Buffer's Year in Review 2019

1

Brand-new Buffer product

What a year! Our most massive milestone this year was launching our third product to the world — Analyze! With Analyze, our customers can really dive into their social media analytics by measuring their content performance, creating custom reports, and getting recommendations for growing their reach, engagement, and sales.

Check out analyze

2

New countries represented

We welcomed several new folks to our team — keep scrolling to find out how many! Two of them are the first on our team to represent and live in their respective countries — Brunei and Switzerland. In total, Buffer teammates work and live in 19 countries around the world, from Australia to France to Sri Lanka.

Here's how we structured our fully remote hackathons

4

On-sites

As a fully remote team, we know the importance of getting the team together. In addition to annual retreats for the entire company, we also have annual gatherings of specific teams (like Advocacy, People, Data) to do some focused, in-person work together. This year we had four on-sites – two of them were in Lisbon, Portugal (at different times)!

6

Pets adopted

Four wonderful babies joined the Buffer family this year, and sparked many smiles across the team whenever they popped into a video call. Welcome to the world, Gael, Baylor, Zachary, and Mara! We look forward to seeing you in your Buffer onesies! (Three dads and one mom took family leave to spend time with these adorable babies.)

Read about the pets at Buffer

7

Buffer babies

This year became cuter and cuter as several Buffer babies entered the world throughout 2019! Seven of our teammates (two women and five men) each took off three full months of family leave (yay!) to spend with their new family members.

Learn about our family policy leave

10

New teammates

We loved welcoming 10 new teammates to Buffer this year! We hired across several Buffer teams, with new folks joining us on our People, Design, Engineering, Advocacy, Marketing, and Engineering teams. Keep an eye on our Journey page for any openings we’ll have in 2020!

See our open roles

13

Days Buffer was closed

This year is a record high for us — we’ve closed Buffer (and given teammates some much-deserved time off) for 13 days in 2019! We’ve been closing Buffer at the end of the year since 2017, and this year is no different. Those 13 days also include a long weekend in July, and the day after our annual retreat where we give teammates extra time to relax, travel, and recover from jet lag.

Read more about our closing Buffer

18

Times the whole company met virtually

In addition to meeting up in person during our on-sites and retreats, we also prioritize meeting up virtually online. This year we met up as a whole company 18 times! This included: 7 All Hands, 5 Town Halls, and 6 Gatherings. All Hands are where we get big updates from across the team; Town Halls are Q&As with our CEO, Joel; and Gatherings are casual, topical discussions, just for fun.

Read about how we structure All Hands

40

Events with Buffer speakers

With our teammates spread out across the world, there are plenty of local and international opportunities for speaking engagements. This year, our Buffer team spoke at 40 events across 14 countries!

40.5

Gallons of coffee consumed at retreat

At our annual retreat in San Diego, California this past year, we all gathered in the same place to spend the week collaborating together. In the four days we worked together, we drank 40.5 gallons of coffee! (And 16.5 gallons of tea.)

212

Blog posts published

As reading is hugely important to our team, we wanted to find a way to support International Literacy Day on September 8th, a day focused on reminding the world of “the importance of literacy as a matter of dignity and human rights.” In the spirit of the day, the Buffer team and our community around the world collectively donated 189 used books to go to charities, local schools, friends, strangers, libraries, or anywhere else where an extra book might make a difference.

Read our blog

464

Coffee shops worked from

We drink a lot of coffee and tea when we’re together on retreats, but we drink even more the rest of the year when we’re working from coffee shops around the world. This year, the Buffer team worked from 464 different coffee shops! The team also works regularly from 51 coworking spaces.

Read our coffee shop coworking

1,541

Books gifted

One of our most well-known (and loved) perks at Buffer is receiving unlimited books. Teammates (and their partners) can request Kindle books, get physical books reimbursed, and download audiobooks.

1,611

Vacation days taken

Another benefit at Buffer is minimum vacation, as opposed to unlimited vacation. We ask that teammates take at least 15 days (three weeks) off every year. This year our team in total took 1,611 vacation days, which works out to an average of 17 per person! In addition to vacation days, we took 410 family leave days for all of those Buffer babies, and 30 days off for sabbaticals. Our sabbatical program is new this year and we’re so happy to have teammates starting to utilize it already!

Read out our sabbatical policy

5,500

Updates to the code base

Our Engineering team made a lot of exciting changes this year! We’ve built several new features, updated older parts of Buffer, and released our third product, Analyze. It’s been a busy year, with 195 issues created, 5,250 pull requests, and 55 new repositories. Of all of the new code that we’ve written, 5,275 lines of code were open sourced!

13,670

Tacos given

One of our core values is to show gratitude, and a big way that we do this is by sending virtual tacos on Slack in recognition of each other via the appreciation tool HeyTaco. These tacos can later be redeemed for cool prizes like a smartwatch, or Buffer swag. This year we gave each other 13,670 tacos! That’s an average of 153 tacos per person, or one taco every 2.3 days. (Yum!)

25,025.76

Dollars used from our growth mindset fund

We significantly expanded our learning and development this year. In previous years, we’ve given teammates $20 per month for classes and courses to support their professional growth. This year, we changed up the policy and started giving every teammate $850 per year as part of a Growth Mindset Fund that they can use anytime throughout the year. In the end, we spent $20,667 more on learning and development this year than last!

Read more about our learning and development stipend

32,349

New customers

We love our customers and are so grateful to have had 32,349 new customers join us in 2019. These incredible folks are the reason we get to do what we do every day. Our total number of customers in 2019 is 74,825.

73,610

Dollars donated to charity

As a profitable company, we have committed to giving back between 8% and 15% of our profits every year depending on that year’s performance. This year, we’re very happy to be able to donate $73,610 to charity.

Read more

109,974

Conversations with customers

Our Customer Advocacy team is made up of 20 people working around the world to serve our customers. The incredible team had 109,974 conversations with customers this past year across email and social media — that’s a lot of words, emojis, and GIFs!

Check out our Buffer plans for small businesses

703,924

Slack messages sent

As a fully remote team, communication is a huge priority for us. We use Slack throughout our workdays to have quick chats, open Zoom meetings, and catch up in our #water-cooler channel. Throughout the year, we sent 703,924 messages (an average of 7,909 per person!), including 94,481 emojis and 1,303 GIFs.

1,049,454

Buffer accounts created

We feel so lucky to have a whole host of people creating new Buffer accounts and giving the free Buffer version a try each year. This year, over 1 million people created Buffer accounts!

1,201,105

Podcast downloads

We really love podcasting! For three years now, we’ve maintained a weekly podcast called The Science of Social Media, which had 1,188,188 downloads this year. We also launched a new story-based podcast series called Breaking Brand (which we’re very excited about), and it gained 12,917 downloads this year. In total, we released 60 new podcast episodes.

Listen to Breaking Brand

1,215,154

Fans and followers on social media

We’re grateful to be able to chat and engage with over 1.2 million people on social media! You’ll likely see us sharing funny GIFs and memes, and diving in to have thoughtful conversations about social media. Thank you to everyone for spending time with us online!

1,234,288

Minutes spent on Zoom

Even though we aren’t in the same office, we still love to see each other’s faces and meet via online video. So, we spend a lot of time and minutes on video chats. We spent over 1.2 million minutes on Zoom in 2019! In total, we had 10,857 meetings, which works out to an average of 32 meetings per day across the team.

1,775,767

Social accounts connected

Each new Buffer user gets started by connecting the accounts they’d like to manage through Buffer and can connect to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. This year new and existing Buffer users and customers connected more than 1.7 million accounts!

20,000,000

in annual recurring revenue

This past year was a big achievement for us as we crossed the $20 million in annual recurring revenue milestone. Thank you to all of our customers for continuing to use Buffer to build your brands on social media! You are why we do what we do.

230,877,605

Posts sent with Buffer

This one is always our largest number every year. This year, more than 230 million posts were sent through Buffer across all of our social media networks. Here’s the breakdown from largest to smallest number of posts: Twitter: 89,300,621, Facebook: 77,236,942, Instagram: 46,546,601, LinkedIn: 13,660,639, Pinterest: 3,403,653, Google +: 729,149. Once again, a huge thank you to everyone who is using Buffer to manage their social media content, analyze the results, and engage with their customers. We can’t wait to see you and your brand grow even more in 2020. Here’s to the next decade!