, and they rely on Buffer not only to post but also to learn what works. We don't want them to get lost in the nuance, but rather feel empowered to focus on what really matters: posting consistently, and connecting authentically with their audience.

Knowing this, we’re focused on making Buffer even more intuitive and visually cohesive. We've got some great updates on the horizon, and I'm excited for you to see them!

AI should support creativity, not replace it

We also asked users how they feel about AI in their content process. What we learned was fairly consistent across users: most aren’t looking for AI to write their posts. They want it to help with the process.

That resonates with how we're approaching and refining our use of AI in Buffer. We want it to be a creative assistant that helps refine your ideas, not replace your voice.

Think grammar and tone suggestions, platform-specific optimization, or performance insights, not robotic captions. We want you to find your own flow, create authentic and engaging content, and develop meaningful connections. AI can help you get there, but it shouldn't be the end result. 

Where we’re headed

These insights aren't comprehensive of everything we've got planned at Buffer, but they're a glimpse into how we're thinking about certain aspects of the platform. 

We want Buffer to be more than a social scheduling tool; we want it to be a social productivity tool. A space where you can brainstorm, organize, publish, analyze, and engage, all without friction. 

We've got some exciting changes on the horizon, all in support of making Buffer the most intuitive, delightful, and connected social media tool out there.

And if you ever see me post on LinkedIn asking for a quick chat, now you know why.

At Buffer, security has always been a balance: keeping our customers’ accounts safe while making login as seamless as possible for our global user base.

A few months ago, we made a decision that might sound surprising — we removed SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) and moved fully to email-based verification.

It wasn’t a change we took lightly. SMS has long been seen as the standard for 2FA. But over time, the drawbacks began to outweigh the benefits.

Here’s the story of how we got there, what the transition looked like, and what we’ve seen since.

Why we moved away from SMS

SMS-based 2FA has long been considered a security standard, but our team discovered several critical issues that made us reconsider:

Security vulnerabilities were more common than expected

SIM swapping attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, allowing attackers to hijack phone numbers and bypass SMS-based security.

Additionally, SMS messages travel unencrypted through multiple carriers, creating potential interception points.

Costs were scaling unsustainably

Every authentication SMS costs money, and with our growing user base, these seemingly small fees were adding up to hundreds of dollars monthly. International SMS rates made this even more challenging because our global user base.

International regulations and Sender ID requirements

SMS regulations vary dramatically by country, making compliance a constant challenge. Each country has different requirements for Sender IDs (the name that appears as the sender of an SMS), with some requiring pre-registration that can take weeks or months to complete.

For example, Singapore requires business verification documents, India demands a template pre-approval process, and the UAE has strict content restrictions.

Managing these requirements across 100+ countries created an enormous administrative burden that grew with each new regulation.

Additionally, failing to comply with any local regulation could result in messages being blocked, and ultimately customers being unable to log into Buffer.

Third-party dependencies created failure points

We relied on SMS gateway providers that occasionally experienced outages, delivery delays, or rate-limiting issues.

When these services go down, our users can not access their accounts—a critical problem for a tool that powers social media strategies worldwide.

Why email made more sense

When we looked for alternatives, we realized we already had a stronger option: email.

So instead of just removing SMS and calling it a day, we reimagined our authentication flow by incorporating email as another venue.

We implemented time-limited, single-use verification codes sent via email with enhanced security headers and encryption. Our email infrastructure, which we already maintained for notifications and updates, proved more reliable than third-party SMS gateways.

We also added rate limiting and anomaly detection to prevent abuse.

The unexpected benefits of switching to email

The transition delivered improvements beyond our initial expectations:

• Security actually improved. Email accounts typically have more robust security options than phone numbers, including their own 2FA, recovery options, and activity monitoring. Users maintain better control over their email accounts than their phone numbers, which can be transferred without their knowledge.
• Support tickets decreased. We saw a drop in authentication-related support requests. Users no longer struggled with international SMS delivery issues, changed phone numbers, or carrier-specific problems.
• Development velocity increased. Our engineering team no longer needs to maintain integrations with the SMS provider, debug delivery issues across different carriers, or handle country-specific SMS regulations.

How we rolled out the switch

Making this transition required careful planning.

We communicated the change to users well in advance, explaining the security benefits and addressing concerns. We provided detailed migration guides and temporarily supported both methods during the transition period.

For users who strongly preferred SMS, we helped them understand that modern email security, especially with providers like Gmail or Outlook that offer robust protection, provides equal or better security than SMS.

We also enhanced our email delivery infrastructure to ensure reliability, implementing redundant email service providers and monitoring delivery rates closely.

The right choice for Buffer

This decision won't be right for every company. Services that don't have users' email addresses or that serve demographics with limited email access might need different solutions. However, for Buffer — where every user already has an email account associated with their profile — this change aligned perfectly with our needs.

Three months after the transition, the results speak for themselves: a reduction in authentication-related support tickets, and significant monthly savings that we've reinvested in product improvements.

Looking ahead

Removing SMS authentication initially felt like swimming against the current, but it forced us to think critically about security theater versus actual security. Sometimes the "standard" solution isn't the best solution for your specific context.

We're continuing to explore additional authentication options, including support for hardware security keys. But our email-first approach has proven that simpler can indeed be more secure.

We share these kinds of stories because we know other teams face similar tradeoffs. Have you reconsidered a “standard” security practice recently? We’d love to hear from you on our social media! Find us @buffer everywhere and follow Carlos on LinkedIn here.

I’ve been carrying the same Patagonia Toromiro for the best part of a decade.

I bought it ahead of our company retreat in Madrid more than eight years ago, and since then it’s been a faithful companion through international travel, coffee shop work sessions, and countless trips (it just about holds enough for a week away, and still fits under an airline seat). It’s simple, tough, and functional.

But recently it’s started to show its age, helped along by my dog, who chewed on the straps during his teething phase. Those little scars make me smile now, but they’re also a reminder that this bag has been through a lot, and that it might finally be time to replace it.

My first thought was to buy the same bag again. But when I discovered Patagonia had discontinued the Toromiro, I started hunting for an alternative.

Ahead of our most recent company retreat, it hit me: the best place to find advice wasn’t gear review sites, it was my colleagues. Remote workers take their bags seriously, and every choice carries a mix of practicality, taste, and lessons learned the hard way.

Here’s what I learned from my teammates at Buffer about the best bags for remote work.

Style vs. function (or both?)

One big theme that came through clearly from my colleagues is that a bag needs to work hard and look good. Tami, for example, uses two different bags depending on the context: an Away Active Daypack for travel, and a Manu Atelier Le Cambon when she’s “working outside” locally. “Backpacks are too ‘high school’ for me,” she joked, though she admits the comfort trade-off is worth it when traveling.

Diego also prioritizes aesthetics. He carries a Coach purse for day-to-day use, pairing it with a Muji carry-on when traveling. “Honestly, it’s not very practical,” he admitted, “but I just do it because I think it’s better looking. I’m prioritizing fashion over confident practicality.”

Suzanne, meanwhile, has found the sweet spot. Her CALPAK Kaya gives her “style and function,” carrying everything she needs but nothing more, keeping it lightweight and easy to use. As she puts it: “I get loads of compliments on it!”

Sometimes the best bag choice isn’t deliberate at all. Arek bought a Jack Wolfskin TRT 65L hiking pack, which came with a detachable 10L daypack. He only used the big hiking bag once or twice, but the small detachable backpack became his everyday companion, traveling with him around the world. It fits his laptop, works great for city life and hikes, and even has fun extras like a built-in bottle opener. His friends say he’s permanently attached to it.

Bags with history

Another surprise was just how long some of these bags have lasted. Octa has been using the same Incase shoulder bag for 11 years. It’s compact, durable, and still protects his laptop—he once saw it fall from an airplane overhead bin, only to find the laptop unharmed.

Hailley has carried her Knomo Beauchamp Backpack 14 for nearly a decade and still loves its timeless design and practicality. Suzanne still owns her North Face backpack from college, now 19 years old and still in regular rotation for travel. And Eric stuck with his Moshi bag for six years, only switching recently after the zipper finally gave out - though in a testament to quality, the company replaced the whole thing under its 10-year warranty.

Clearly, it’s not just me who is hanging on to a much-loved bag.

Packing habits and hard lessons

My colleagues aren’t just picky about their bags; they’re also full of clever tips and stories, which turned out to be the insightful part of our conversations. Amanda realised that her new Stubble & Co bag had a side zip to the laptop compartment when her laptop nearly slipped out of it. A quick catch saved it from teammates who saw it about to fall. Andy, one of Buffer’s many photography enthusiasts, also quickly learned to double-check his zippers after a camera lens almost fell out of his Peak Design backpack mid-trip.

Daisy swears by compartments: her Blast Quick Access backpack has made her, in her words, “an organization nerd,” keeping essentials like chargers, passport, and headphones exactly where she needs them. Kelly’s approach is to use the same packing list every trip, always putting the most important items (passport, wallet, phone) at the top of both the list and her bag, a North Face Jester backpack, so they’re easy to check off and grab quickly.

Several people shared lessons about packing less. “Always pack less than you think you need,” says Hailley. Tami echoed this: “I’ve slowly been unlearning overpacking.” Diego takes this further, suggesting leaving up to a quarter of your bag empty to make space for gifts or purchases along the way. Almost everyone mentioned water resistance as non-negotiable, whether to survive a rainy commute or just the inevitable spilled coffee. And Eric offers the most pragmatic tip of all: “Always put a couple of pairs of underwear and a charger in your backpack if you’re flying - you never know if your suitcase will go missing.”

My takeaway

Talking to my colleagues reminded me that the right bag is about more than specs. For remote workers, a bag becomes part of daily rituals and big adventures, carrying not just laptops and chargers but years of memories.

For now, my Toromiro is sticking with me. It’s had a bit of a freshen up in the washing machine, and although it’s still a little battered, it does the job. When the time comes to replace it, I’ll have plenty of inspiration from my teammates - here’s my checklist for my next remote bag:

• Is there capacity for unexpected extras (like gifts or gear)?
• Is it water-resistant enough for rain (or spilled coffee)?
• Does it have compartments where I need them, without too much “faff”?
• Does it hit the sweet spot of looks, practicality, and durability?
• Will it survive years of travel, and does it have a solid warranty?
• Do zippers, straps, and closures feel reliable?
• If I can’t check it out in real life before purchasing, is there a solid returns policy?

Recently, we realized our way of calculating MRR and ARR wasn’t giving us the clearest picture of our business.

A few months ago, we made the decision to cancel the Buffer subscriptions of 1,361 inactive annual legacy subscriptions. We let those customers know they can always use Buffer for free or sign up for an annual plan again.

After sending that email and canceling the annual plans, we braced for a $14,000 monthly recurring revenue (MRR) drop. But the numbers didn’t budge.

We knew something was off when we didn’t see the immediate impact of cancelling those subscriptions. Instead, those cancellations were being stretched across the next 12 months, tied to each customer’s renewal date.

That didn’t sit right with us. Those customers’ accounts had already been cancelled. Why should their revenue still be counted as if nothing had changed?

Here’s how we changed our calculations to get a clearer picture of Buffer’s finances and a faster feedback loop on how customer experience drives growth.

The change: recognizing churn immediately

Until now, when customers cancelled their Buffer subscription, we continued counting their revenue until the end of their paid period. For example, someone cancelling halfway through an annual plan would remain ‘active’ until the twelve months ended. This method is common in analytics tools, like Chartmogul, because API limitations make it hard to track cancellations immediately. We’ve put in the extra work to overcome that limitation, so our MRR and ARR now reflect cancellations in real time, making our numbers more accurate and responsive.

Going forward, we’re recognizing churn the moment it happens, at the exact point a customer churns. By definition, MRR is meant to reflect the future expectation of monthly recurring revenue. If a customer cancels today, they’re gone. The revenue isn’t “recurring” anymore.

This shift has an immediate impact: our reported MRR/ARR is lower. To put this into perspective, we reported that our closing numbers for July were $1.93M MRR ($23.1M ARR). Those numbers have now been adjusted to $1.84M MRR and $22M ARR.

Today in September, our MRR sits around $1.87M ($22.4M ARR). That’s below some of our recent milestones, like celebrating $23M in ARR and crossing 70,000 paid subscribers. But it’s also a more accurate, real-time reflection of Buffer’s revenue and customer count.

Recognizing churn immediately gives us a clearer picture of the business and a faster feedback loop on how customer experience drives growth. When customers leave, we see it right away. And when they stay, that loyalty shows up more clearly, too.

We’re still syncing the data, but going forward, you’ll see a dip on August 3rd in our transparent metrics when we cancelled those 1,361 inactive annual Buffer subscriptions.

Choosing smaller, more accurate numbers

“We’re doing this because we believe having this responsiveness baked into our metrics will serve us in providing a superior experience.” - Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO of Buffer

The decision to recognize churn immediately wasn’t a correction or a fix to a mistake. It was a deliberate choice to move away from the default in favor of what we believe is a higher-quality, more transparent methodology.

It’s also a bold choice.

Many companies prefer delay recognizing churn until the end of a customer’s paid period. This makes the reported numbers look larger for longer. We’ve chosen the opposite: to reflect cancellations right when they happen. The result is smaller numbers, but ones that feel more accurate, transparent, and true to our customers’ experience. And because we’re independent, we have the freedom to report in the way we believe is most meaningful.

For us, this is about being genuinely customer-centric and shaping every aspect of how we operate so that it reflects the real experiences of our customers.

What this means going forward

• Our MRR and ARR charts will now move more responsively with customer behavior, both growth and churn.
• Some of our past milestones will look different (we’ll be updating the historical data on our Open page to reflect this methodology).
• Fluctuations may appear sharper, especially around month-ends or when multiple cancellations happen on the same day. We see this as a feature, not a bug: it gives us even more incentive to reduce friction and improve the product experience.

Staying true to transparency

We know this might feel unusual. It’s not common for SaaS companies to voluntarily adopt a methodology that lowers their headline numbers. But as soon as we realized this would improve how we use the numbers, we wanted to share it with you. We believe it strengthens the accuracy and transparency of our reporting, bringing us closer to our customers, which is ultimately our most important goal.

At Buffer, transparency has always been one of our guiding principles. That means sharing not only the highs of our journey, but also the changes we make along the way as we learn and grow, on our way to building the healthiest and most customer-centric company possible.

In the long run, we believe this change will make us a stronger, more resilient company. It gives us clearer insight into the impact of our product and customer experience work, and it ensures that when we celebrate future milestones, they’ll be rooted in the most accurate reflection of our business.

One of the first hires we made at Buffer was for our customer support team, and that was intentional. We've always wanted every person who reaches out to feel genuinely valued and heard, striving to set the bar for exceptional customer support. That commitment to excellence in customer support hasn't changed in the nearly 15 years we've been in business. Over the years, we've built a team where everyone takes ownership of the customer experience and actively seeks new ways to deliver stand-out experiences.

Buffer’s customer support team includes 18 talented teammates from seven countries, and the average tenure for our team is nine years. Through thoughtful planning with our four-day work week, we maintain 24/7 coverage for our customers, and this balance reflects our commitment to both our team and our customers.

Read on to learn more about how we approach customer support and how we work together. 

Our approach to customer support: The Hospitality Mindset

“We believe in the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect.” -Will Guidara

A key piece of Buffer’s Customer Advocacy team is our hospitality mindset. We adopted this mindset to level up the support experience and to provide clarity to our why, how, and what. 

A hospitality approach in customer support means that we strive to create standout, above-and-beyond, and personal experiences in every customer conversation. While many of our support conversations stem from customer friction or frustration, we believe we can still deliver an encounter that leaves a lasting impression. Our goal is to be the company that we would want to go to for customer support if we needed something. 

To keep this approach top of mind, we start by being curious and intentional in every customer conversation. This mindset also means that we look for ways to personalise and connect during each interaction.

We’re working toward having fewer conversations about user friction and bugs by prioritizing product quality even more than usual right now. Our goal is to one day have more conversations with customers who reach out because they want to connect with us, whether to learn how to get the most out of Buffer, explore social media strategies, or share their successes and challenges. We always love solving problems for our customers, but the connections are what make our work meaningful.

We draw a lot of inspiration from The Frictionless Organization, a book written by Bill Price and David Jaffe. 

Our guiding principles 

For each customer interaction we have with customers, we also have three guiding principles:

• Awareness (I understand and see you):  Taking the time to really see the customer enables us to look between the lines for areas of frustration, opportunities to empower customers further, or doorways to build a deeper relationship.
• Clarity (I want to make sure you understand me): Our communication is our only medium to show our personality and ensure our customer is looked after. We provide the clearest path toward a resolution possible, focusing on how we can make it simple for customers to get to an answer.
• Empowerment (I can help you): We aim to be experts, not only as customer service professionals but also as experts at our product and how customers can successfully use it. We go above and beyond to find information for customers, and we're neither afraid to ask for help nor lean on each other to provide an above-and-beyond experience.

What it’s like to work on Buffer’s Customer Advocacy team 

Each company approaches customer support differently; here’s what we do at Buffer. 

A team built on trust, ownership, and flexibility

What makes our culture truly special is the foundation of high trust, high ownership, and flexibility. Our team feels a high level of ownership of the customer experience at Buffer and have a deep understanding of their own impact as a support team member. 

We trust our teammates to create meaningful connections with every person they interact with. Most importantly, we trust each other to follow our instincts and make decisions that put our customers first. While we have a comprehensive internal FAQ and Wiki, we encourage our team to do what’s right for the customer. This model means everyone has significant autonomy in how they manage their work and relationships with customers. 

This level of ownership over the customer experience is rare and transformative. We recognize that ownership and decision-making skills come easier with experience, and that's not something we take for granted. We work closely as a team to support each other with questions, gut checks, and "second pair of eyes." This happens across Slack, Zoom calls, and even in notes in HelpScout. As team members build up a deeper understanding of our product, our customers, and our culture, their confidence and independence naturally grow.

When someone is newer on the team, they tend to ask for more advice, which we welcome and encourage. 

Rather than having rigid processes in place, we lean heavily into trusting our team and the collaborative support approach we have in place. This foundation of trust we place in each other comes through in the service that we provide. It’s a joy to do the right thing by customers and that is something that I genuinely believe folks notice.

How we operate without complex hierarchies 

Our team operates without escalation processes or complex hierarchies. We work alongside each other in the Advocacy team and with other teams to deliver the best possible experience. By increasing communication and collaboration, we believe we can improve both the support and product experience. 

We aim to be exceptional 

We have three pillars that are the foundation of how we work and the experience we want to deliver:

• Exceptionally Fast
• Exceptionally Personal
• Exceptionally Informed

These pillars guide our work as a team and help us with goal setting, both as a team and as individuals. 

Working remotely and creating a collaborative culture

Our team spans multiple time zones, and this has created something quite special: we've learned that distance doesn't have to mean disconnection. We've built systems for seamless collaboration that feel more like having teammates right next to you than working across continents.

An ‘open office’ approach 

Slack serves as our virtual office, but it's far more than just a messaging platform. It's where team members pop in to say, "Has anyone else seen this come up?" or "I'm working on this tricky conversation — any thoughts?" Think of it as that open office environment where you can tap someone on the shoulder or call out a question to the room, knowing someone will be there to help.

We're intentional about chatting transparently and openly about any conversations or support issues we're struggling to solve. There's something powerful about this vulnerability — when someone admits they're stuck or unsure, it creates space for the entire team to learn together. We've found that the conversations we struggle with individually often become the ones that teach us the most collectively.

Open communication isn't just how we solve problems; it's how we all get better at what we do. Team members know they can reach out for help the moment they hit a roadblock, and there's never any judgment — just genuine eagerness to figure it out together. Whether someone needs help understanding a technical issue or wants to brainstorm the best way to respond to a frustrated customer, team support is always there.

Collaborating closely across Buffer 

Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. Rather than working in silos, we partner closely with teams across Buffer to identify friction points, enhance the customer experience, and deliver exceptional support. This cross-functional approach fuels continuous growth, both individually and collectively, which directly translates into better experiences for the people we serve.

Our team regularly collaborates with Product, Engineering, Design, and other departments, ensuring customer insights flow naturally through every decision we make. This connection helps the entire company stay grounded in real customer needs.

How our Customer Advocates grow at Buffer 

We believe that customer support is both vital to our business and a fulfilling career choice for team members who genuinely care about helping folks and love solving problems. In our Customer Advocacy team, everyone interacts with customers regardless of their level or role. We focus on creating delightful customer experiences, both by supporting the successful adoption of our product and by digging into bugs and UX issues that need attention.

As the team that connects most with our customers, we have an immense impact on our business. We've built our team around the idea that customer support professionals can both grow and specialize within this area. All team members need a broad foundation in our customer support fundamentals, but from there, they can choose their own growth path. Some remain generalists who excel across many areas, while others develop deep expertise in specialisations like AI, our Help Center, customer education, billing, technical troubleshooting, product development, and internal documentation.

Within our team, individual contributors (meaning teammates who aren’t managers) have a career framework to provide clarity of what growth looks like to support furthering their careers and developing their skills. It is important for us that there are growth opportunities beyond the traditional management track. The framework shouldn't limit anyone to one path—we lean into self-led growth where each team member works with their manager to outline what personal growth looks like for them. The goal is to have clarity about where you may belong while encouraging everyone to find their own role and growth trajectory.

There's a genuine pride that comes with being part of Buffer's support team. Customer experience isn't just a department; it's a company-wide priority that everyone values. 

When you know your work directly impacts people's success and that your company truly invests in support excellence, it creates a sense of purpose that's hard to find elsewhere.

If you’ve been seeing Buffer teammates pop up on your social feeds a lot more lately, it’s not a coincidence. It’s by design! We’ve been intentionally investing in building a team of Buffer creators as a company-wide initiative.

At the core of this work is a simple belief: being creators ourselves will continue to set Buffer up for long-term success. By living the same creator journey as our customers, we can make better product decisions and connect more meaningfully with the people we serve.

Becoming a team of creators is a signature brand bet that we've kicked off in 2025; it’s our way of building Buffer from the inside out.

In this post, I’ll take you behind the scenes of how we’re making it happen. From the systems and workshops we’ve designed to support our teammates, to the early signals of impact we’re already seeing.

The evolution from dogfooding to Team of Creators

Buffer’s story with creation started long before we called it “Team of Creators.”

Back in November 2010, our CEO Founder Joel Gascoigne built the first version of Buffer during a Startup Sprint to solve a problem he was experiencing: he wanted a way to space out when his tweets were sent.

In the early days, we were small, the product was personal, and many teammates were building in public — tweeting often and using Buffer just as our customers did. Creation was woven into the day-to-day in a natural way, but there was no formal structure and no shared expectation.

As Buffer grew, our approach became more intentional through dogfooding — using Buffer internally to publish our own content, test new features, and catch bugs before they reached customers. Dogfooding kept us close to the product and gave us useful feedback loops, but it had its limits. We were using the product, but not necessarily living the customer journey.

The shift to building a team of creators

Team of Creators is a deliberate shift from dogfooding, and a defensible long-term strategy that could be a huge differentiator for Buffer.

We’re no longer just testing our product internally; we’re creating content in public together. That means experiencing the same hesitations, creative blocks, and cold-start challenges our customers face; and learning how to move through them. In the process, we’re building our own voices and consistency; and gaining a deeper understanding of what it takes to grow as creators which ultimately helps us create a better product experience.

Team of Creators is about encouraging every Bufferoo to share their voice in a way that feels natural to them; on social platforms they’re most comfortable with, and in areas they genuinely care about. That might mean a designer sharing their process on Instagram, a marketer offering industry tips on LinkedIn, or a teammate posting their hiking adventures on Threads. It’s not about only posting about Buffer, it’s about building the habit of creating and connecting consistently.

Joel talked about this shift from dogfooding during our June 2025 All Hands, reflecting on how Team of Creators marks a natural evolution in our culture: one that moves beyond transparency into visibility, and invites every teammate to be a storyteller in their own way.

Setting expectations at Buffer

This shift has been intentional, and is a change we're making company-wide. We've had certain teams in the past that naturally worked on becoming creators, but this change is company-wide — every role, every team.

To truly make the vision for our team of creators be a reality, Joel, set a clear expectation that everyone on the Buffer team participates and starts their creator journey; with managers supporting this work along the way.

We’re not just empowering the entire Buffer team to grow their voices on social, build public credibility, and share real stories from behind the scenes. We’re setting a high standard of excellence.

This shift strengthens our culture, builds a stronger bridge to our community, and creates a form of brand differentiation that’s hard to replicate. As Michael Porter writes in What is Strategy?:

“A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.”

Team of Creators is how we preserve that difference; by keeping our people at the center, and learning by doing.

Once we’d made the decision to become a true team of creators, the real work began.

How we built the Team of Creators ecosystem

It’s one thing to set an expectation, it’s another to build a program that people want to be part of, week after week, for the long haul.

Even great ideas can lose steam once the initial excitement fades. For Team of Creators to deliver on its promise, we couldn’t just rely on initial enthusiasm; we needed to build something that would make it easy, energizing, and rewarding for teammates to take part over the long term. That meant creating a strong backbone: clear structure, accessible resources, and ways for teammates to support and inspire one another.

With that end goal in mind, we set out to create a framework that could stand on its own, adapt over time, and truly help Bufferoos build a sustainable habit loop. That also meant making intentional choices about what to prioritize first, and setting up systems we could scale as momentum grew.

Setting up support systems for Buffer creators

Step one was making sure every teammate had practical support, clear pathways, and a place to connect with others doing the same. That foundation came together in several interlocking parts, starting with a dedicated Slack channel.

The Slack channel: #buffer-creators

Slack was the natural choice for this first step since it’s where we already collaborate daily, and we wanted this space to mirror the community spirit we’ve built externally, but within Buffer.

From the very beginning, we kept the comms pace intentional and set the channel up as an active, working space to swap ideas, share wins, ask for feedback, and cheer each other on.

One key piece of the strategy was to keep focus on a human and values-led approach, rather than kicking off any system-based automations or zaps in Slack on day one. Some days that meant asking what content people were planning for the week; other days it was spotting a teammate’s post in the wild; grabbing a screenshot, and sharing it with the link so others could boost it. And always, there were taco emojis — our Slack tradition for celebrating wins, living our values, and marking milestones!

We also made it a point to spotlight teammates who were just starting out as creators or were slightly more introverted. The aim was twofold: encouragement and visibility. Established Buffer creators — those with existing audiences and more creator experience — often joined in, offering platform-specific tips, sharing AI workflows, or breaking down viral post frameworks.

Over time, a set of natural champions emerged: people who consistently offered encouragement, tips, and quick help for anyone navigating the creator journey.

This deliberate early nurturing really paid off.

Today, #buffer-creators is a buzzing nook of experiments, candid conversations, and mutual support. Teammates openly share post drafts, ask for feedback, and celebrate Buffer Streaks from our leaderboard. Many posts have gone from draft to published in a matter of minutes, given the collaborative review process. It’s also become a chance to learn from each other, as teammates watch how different people shape their ideas and bring content to life.

As the space evolved a bit more, we added one light-touch automation — a Monday check-in — to keep the momentum going.

It’s a gentle accountability mechanism that also sparks idea sharing and sets the tone for the week. But the heartbeat of the channel remains the same:

Real people supporting each other, as they grow as creators.

Team of Creators Resources HQ (Notion)

The next big step was level-setting creator knowledge with rich and easy-to-follow resources.

We did not want to assume people knew where to start. We wanted to create something that felt like a light, choose-your-own-path onboarding: easy to dip into, substantial enough to level up.

That became the Team of Creators Resources HQ in Notion; a working library for kickstarting or up-leveling a creator journey.

Inside, teammates could find:

• Clear context for why the initiative exists, why it matters, and simple first steps to get going.
• Actionable guidance on identifying a niche, picking a primary platform, and setting achievable content goals.
• Practical techniques for content batching and scheduling content with Buffer.
• Exercises and strategies for reframing common creator mindset hurdles.
• Platform-by-platform best practices, plus notes on how algorithms tend to behave.
• Repurposing playbooks to help content travel further.
• Tools for packaging content well, aligned to personal brand goals.

Since teammates are balancing this journey with day-to-day work, in a 4-day work week; we were careful to avoid information overload. Throughout the hub, the tone stays warm and precise; pages are short and interactive. We baked in prompts like "Identify your why with these questions" so people could define their purpose at their own pace. We also layered in tips and knowledge share posts from teammates sourced directly from the #buffer-creators Slack threads, which created a nice continuity between where ideas start and where they are documented.

A favorite section in the hub is the Wall of Wins: a curated, daily-updated gallery of real posts from Bufferoos across platforms. It gives quick, visual inspiration and underscores an important truth: showing up counts, whether you are sharing Buffer-related work or something personal you care about.

The Team of Creators Resources HQ usage data tells us that teammates are using it!

Our latest Notion analytics snapshot shows 773 total views since launch, spread widely across the company; evidence that people are returning to the hub as an active working tool, and not a one-time launch document. Hurrah!

Creator Café workshops

After launching the Slack channel and resources hub, we wanted something that would bring teammates together regularly, and in real time. A space where Buffer creators could connect, learn, and ask questions without having to carve out that space themselves.

That’s how Creator Café workshops came to life!

These sessions are designed as relaxed, beginner-friendly virtual meetups for teammates to enter and sustain their creator journeys with more confidence. They’re totally optional, as we’re a fully remote team, but every workshop is recorded and content shared afterwards so no one misses out.

We’re still early in this journey, and have mapped out three waves for the months ahead:

• Wave 1 (foundational): Practical sessions to build early creator habits, overcome mindset barriers, and offer hands-on guidance
• Wave 2 (needs-based): Targeted workshops responding to specific challenges, strategies, or opportunities that surface over time
• Wave 3 (collective themes): Sessions focused on team-wide trends, showcasing successful approaches, and spotlighting creative experiments from teammates

Our first Creator Café was held on July 21st, and it set the tone for what’s to come!

We kicked things off with a tour of the new resources HQ and shared some surprising early results (yay) from our collective posting momentum that got everyone excited. Next, the heart of the workshop was an interactive Figma exercise, complete with “hero’s journey” soundtrack, that invited everyone to map out the hurdles keeping them from posting:

The first board, on the left — a Creator Empathy Map — had four quadrants: Imposter Syndrome, Perfectionism, Not Knowing Where to Start, and Lack of Time/Energy, plus a space for “something else.” Teammates filled it quickly:

• Imposter Syndrome: “I worry my content isn’t original enough.”
• Perfectionism: “I feel like I need to have everything figured out before I share anything.”
• Not Knowing Where to Start: “I have too many ideas and can’t decide which to focus on.”
• Lack of Time/Energy: “By the time I finish my workday, I’m drained and can’t think about creating.”

The second board, on the right — also a Creator Empathy Map — flipped the conversation. For every challenge listed, teammates offered ideas for overcoming it: everything from small mindset shifts to using templates, batching content, or finding an accountability buddy. It was knowledge-sharing at its most organic, with value flowing between creators at every stage of their journey.

We closed the exercise loop with a myth-busting segment on content creation and easing common worries. The session wrapped with an open jam and Q&A, which sparked ideas we’ll carry into the next workshop.

For any workshop we host, the goal is to keep it light and memorable throughout. For this first one, we framed the workshop around a pasta metaphor: content, like pasta, comes in many shapes and styles, with endless “seasonings” (AI tools, personal systems, creative twists) to suit your taste. The feedback was clear; the workshop left teammates more confident, inspired, and ready to experiment.

Today, our approach remains incremental, supportive, and grounded in meeting teammates where they are; with each session building on the last. More to come!

Turning Buffer’s social channels into shared spaces

As more teammates found their rhythm with posting, the next step was to extend that momentum beyond individual accounts.

We wanted to bring more of that creativity, personality, and lived experience into Buffer’s owned social channels; turning them into shared spaces that reflected the people behind the product.

This was a shift in how we saw our brand presence: from being centrally managed by a few faces to being a living, collaborative stream of stories. We began featuring teammate-generated content front and center; everything from industry observations and practical creator tips to behind-the-scenes glimpses of Buffer culture and personal milestones.

For teammates, this became a gentle and accessible way to ease into public content creation. Sharing on the Buffer account meant they could experiment, build confidence, and connect with a wider audience — all while knowing their voice still sounded like them.

For our audience, it meant more authentic, varied storytelling that could never be replicated by a single perspective. It gave our channels a steady flow of fresh content, more faces from across the company, and richer representation of the people and work that make Buffer what it is.

We’ve since expanded that same principle to our blog, inviting anyone at Buffer to contribute. This opens the door for a broader range of voices and experiences to shape our content — from engineers sharing product decisions to designers unpacking creative processes. It’s diversifying the perspectives we share and adding more depth to the conversations we start.

To keep this momentum going, we actively repost and syndicate teammates’ content, highlight their work in ask-me-anything (AMA) style threads, and encourage community-driven dialogue. The result is a feedback loop where our team and our community inspire each other, reinforcing the idea that Buffer’s brand is built by the people in it, and shared by everyone.

Measuring success with data and qualitative impact signals

From the beginning, we knew that measuring the success of Team of Creators couldn’t just be a numbers exercise.

We’re not chasing ad ROI or trying to justify media savings, which is why we deliberately skipped metrics like Earned Media Value (EMV). The story we want to tell is of collective momentum, participation, and building empathy for the people we serve. It’s about the ripple effect that happens when dozens of Bufferoos start showing up consistently, in their own voices.

In a team of 70, you can sense the change almost immediately without ever opening a dashboard. It’s in the rhythm of our feeds, in the conversations we’re having with our community, and in the steady stream of posts we reshare from teammates on Buffer’s brand channels.

We see it in our Wall of Wins, too. It’s updated daily and is a living gallery where anyone at Buffer can see what others are creating. Some posts are Buffer-related; others are deeply personal or rooted in industry expertise. That mix is intentional and we’ve never set the bar at “you must post about Buffer.” The goal has always been to help people create in ways that feel natural, self-led, and sustainable.

Building a dashboard

While the cultural signals have been clear, we also wanted a way to anchor our progress in something more tangible.

Before launch, we set a baseline by pulling data from teammate social accounts connected to Buffer, making sure to only include accounts they posted to themselves (not those managed for freelance or other side projects). This gave us a true picture of the starting point and ensured we were capturing the right volume for the right story.

From there, we built the Team of Creators dashboard; our home for tracking a few key signals:

• Active team members: to measure adoption rate, and see how many people are participating in a given week or month.
• Total team posts: to measure volume and spot spikes tied to launches, events, or cultural moments.
• Median posts per member: to understand posting habits across the team, not just the most prolific voices.
• Total team reach, impressions, and views: to show the collective impact of our content in the wild.

The numbers alone aren’t the whole story, but they give us a powerful lens on what’s happening.

More importantly, the trajectory is upward; participation and reach are both climbing as more people find their rhythm. Next, we’re exploring ways to monitor reach per teammate and track the percentage of weekly posting goals met in Buffer. This will add even more depth to how we measure and share this story.

Leaderboard for encouragement

While tracking numbers is useful, we also wanted a way to celebrate the people behind them, without turning Team of Creators into a high-stakes competition.

That’s where the monthly leaderboard came in!

It’s designed to recognize participation and consistency, not just the biggest reach or the highest engagement. The primary ranking factor is posting streaks, because consistency is a more equitable measure than raw impressions and reach; especially when social following sizes vary widely across the Buffer team.

Alongside streaks, the leaderboard highlights each person’s total posts, likes, reposts, comments and replies, reach, impressions, and views. The intent is to give teammates a fuller picture of their own momentum, while keeping the spirit collaborative.

Next up, we’re building a team leaderboard to see which teams are leading the pack on posting consistency! It’s meant to spark some friendly competition, while keeping the spirit collaborative.

Creator Confidence as a success metric

Consistency matters, but so does how it changes the way you see yourself.

To measure that change, we created a Creator Confidence survey that we’ll run every six months. It asks teammates to rate — on a scale of 0–10 — how confident they feel creating and sharing as a Buffer Creator, how comfortable they are expressing themselves authentically, and how their confidence compares before the support systems existed versus now.

In true Buffer fashion, we’ve made the results fully visible! The survey isn’t anonymous, and every response is shared right inside the Team of Creators Resources HQ. That transparency means we can all see what’s helping, where more support is needed, and what’s possible when we make space for each other’s voices.

Since launching the resources hub, the average teammate confidence score has risen by two full points compared to before the initiative! This is a steady, measurable shift that reflects both the consistency of participation and the comfort people are finding in sharing their own voices.

The results we’re seeing so far

The early signals are encouraging! Participation is high, and people outside Buffer have started to notice “Buffer everywhere” in their feeds.

Bufferoos from across teams are sharing everything from personal reflections to behind-the-scenes looks at their work. Some are building entirely new content niches; others, who once felt more self-conscious about posting, have hit their stride.

There have been many breakthrough moments; posts that took off and led to steady follower growth; and smaller compounding wins that created habit loops, making it easier for teammates to keep showing up.

Since launch, we’ve seen:

• 90% of the team actively participating
• 4132 total posts
• 2,529,156 total reach
• 3,705,897 impressions
• 1,852,648 total views
• 43, median posts per teammate

We’ve also noticed a big shift in how our community engages with us! More and more people are leaning in to help us create buzz around launches and key milestones.

As an example, for the launch of LinkedIn Profile Analytics, Buffer creators and community members posted coordinated teasers ahead of release. It turned the product launch into a company and community wide event, filling feeds with curiosity and enthusiasm. As a result of this, there has also been an uptick in product questions and suggestions directed to specific teammates, signaling that the circle of connection is widening.

The combination of clear expectations, accessible resources, and shared momentum is why the program is holding so strong, long past the initial excitement. The act of creating is no longer something we do “on the side.” It’s embedded in how we build, connect, and show up for the people we serve.

Keeping momentum alive and what’s next

With the systems and structures in place, Team of Creators is still in its early chapters. It’s a long-term strategy, and we’re deliberate about keeping the energy high and the participation steady.

Part of that is celebration. At our monthly All Hands, we spotlight teammates from the leaderboard — moments that always spark smiles and applause. The same spirit lives in our #buffer-creators Slack channel, where encouragement flows daily, and often in the form of taco emojis!

We’re equally intentional about listening. The initiative keeps evolving in response to what creators ask for — whether it’s new resources, one-on-one support, or Creator Café workshops that dig into specific, actionable topics. Soon we’ll be experimenting with lighthearted internal challenges; offering fun, low-pressure prompts to keep creative muscles active.

If you’ve been following along and wondering how something like this might work in your own team; or you’re curious about what we’ll try next, pull up a chair. We’re always happy to share how we’re building, what we’re learning, and where we’re headed next. You can also direct message me on LinkedIn or reach out via my website with any questions!

At Buffer, one of our core values is Focus on Self-Improvement. But a value on its own doesn’t create action. Values need structure and support behind them.

I’m Suzanne, Buffer’s Operations Manager. Part of my role is building and executing the systems that help turn our values into reality. In this article, I’ll share how we support self-improvement at Buffer and how our teammates are tapping into those resources in their own ways.

Let’s take a look behind the scenes.

Growth Mindset Fund

Every teammate at Buffer has access to a $1,000 annual Growth Mindset Fund. The goal is to create a flexible way to encourage self-improvement and skill-building among the team.

The name “Growth Mindset Fund” comes from psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset. Dr. Dweck pioneered the idea that abilities aren’t fixed and that learning and effort can lead to improvement over time.

“In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome . They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues.” Carol Dweck writes in her book, Mindset.

Here are just a few things our teammates have used their Growth Mindset Fund for:

• Courses to build or deepen a skill, specifically ⤵️
  • A course on coding with React
  • An animation on the web course
  • A self-paced workshop on testing accessibility
• One-on-one coaching or mentorship, specifically ⤵️
  • Design mentorship through MentorCruise
  • Accounting coaching through Wyzant
  • Executive coaching with Tiles Collab
• Memberships in professional communities, specifically ⤵️
  • Elena’s Growth Scoop membership
  • Skillshare membership
  • CodeCrafters membership
• Productivity tools or software, specifically ⤵️
  • Blinkist
  • ToDoist
  • Recall

Teammates have also financed conferences using the Growth Mindset and dedicated Conference funds, which I'll cover more in-depth in the next section.

Conferences

For some teammates, learning happens best in person by attending conferences, forming relationships, and hearing from others in the industry.

Each year, we identify a small number of key conferences where Buffer would benefit from having teammates attend. While this list changes, here are a few conferences that we continue to find valuable year after year.

• WWDC
• Meta Connect
• API Days
• GraphQLConf
• Threads API Summit

Buffer fully covers the cost of these, everything from registration to travel, to accommodation, and meals. We see these conferences as strategic investments for both the company and the teammate. Often, our team will even present at these conferences as we love building in public and sharing what we’re learning transparently!

If a teammate wants to attend a different conference not identified on our key conferences list, they can absolutely still do so! We would cover up to $1,000 of conference expenses through the use of their Growth Mindset Fund.

For example, Senior Content Writer Tami Oladipo used her Growth Mindset Fund to go to SXSW London this year (you can read about everything she learned there in this article, if you’re interested!).

Unlimited books

We also believe that reading can be a powerful way to learn and grow.

Every teammate receives a free Kindle when they join Buffer and can expense any digital or audiobooks they choose. No approvals needed. No need to tie it directly to work.

We believe that books of all kinds can expand our perspective and increase our creativity. That’s why we believe in supporting everything from science fiction and romance to leadership books and marketing deep dives.

Curious what we’re reading? Check out buffer.com/books for a peek at our ever-evolving team bookshelf.

Right team 🤝 Right support

Learning looks different for everyone. Learning can even look different every year! Some teammates go deep on one new skill each year. Others dip into new topics month by month. Some prefer solo learning. Others thrive in community. We’ve strived to build a structure that has the flexibility to support all of it.

At the end of the day, no system works without the right people. That’s why, when we’re hiring for open roles at Buffer, we ask candidates to record a short video sharing something they’ve learned recently. This is one of our favorite ways to spot lifelong learners who’ll thrive here. Because while we’ve built the tools and resources to support growth, it’s our teammates’ curiosity, drive, and love of learning that truly bring self-improvement to life.

Over to you

How do you like to learn best — books, courses, conferences, mentorship, something else entirely?

I’d love to hear. Drop a comment and share what’s helped you grow recently.