
> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on April 22, 2024_


Hi there,



Joel welcomed his second son, Tobi, earlier this month and is currently taking some time away on family leave. I’ll be sharing the metrics and key updates for Buffer for March 2024. I’m happy to take any questions or comments while Joel is away! 


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](https://buffer.com/shareholders) _to see the metrics table._

- _This is a fun one to celebrate - in March, our MRR/ARR hit the highest level of any day in 2023!_
- _The New Buffer segment continues to perform strongly, while our Legacy segment continues to decline and become a smaller portion of our overall MRR. As of March, New Buffer MRR now makes up for 75% of our total MRR and 72% of our total paid customers are on New Buffer plans._
- _Overall, Q1 proved to be a strong quarter and we remain on track for a growth year overall for 2024._

## Note-worthy updates and reflections


### **Retreat**


For the first time since 2019, we gathered together for a Buffer retreat in Cancún, Mexico! Teammates flew in from all over the world to spend a week in-person discussing upcoming projects, aligning on culture and strategy, and bonding. It’s a rare treat for our remote team to enjoy things like meals, and meetings unencumbered by timezones. Teammates reported that the cross-functional sessions were especially valuable, particularly our company-wide inbox time, when the whole team replied to customer questions in the support inbox. During free time, Bufferoos swam in the ocean, competed in beach volleyball, played card games, and enjoyed treats that we brought from all over. (The most controversial were Candy Corn and Vegemite!) We’re enjoying the great energy from this time together and looking for ways to recreate a bit of the magic remotely.


### **Growth & Q1 results**


After 10 consecutive quarters of MRR decline, Q1 marked our first quarter of MRR growth since Q2 of 2021. New Buffer MRR now makes up 75.0% of total MRR, and New Buffer customers increased by 3,435 in Q1 to make up 72% of total paying customers. We also saw a small uptick in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Revenue grew by .6% in Q1 hitting $4.5M, our largest revenue total since the fourth quarter of 2022.


Our total operating expenses were higher than average in March due to the recognition of 2024 retreat costs. Because of this, we finished March with a pretty significant loss of $262K putting our net income for the first quarter at a total loss of $410K. As of the end of March, our cash runway is 27 months (up one month from February) and our bank balance remains strong.


### **Mobile Apps Growth**


We’re seeing continued growth in app-paid subscribers due to several UX growth experiments, the rollout of annual paid plans, and several key projects that the team shipped in Q1. In Q1, new paid subscribers (weekly) went up 15% from 75/week to ~90/week. As a result, two powerful insights have emerged:  1) The **queue or post limit** is a highly effective upgrade path, especially if it is shown to users **before** they reach the 10-post limit 2) A **highly visible** upgrade CTA delivers strong results in mobile apps, even if they are generic (vs. feature-specific).


### **We moved New Board View to Beta**


We introduced Buffer’s New Board view and invited users to the Beta version which sets the stage for a larger product launch in April. Buffer’s new Board view will allow users to create and organize content by format or channel, keep track of different team member contributions, and visualize the progress from “to-do” to “done”. We will launch this to all users in April.


### **Instagram Universal Publishing** **(aka Reminders)**


In March, we launched a new notification publishing option for Instagram. This allows users to plan any type of Instagram content in advance; whether they want to fully automate their post or handcraft each Reel and Story, Buffer now has more publishing options to suit every Instagram creator. Users will enjoy more flexibility and power with every post and can choose the option that best suits them. **Automatic publishing** allows users to set it and forget it. Buffer will automatically post on their behalf and they don’t have to lift a finger once a post is scheduled. **Notification publishing** allows users to add stickers, music and enjoy more creative control. Buffer will tee up the post, send a notification based on a user’s defined schedule, and help users finish the post on Instagram. Both options are available on all Buffer plans, including the free plan.


This sets the stage for a larger product theme slated for later this year. Our forthcoming launch aligns with our vision to provide our users with more flexibility by expanding publishing options across all Buffer channels, incorporating both automated and notification-based social sharing, alongside strengthening the notification features and settings.


That’s it for March. I’ll be in touch soon to share the next update for April and Joel will be back to share our May results in June.


Thanks for your continued support!


Jenny Terry, Head of Finance



Hi there, 
Joel welcomed his second son, Tobi, earlier this month and is currently taking some time away on family leave. I’ll be sharing the metrics and key updates for Buffer for March 2024. I’m happy to take any questions or comments while Joel is away! 

March 2024


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on March 1, 2024_


Hi there,


I hope you had a chance to read the [2023 Shareholder Letter](https://e.customeriomail.com/e/c/eyJlIjoxMjk3MzAsImVtYWlsX2lkIjoiZXhhbXBsZSIsImhyZWYiOiJodHRwczovL2J1ZmZlci5jb20vc2hhcmVob2xkZXJzLzIwMjMiLCJ0IjoxNzExMDQ0OTAzfQ/9c9d33c3ecb69c78a617e189ab687fb0016f3a3900e2b48b9f95d3f11320b760). It goes into more depth than my monthly updates of the metrics, strategy, and changes we’ve undergone at Buffer in the past year.


I’m happy to share Buffer’s metrics and key updates for January 2024. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- _I’d like to take a moment to celebrate that we’re seeing positive increases across the board in our numbers._
- _There’s so much diligence and hard work by the team that has gone into getting to this point._
- _We’re finally growing again, and not only growing MRR/ARR but also paying customers._
- _It’s worth noting that while we had a great turnaround year in 2023 and grew 5 of 12 months (vs 1 of 12 the prior year), we had zero months where we grew the number of paying customers._
- _For our “down and wide” strategy of focusing on creators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses, our goal is to be growing both MRR/ARR and paying customers._
- _This month provides a great example of what we’d like to be achieving on a regular basis._

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **LinkedIn Documents (aka PDF Carousels) and First Comment**


In December we rolled out support for LinkedIn Documents. These are the type of post that appears as a carousel on LinkedIn. They’re a great option to have, they do very well, and now you can fully plan and schedule them within Buffer. In January, we added support for scheduling a post to LinkedIn with a First Comment. This is another very useful capability to have in your toolkit. There’s some debate as to whether you should include links in the post itself or put it in the first comment. From my personal experience, putting the link in comments does indeed increase reach of the post. Now you can do this with Buffer. [Read more](https://e.customeriomail.com/e/c/eyJlIjoxMjk3MzAsImVtYWlsX2lkIjoiZXhhbXBsZSIsImhyZWYiOiJodHRwczovL2J1ZmZlci5jb20vbGlua2VkaW4iLCJ0IjoxNzExMDQ0OTAzfQ/42e35d1d17e3f8fb243da7342adfa69af491c36ef1f43aff86d750d0191dc1e6)


### **Reorder Images in a Scheduled Post**


We also recently added support for reordering images in a post. So if you’re creating a post with multiple images, such as an Instagram carousel post, you can change the order of the images. This is a much improved experience compared to where you needed to remove and re-upload in order t get things in the right order.


### **Paste Images and Videos into the Composer**


Another great UX improvement we’ve recently made is the ability to paste images and videos directly into the composer. So if you have a file on your computer, just copy it and paste it in, and it’ll get uploaded to your post. We’re moving fast with these types of UX enhancements that can add a lot of delight to the product and bring us up to and beyond the expectations of users today.


### **100K signups**


One of our big wins for January was that we saw over 100K signups to Buffer. 100,200 new users signups, to be exact. Increasing top of funnel and acquisition has been a focus for the past year, and it’s wonderful to see the diligent efforts throughout 2023 come to fruition for our biggest month of signups in years. Signups for January were 39% higher than December. And while January is generally a much better month for us than December, this result was 22% higher than January 2023.


## **What’s coming up**


### **Company Retreat!**


We’re meeting up in person as a whole team very soon. We’ll be together in Cancún, Mexico for the first week of March. This will be our first whole company retreat since 2019. While we’ve had quite a number of team meetups in the past couple of years, we haven’t been together as a whole team, and we’re feeling that connection debt. Company retreats come at a significant cost, however we have found again and again that the level of alignment and deeper connection we are able to achieve in the week we are together, pays dividends for many months beyond the retreat itself.


### **User Experience Improvements**


We’re charging ahead with many more UX improvements, and some of them are going to be even more foundational and significant than what we’ve put out there so far. We’re in the midst of revamping our card style for posts in the queue, and the whole interface for publishing to bring alignment between the different views (queue and calendar). We’re also working on a way to seamlessly view one, multiple, or all social channels and see scheduled posts, sent posts, drafts, etc. We’re making a big bet that adding significant flexibility to Buffer will allow us to keep expanding to more use cases, as well as make the product more intuitive to use.


### **Meta Threads**


We’re on standby to add Meta’s Threads as a new channel rapidly once they announce an API. We’ve had hints that it could come any day now, and we expect it to happen in the first half of the year. We’ve been doing all the implementation we can on our side without the authentication and various endpoints, and we’ll be ready to hook everything up and launch very fast when the day comes. This is going to be a huge value add for folks as Threads is growing fast right now, and a lot of people want more help to easily post across more channels. We’re fortunate to be in a time right now of emergence of new channels, exactly what Buffer can help with.


That’s it for my January update. I’ll be back in touch soon with February results.


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I hope you had a chance to read the  I’m happy to share Buffer’s metrics and key updates for January 2024. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.

January 2024


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on March 25, 2024_


Hi there,


I’m here with the metrics and key updates for Buffer for February 2024. This is a shorter update, however the results are some of the strongest we’ve seen in years. Please reply with comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- _It’s great to see our strong growth from January continue. In fact, we saw a stronger growth rate and net MRR increase in February despite it being a month with 2 fewer days._
- _These great results are due to the New Buffer segment continuing to perform strongly, while our Legacy segment continues to decline and become a smaller portion of our overall MRR. Read more about this shift in the recent_ [_Annual Shareholder Letter_](https://buffer.com/shareholders/2023)_._
- _We’re forecasting continued growth in the coming months and are on track for a growth year overall for 2024._
- _I’ve included our Revenue per team member metric as this is something we’ll be working to grow as we head towards profitability. At $256,456, this is the highest number we’ve seen for this metric in the past year._

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Positive year-over-year growth rate**


With our great February results, we are now seeing positive YoY growth in MRR/ARR overall (February 2024 is a 1.3% increase from February 2023). We’re delighted to be in a very strong position so early in 2024, and it’s now clear that we have the opportunity for a great year overall for Buffer.


### **More flexibility in link shortening**


We added more flexibility to our link shortening functionality in the composer. Buffer users can now select a default shortening option ([buff.ly](http://buff.ly/), [bit.ly](http://bit.ly/) or a custom domain), and can additionally shorten or unshorten links individually when they create each post. [Read more](https://support.buffer.com/article/620-shortening-and-unshortening-links)


### **Various UX and conversion rate improvements**


We made a variety of improvements during February to our upgrade and cancellation flows, while we worked iteratively towards some of our more significant upcoming new features.


### **Preparing for retreat, and working towards larger updates**


February was a quieter month on the customer-facing updates, as we prepared for our retreat (more to come on that in the March update), and continued to work towards significant new features. We have a significant upgrade to our Create space coming soon, including a new board view for content planning. We’ve also been working towards a revamped Publish experience for switching between the queue, calendar, drafts and approvals and improved UX for viewing one, multiple, or all channels at once.


That’s it for February. I’ll be back in touch soon for the March update. A small note that I’ll be heading out on family leave sometime in early April as my wife Jess and I are expecting a baby boy (Milo is excited to be a big brother). If he arrives before I have a chance to send the next shareholder update, our Head of Finance Jenny will be in touch with the latest metrics.


Thanks for the long-term support as we’ve turned around the decline,


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I’m here with the metrics and key updates for Buffer for February 2024. This is a shorter update, however the results are some of the strongest we’ve seen in years. Please reply with comments or questions.

February 2024

Dear Buffer shareholders and community, 2023 was a turnaround year for Buffer by a variety of measures. This is something the team has worked tirelessly towards, and it is wonderful to see the positive shifts take place in our metrics and the culture and energy around the company. We’ve spent the past few years clarifying our strategy and the principles by which we operate, and being diligent in our execution in alignment with that path. I’d love to walk you through our results for 2023 and share insights into how we’re approaching building a long-term business. We ended 2023 with $1,495,870 in MRR, or $17,950,440 in ARR. This was a decline of 1.75% from the prior year and represented a stalling of our steeper declines in the previous years. Our number of paying customers declined 4.75% to 55,975, which was an improvement from the 6.94% decline in 2022. We concluded 2023 with a net loss of $572,827, a significant improvement from our $1,094,128 net loss in 2022. We ended the year with $3,219,455 in the bank, representing 21 months of runway. We improved our operating (EBITDA) margin from -2.65% in 2022 to -1.86% in 2023. Combining our ARR growth rate and operating margin, our rule of 40 for 2023 was -3.60%, an improvement from -10.22% in 2022.

2023 Annual


<u>**Key numbers: April**</u>

- MRR: $1,501,423 (-0.18%)
- ARR: $18,017,076 (-0.18%)
- Customers: 58,065 (-0.20%)
- MAU: 148,495 (-2.45%)
- ARPU: $25.85 (no change)
- Team size: 78 (no change)
- Net income before tax: $49,218 (+316.20%)
- Bank balance: $4,863,581 (-0.58%)


April 2023 (Metrics Only)


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on November 19, 2023_


Hi there,


I’m happy to share Buffer’s October 2023 update. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- _It doesn’t get much flatter than 0.00% change in MRR/ARR! We were literally $73 in MRR away from shifting into positive growth territory for October._
- _We’re seeing the flat phase I’ve talked about in recent updates continue. We’re happy to be here, and the longer we are flat the closer we are getting towards growth, since we’re still seeing the New Buffer segment grow at healthy levels. For more context on the New Buffer segment, see an update below._
- _The sharper bank balance decline was as a result of us taking the opportunity to repurchase shares from one of our seed investors. The cost was around $400k, and is an investment we’ve felt has been worthwhile a number of times in the past few years. As a shareholder, you have benefited from these buybacks as we’ve reduced our fully diluted shares by 20% since 2017, increasing the value of your shareholding._
- _The resulting runway number is quite a reduction from previous months, however it is worth noting that the calculation to arrive at 32 months includes this buyback, which is more of a one-off cost we took on. If we were to exclude buybacks from the runway calculation, our current runway is 74 months (6 years, 2 months). So we feel very comfortable in our current cash position._

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **AI Assistant becomes Social Media Smart**


We launched a significant upgrade to our AI capabilities during October. Buffer’s AI Assistant is now truly tailored to the network you’re sharing to, and we also took the time to really dig into the user experience and ensure that it’s seamless and delightful to utilize AI directly inside Buffer. [Read more](https://buffer.com/resources/introducing-ai-made-for-social-media-buffers-ai-assistant/)


### **Tags and upgraded organization features**


We also launched our brand new Tags feature, which had been months in the making. You can now tag content (ideas, drafts or scheduled posts) with multiple tags. You can filter various views by tags, and this sets the foundation for even more organizational capabilities down the line. We had especially heard from users who use the Create space (ideas) extensively that it started to get unmanageable without tags or other ways to organize and filter out content. [Read more](https://buffer.com/organize)


### **New Buffer crossed $1M MRR**


Our New Buffer segment represents those on the new pricing we rolled out in mid-2021. This segment now represents 67% of MRR, and has been growing consistently at around 3% per month, or around $20K in net MRR growth. Around 20% of that growth has been from customers migrating over from legacy plans, the rest is pure growth. Therefore, once we see legacy fully churn out, or drive more migrations there, we should see growth months. Notably, in October our New Buffer segment crossed $1M in MRR, a milestone we’ve celebrated internally.


### **Exec Team meetup**


In October, the executive team gathered in Boulder to dig into deeper topics and discuss our plans for the coming couple of quarters and focuses for 2024. Much of the meetup centered around ongoing cultural shifts and reflecting more diligently on the structure of the company and what’s needed for this next chapter as we turn the corner back towards growth. We’re ensuring that we’re set up for success in our efforts to go “down and wide” and serve the lower end of the market effectively (really succeeding with our freemium model) and getting closer to customers again both in terms of how we build the product and the quality of customer service we provide. We also discussed our operating principles (see below) to ensure our current efforts are reflective of the 4 principles. We specifically want to do more over the next year to live up to our Ambitious and Efficient operating principles.


### **Operating Principles**


In our monthly company-wide All Hands meeting for October, I shared Operating Principles which I’ve been working towards for a while now. The principles add an extra layer of clarity and guidance for us alongside vision/mission and values. I see vision/mission as what and why, and both values and operating principles as describing “how” we work together. Values are on the individual level, how we each strive to work and what we can expect from one another; operating principles are at the org level, how we run the company. Our operating principles are: Long-Term, Independent, Ambitious and Efficient. [Guiding statements slide from our All Hands.](https://share.cleanshot.com/VKyL8QwZ)


## **What’s coming up**


### **Universal Publishing**


We’re ready to launch our first key step towards a vision we’re describing as Universal Publishing. This is a vision for Buffer to be able to help with publishing all types of content, to almost any imaginable channel. While Buffer can help to varying degrees when it comes to fully automatically publishing the content, we can do much more to help with planning, scheduling and providing reminders to share content. We can tee it up and just need the user to hit publish themselves. For our first step, we are getting ready to roll out a way to share more types of content formats to Instagram, via a way to toggle any post (feed post, reel, story) to become a mobile notification. This will allow users to plan and schedule all of their Instagram content, and still add unique content features such as trending audio and stickers (unavailable via API) at the time of posting.


### **Engineering Leadership & Product Management meetups**


During November, we have our Engineering Leadership team and our Product Management team gathering together at meetups in Barcelona and Miami respectively. These meetups are very well timed with some recent structure and strategy changes as well as for looking ahead to 2024.


That’s a wrap for our October update. Thanks for your continued support!


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I’m happy to share Buffer’s October 2023 update. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.

October 2023 


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on October 28, 2023_


Hi there,


See below for our September numbers, my Q3 reflection as well as key updates and what’s coming soon at Buffer. As always, hit reply to share any comments or ask questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- _We’ve seen another relatively flat month, with a slight MRR decline of 0.3%. This flat state is our new normal, and while we are working hard to move towards growth, it is a welcome change from our prior decline trend. Relative to decline, being flat is growth, and so we feel confident our trajectory in the upcoming 6-12 months._
- _We’re continuing to see customers decline faster than we’d like. We’re still seeing healthy growth of customers on our New Buffer segment, therefore these declines are coming from our legacy cohort churning at a slightly faster pace than New Buffer._
- _Monthly Active Users has remained flat, while we have seen growth in signups throughout the year. This is something we want to see change in the coming couple of quarters._
- _We’re putting some extra focus on activation, onboarding and growth for New Buffer to help here, as well as looking towards New Buffer continuing to take over even more as the dominant segment. These different pieces I believe will get us towards customer growth._
- _Average Revenue Per User has continued to grow at a healthy pace. This is occurring largely due to the increasing number of channels / social networks we support within Buffer. It’s great to see ARPU grow without any pricing changes in the past 2 years, which indicates that our strategy of serving wider use cases while keeping the entry point of the product accessible can work._
- _With a consistent net loss of around $50k in the past 3 months, we are close to breaking even. With some slight growth as well as a little diligence in our expenses, we believe we can break even again in the next year, and start to see profitability and growth in the profit margin. This is important to us for our goal to exist and thrive for the long-term._

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Notes**


During September we launched a significant upgrade to our collaboration functionality with Notes. This allows customers to add context to their posts and communicate with team members in their Buffer account and work together to shape and finalize content before it is posted. Notes are also available to solo Buffer users, and take the form of internal notes which can serve as reminders for yourself for later. Notes is available on all plans, including free. [Read more](https://buffer.com/collaborate)


### **Quick Navigator**


We also launched what we’re calling our Quick Navigator, which is a navigation menu you can open by hitting the CMD+K / CTRL+K keyboard shortcut, or from the Help menu in our navigation. This is a pattern that has been established in the past few years, which felt particularly powerful for us to implement for users. Through this menu, you can easily navigate to various tools within Buffer, to specific channels, and various parts of your account. [Read more](https://support.buffer.com/hc/en-us/articles/18536387721363-Work-smarter-with-Quick-Navigator)


## **Q3 reflection**


Q3 2023 was our best Q3 since 2020 in terms of MRR growth rate, with a tiny 0.07% decline quarter-over-quarter from Q2. 2023 continues to be a turnaround year, and we’re now far enough into the year to feel confident in this outcome. At our current pace, we are on track for a 1.25% decline. This is a significant improvement from our 7.57% decline in 2022. The entirety of the decline occurred in Q1, and we have been flat since then. This puts us in a very strong position heading into the new year, with a real opportunity to see growth in 2024.


We’re now seeing consistently flat results. This is something we’re celebrating as we had 3 years of decline while we shifted our strategy including our pricing, positioning and packaging. At our scale ($18M ARR, 55,000+ customers), generally the trajectory is fairly predictable and therefore it is quite difficult to “turn the ship” and see immediately different results. We’ve been putting significant effort into this turnaround, and it’s wonderful to see the fruits of our product, engineering, community, go to market and cultural shifts. With that type of predictability, it is unrealistic to go from decline to immediate growth, and we now find ourselves in the transitionary flat period.


From here, our work is to follow through to a phase of healthy growth and thriving for the company. This is something that we’re all very excited about and are fully committed to making happen. Many in the team have joined during this challenging period of the company, and have enjoyed joining a company with strong values and a long-term focus, while having the opportunity to work on a real challenge of a turnaround. Others have been at the company for 7, 8, 9, even 10 years and have seen all the different phases and enjoy being at a company where we can weather these market and company challenges while staying true to our mission and values, and are happy to experience and contribute to the entire journey of getting back to healthy growth. With over 4 years of runway with our cash balance, we’re still in a very strong position as we see the light of growth ahead.


## **What’s coming up**


### **Tags**


We’re launching Tags soon, which will enable you to tag posts and ideas with one or more labels to give greater organization and workflow capabilities. This has been a top request for our Create space, one of the newest parts of the product which is getting a lot of positive feedback, but can fairly quickly become hard to manage. Tags are a significant upgrade to our prior Campaigns functionality, now allowing you to use multiple tags. We’re rolling this out to all plans, and there will be a limit of 3 tags for the free plan which should be enough to get some real value, while also providing a powerful upgrade path to our paid plans.


### **New Salary System**


We’re close to finalizing our new salary system, which we will roll out internally in the next month. We’ve switched our salary data source from Radford to Carta, which feels more better suited to our industry and size of company. It has given us much simplified and more accurate benchmarks for the roles in the company. We’ve worked for many months on the salary system, and it will resolve a lot of debt that has built up over the years in our salary formula, which had led to discrepancies at times across areas and roles. The work on this has also led to a very healthy revisiting of levels of roles and individuals across the company, to resolve any inconsistencies which had built up there too. It’s a big step forward for us in terms of our commitment to transparency, simplicity, consistency and fairness.


### **New company-wide support tool**


After using Zendesk for 4 years, we are very excited to return to Help Scout which we used for the majority of our journey. We switched to Zendesk for a number of helpful capabilities as we scaled, and for bringing all of our support channels together. Over time, however, we found that Zendesk was overkill for our needs, had a variety of different bugs and issues which degraded the customer service experience, and we also decided to approach channels in a native way rather than bringing it all together. Something we lost with the switch 4 years ago which was culturally significant, was our ability to have a seat for everyone in the company and easy access to read and respond to customers’ emails. We’re delighted that with our new Help Scout contract, we’ve been able to work with them so that everyone in the team can have a login and use the tool. This is a big step forward as part of our overall strategy of viewing our customer communication tools as shared tools rather than owned purely by a single area.


Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in touch soon with the October update.


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, See below for our September numbers, my Q3 reflection as well as key updates and what’s coming soon at Buffer. As always, hit reply to share any comments or ask questions.

September 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on September 19, 2023_


Hi there,


I’m here to share the Buffer numbers for August, notable updates and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply if you have any comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- I’m moving away from Net Income Before Tax, to report simply Net Income, the absolute bottom line of our income statement each month.
- We recently started passing along sales tax and VAT to customers, which should improve our numbers in general. It also makes our Net Income Before Tax and Net Income numbers much more aligned, which is more further reason for the change.
- It’s great to see another month of small growth as we see our journey back to growth continue. Notably, we’ve not had a three month streak in MRR gains since July - September of 2020.
- To be transparent, we would not have achieved MRR growth for August had it not been for us welcoming our largest customer of the year so far on August 30, a new $1.5k MRR customer on our agency plan. Regardless, we’ll take the win!
- Our runway continues to be very healthy at over 5 years, which is allowing us to be patient as our numbers improve again.
- I’m keeping an eye on the decline in customers. Over time, our goal is to see us start growing customers again as a key part of our growth engine. Currently, the decline is coming entirely from churn of our legacy cohort, whereas we are continuing to see healthy growth of new customers on our current offering and pricing.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Facebook Reels scheduling** 


With this addition, Buffer users can now auto-publish Reels to Facebook. This completes our lineup of short form video channels alongside Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. With the rise of repurposing content across channels, Buffer is now an incredibly powerful tool to get maximum distribution by creating short form video content once and sharing it across these four channels which each have massive audience opportunities.


### **Mailchimp email capture from your Start Page** 


We’ve added the ability for users to add an email subscriber signup form to their microsite built using our Start Page offering. This adds a real tangible level of value and a clear conversion and ROI that users can gain from their Start Page, which is a link many put in their bio across social media profiles. It’s exciting to add something here that continues to push our offering well beyond social, and in particular growing an email list is something we highly recommend in order to really own the connection with an audience.


### **Start Page incident with Meta**


On August 23, our Start Page domain start.page was incorrectly flagged as malicious content across all Meta products (Facebook and Instagram). We rallied and reached out to every contact we had at Meta and eventually were able to get help to resolve the issue. In the process, we’ve strengthened our partnership with Meta and made a number of improvements to verification of our domain with Meta and moderation approaches on our end to avoid this happening in the future.


## **What’s coming up**


### **New design system and UX improvements**


As part of the Visual Refresh project I mentioned last month, we’re working on upgrading our design system and components which will lead us to a much more modern feeling Buffer experience. This is a big initiative for a product that has existed for so many years, and so we’re taking a very iterative approach to reaching our ideal end state.


### **Company Retreat in early 2024**


We’re in the midst of planning our first whole company retreat since the pandemic. We’ll all be gathering somewhere together in early 2024. At this point, whilst we’ve had smaller team meetups that most folks have attended in the past year, over half the team have not attended a Retreat, which has always been a very meaningful and productive experience. We’re excited to not only resume this important Buffer tradition, but reshape the retreat to match our current team, strategy and culture.


That’s a wrap for the August update. Thanks for your continued support!


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I’m here to share the Buffer numbers for August, notable updates and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply if you have any comments or questions.

August 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on August 31, 2023_


Hi there,


I’m back with the monthly Buffer shareholder update. See below for July numbers, notable updates and what’s coming up. Reply to this email if you have any comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- We’ve seen another month of slight growth, it is great to see that our trajectory continues along our expected path of flat to small growth.
- At this stage it feels clear that we’ve stalled our decline and are on our way to some months of growth ahead. We are working hard to achieve higher growth, and ensure that we aren’t on our way to a growth ceiling down the line.
- In July we experienced a lighter month on the cash receipts side, which contributed to the bank balance decrease. Some of this is related to seasonality, for example we collected about $64K less in annual subscription payments than we did in June.
- Despite current losses we have very solid runway which allows us to continue to be patient and take a long-term view.
- We plan to keep our team size stable which will allow us to work back to profitability as we see growth months.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Buffer Build Week 2023** 


We had our second annual company-wide Build Week in July. This is an event where we take a week to work in a small 3-5 person group with people we don’t normally work with and a goal to ship something of value to customers or the team. The emphasis is on shipping value, and building connections and understanding across the company. This year’s event was a great success; we had 19 small teams and shipped a ton of value. [Read more.](https://buffer.com/resources/build-week-2023/)


### **Buffer Suggestions** 


We’ve launched a new feedback hub for customers to request features and improvements, and vote and comment on existing ideas. This is a significant step towards our strategy of embedding customers much more into how we work and build as a company. We’ve moved from a Typeform which was not transparent to the community, to a transparent suggestions board that keeps us more accountable to our customers. We’ve already found this to be a goldmine of insights for us in building the product. [View the suggestions board.](https://suggestions.buffer.com/)


### **Open Beta**


As part of rolling out Buffer Suggestions, we’ve also launched an Open Beta program. In the past we’ve included customers in the rollout of new functionality, however this was done through a closed beta approach where we would reach out specifically to a subset of customers and invite them to try new features. With Open Beta, we’ve made it possible for any user to opt in to access and receive new functionality on beta in advance of it launching to the wider customer base. We have a new page in Buffer Accounts where users can view all the current functionality in beta, enable or disable beta at any time, and a button to share feedback (this links to the Buffer Suggestions page for that feature). [Check out Open Beta within Buffer Account.](https://account.buffer.com/beta?ref=buffer.com)


### **Referral Program**


One of the Build Week projects was to create an MVP for a referral program. This is something we had in the earlier days, but dropped over the years as we experimented with moving more towards B2B SaaS. Now that our strategy is firmly in supporting small businesses, entrepreneurs and creators, we are taking inspiration from B2C SaaS and a referral program is a key way we’ve identified that we can leverage our brand and enable our happy users to invite people from their network to use Buffer. At this stage, we have built the groundwork to allow for tracking of referrals, and even without incentives yet in place for referring Buffer to others, we have seen quite a number of people go ahead and do so. [See our Help Article on the Referral Program.](https://support.buffer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042816994-Does-Buffer-have-a-referral-program-)


## **What’s coming up**


### **Revamped Reminders** 


We’re in the midst of upgrading how Reminders work for Instagram, with plans to roll out these improvements to all channels. Reminders is the approach we’ve used for years to support channels or functionality that we can’t offer due to it not being part of APIs. For example, adding trending audio or stickers to Instagram posts. We’ve now realized that Reminders should be a first-class experience alongside our standard publishing capabilities, as there are many situations where you’d want to add final polish or native functionality to posts. We’ll be renaming the feature, and allowing users to choose on a per-post basis whether to publish fully automatically, or to get a phone notification to add final touches.


### **Visual Refresh** 


As part of our push to double down on freemium and serving individuals as well as businesses, we are in the midst of a visual refresh project. This will bring a visual upgrade to the web dashboard, and pave the way for better UX, a responsive experience and themes (dark mode). It will also make it easier for us to significantly improve accessibility of the Buffer product.


### **Equity + Salary updates** 


For a few months, I’ve been working with our head of finance Jenny to revisit our equity and salary formulas. We’ve gone all the way to rethinking these from first principles, and in the coming months we plan to roll out a new stock options plan for the team, and transition to a new salary system which will simplify how salaries are calculated and remove some discrepancies which have been introduced over the years.


Thanks for reading - I’ll be back soon with the August update!


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I’m back with the monthly Buffer shareholder update. See below for July numbers, notable updates and what’s coming up. Reply to this email if you have any comments or questions.

July 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on July 31, 2023_


Hi there,


I’m back with a monthly Buffer shareholder update. See below for June numbers, a Q2 reflection as well as key updates and what’s on the horizon. If you have any questions or comments, hit reply to discuss.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> Check out this post on [buffer.com/shareholders](http://buffer.com/shareholders) to see the metrics table.

- We’re very happy to see our holding steady pattern continue and in fact see a slight increase in MRR for June.
- We’re keeping an eye on the customer decline, which is solely tied to the legacy cohort of customers declining. Our New Buffer cohort (new pricing since mid-2021) continues to grow at a healthy pace. I expect that at some point in the second half of the year, we will see churn of the legacy cohort slow down, and we should see growth for this metric.
- We saw a number of annual renewals, as well as elevated employee expenses (severance + new teammates) which contributed to the unusual level of decline in our bank balance. Another contributor was our increased Twitter costs which have now kicked in.
- Despite our current losses we have very solid runway which allows us to continue to be patient and take a long-term view.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **YouTube Shorts** 


The big update for June was that we launched YouTube Shorts scheduling in Buffer, and as part of that launched YouTube as a new channel. This has already been by far our most successful channel addition in recent years, which is not hugely surprising given how requested YouTube has been for a while. We chose to launch initially with Shorts, which was a lighter lift due to the similarity to Reels and TikTok. Over time, we plan to consider how we can effectively support longer form video scheduling to YouTube and add more value for this channel. [Read more](https://buffer.com/library/how-to-schedule-youtube-shorts/)


### **Revamped Post Analytics**


We’ve started the process of upgrading Post Analytics across all channel types. With our launch of YouTube Shorts, we rolled out our new approach for Post Analytics, and we plan to have Post Analytics for all channels by the end of the year (including Mastodon, TikTok, Start Page, Google My Business).


## **Q2 reflection**


Looking year-over-year, Q2 2023 has been our best quarter since Q2 2021. So far, the 2023 trajectory is far better than any of the past 3 years. It is clear that we are in a turnaround situation, a turnaround year. We’ll need to keep up our current momentum and execution, but so far 2023 is looking like a great year and change in trajectory for Buffer.


Reflecting quarter-over-quarter, Q2 2023 was significantly better than Q1 2023. In Q1 we declined 1.2% in MRR, whereas in Q2 we declined just 0.11%. In terms of customers, in Q1 we declined 1.03%, whereas in Q2 we declined 0.87%. All metrics are trending better when comparing Q2 to Q1, and when comparing 2023 YTD to 2022.


When it comes to leading indicator metrics for Q2, it has been a solid quarter. We had 232,938 signups, which was 38.02% higher than Q2 2022 where we had 168,775 signups. This level of growth is significant for us, as signups is now a key focus for us with our down and wide strategy focused on serving individuals as well as businesses, and our need for volume as well as revenue per customer.


And when it comes to ARPU, this metric has remained relatively stable. We grew ARPU 0.77% compared to Q1, and it has grown 0.11% YoY from Q2 2022. We are happy with this stability, as ARPU is not a metric we are currently focused on growing. Instead, MRR and Customers are metrics we are focused on stabilizing and then finding growth in again.


Thanks for reading - I’ll be back in touch in a couple of weeks with the July update.


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I’m back with a monthly Buffer shareholder update. See below for June numbers, a Q2 reflection as well as key updates and what’s on the horizon. If you have any questions or comments, hit reply to discuss.

June 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on June 23, 2023_


Hi there,


My apologies for skipping a month, it’s been a full season with some time off with family, sickness and then straight into a performance review cycle. I’m here with a shareholder update for both April and May of 2023. See below for the numbers, key updates, and what’s on the horizon. If you have any questions, as always hit reply to discuss.


> 📊 [MetricsTable id=17]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._


And for May:


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- In several of the past shareholder updates, I’ve mentioned the VAT payment we’ve been preparing for. In May we made this payment to the HMRC, and this project is now all wrapped up. As a reminder, this was a tax liability we had to pay related to consumer customers located in the UK. The reason it is a large sum, is that we were required to backdate our tax liability for several years. We’re glad to be done with this item, and overall we were very happy with the impact, which was lower than we initially anticipated. Even after our payment, we have 58 months (4 years, 10 months) runway based on our $4.4M cash.
- I would describe our current growth situation as being in a holding pattern. We’ve hit a level of stability in our MRR that we’ve been working towards for a couple of years, as we shifted and solidified our strategy for longer term growth. While we’re not where we want to be, which is consistent healthy growth, this is a clear step towards that place and we’re glad to be in a new phase rather than the declines we’ve been seeing for a while. And in a flat phase, our runway gives us plenty of time to continue the diligent work that has led to us stalling the decline, to find growth soon.
- It’s worth noting that the segment of customers on our current product and pricing offering is continuing to grow at a healthy pace (4.42% and 4.21% MRR growth in April and May respectively). Our declines are caused by the legacy segment who continue to churn out gradually, due to that segment having a higher average revenue per customer than the New Buffer segment. New Buffer is the product, pricing and packaging update we rolled out in mid-2021, which most notably is priced by channels (social accounts) rather than having tiers with a fixed number of channels included, and consolidated separate products into a single price.We’ve been successful in achieving higher volumes and solid growth with New Buffer, and we chose not to force a migration thus far for the legacy customers since the pricing model is so different and customer goodwill is vital to our strategy.

## **Note-worthy updates**


Here are a variety of the updates and improvements we’ve rolled out in the past couple of months:


### **Revamped Zapier Integration** 


We rolled out a significant upgrade to Buffer’s Zapier functionality. This involved upgrading to Zapier’s new code-based builder, which has enabled us to more easily add functionality in the future as well. For customers, this upgrade has enabled a wide range of new options for Triggers and Actions to allow integrating Buffer with other products. We’ve added 4 new triggers: New Draft, New Queue Item, New Contribution (for approval) and New Idea. On the Actions side of things, the significant one is that you can now add Ideas to Buffer’s Content section via Zapier, and you can also pause your queue. With these upgrades, we are now a Zapier Gold Partner, which gives us new co-marketing opportunities. And in April, we were prominently [featured on their blog](https://zapier.com/blog/whats-new-zapier-april-2023/). [Read more](https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-zapier-integration/).


### **Stripe Checkout and Stripe Tax** 


We migrated a significant portion of our billing interface to Stripe Checkout. In doing this, we’ve been able to offload the maintenance of this portion of our account section to Stripe, who have a whole team working to make sure the experience is optimized. This is one of those things that wasn’t available years ago when we built out our billing system, but would be a no brainer to go with if starting a SaaS product today. We’ve been making a number of these types of decisions in recent years (e.g. adopting Segment and Mixpanel for product analytics rather than managing our own data pipelines). The other key reason we made this change, is to make use of Stripe Tax to assist with collecting required tax information to start charging a variety of different sales and value added tax, depending on the location of the customer.


### **AI in the main composer + post suggestions** 


We launched the first version of our AI capabilities in February, which were only available in our Content space. This was a great place to start testing out how we could use AI to help customers. Even with the limited scope of AI in our first offering, it has already assisted in creating over 31,500 posts for 8,100 users, generating 2.5 million words. In April we launched the Buffer AI Assistant in the main composer across all channels, and we’ve added a set of clear options to work with posts: rephrase a posts, summarize long-form text, expand sentences into paragraphs. Additionally, we launched a post idea generator in our Content space, to help solve the blank page problem. [Read more](https://buffer.com/resources/why-were-doubling-down-on-ai-at-buffer/).


### **Instagram Stories Scheduling** 


We launched direct scheduling for Instagram Stories, a recent addition to the Instagram API. This is a wonderful step in completing Instagram as a fully fledged channel within Buffer - you can now schedule Posts (image and video), Reels and Stories and have them posted directly to Instagram without the need for a mobile notification, or opening the IG app. [Read more](https://buffer.com/resources/instagram-stories-auto-scheduling/).


Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in early July with the next update.


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, My apologies for skipping a month, it’s been a full season with some time off with family, sickness and then straight into a performance review cycle. I’m here with a shareholder update for both April and May of 2023. See below for the numbers, key updates, and what’s on the horizon. If you have any questions, as always hit reply to discuss.

April + May 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on April 10, 2023_


Hi there,


I’m here with Buffer’s shareholder update for March 2023. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. If you have any questions or something stands out, don’t hesitate to hit reply to discuss.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- We’re certainly celebrating our March results over here. We’ve had increases across the board other than a tiny decrease in paying customers.
- Most of our numbers have been gradually improving over the course of many months, so it genuinely feels like we’re seeing the bottom of our decline. Time will tell, but April is already off to a strong start.
- Notably, MAU has now increased for 7 of the last 8 months and is up 13% overall in that 8 month period.
- The growth this month is small, however it has taken a lot of diligent effort to get here (more systemic change of our product and culture, rather than growth hacks and short cuts). Therefore, I believe that we are strongly placed to see compounding improvements to our numbers into the future, so long as we can continue strong strategy and execution.
- Our runway is based on the average monthly burn for the past 12 months, and this number is down to $69,863. Notably, the past few months burn rate has been much lower than this, so I expect our runway to continue to increase. It also takes into account our expected VAT liability estimated at $1.2m, however we expect this number to come in slightly lower, and will be paid within the next 1-2 months. At that point, we will see this runway number refreshed and likely even higher. Still, 53 months is already 4 years and 5 months, so we’re in a very solid place.
- Despite a slow decline for a long period now (around 20 months to be precise), I’m proud of the fact that we came into this period with a very healthy cash balance and runway, and have been able to avoid layoffs while they have been very prevalent across the industry. I believe that this strengthens our culture and trust, and will enable us to continue to have stronger collaboration and results ahead.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **AI for highlighted text and new prompts** 


In early March we rolled out a new set of features for our beta AI integration in our Ideas space. Users can now highlight text within an Idea and choose to Rephrase, Summarize or Expand that content. It’s also still possible to simply click “Generate” and have us generate content based on the text in the Idea. This acts more as a prompt to create content, whereas the new functionality works with existing content to rework it in some way. AI is of course a very fast-moving new technology with almost unlimited potential, so we are increasing our investment and focus on it accordingly. Stay tuned for much more here in the coming months.


### **Keeping Buffer Free campaign** 


On March 31, we launched our Keeping Buffer Free campaign, something we had been working towards for a couple of months. This was a campaign we came up with related to Hootsuite’s decision to remove their Free plan on that date, however the campaign became a larger message of commitment to our entrepreneur, creator and small business customers and to keeping a free plan for Buffer. We had an incredible response to this campaign, both to our overall message ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1641501709233971201), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/CqbDOYMO51h/)) shared through our Buffer social channels, as well as to [my Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/joelgascoigne/status/1641572486520217600?s=20) I wrote sharing more of my thinking on freemium as part of our strategy. _Ask: I’d be really grateful if you could reshare one of these posts with your network, if this feels like useful content for them._


### **Stripe Checkout to facilitate tax collection** 


We are clearly moving into a world with more complexity and regulation around selling SaaS products globally. We’ve felt this with the increased accountability for VAT collection, and for a while now we’ve been paying state sales tax in many cases. Going forward, we have made the decision that it will make sense to be transparent with the customer, and also apply that tax to the price. This is a change from a singular price that always applies, to a singular price which will have eligible taxes added that differ based on the customer’s location. In preparation for this, we rolled out Stripe Checkout to replace our existing checkout system. This is going to make rolling out this type of tax collection much easier in the coming months.


**Upwards Manager reviews** - During March, we conducted a round of reviews however in the opposite direction to usual. Instead of managers reviewing their team, we had individuals reviewing their manager. This gets us towards more fully rounded feedback (akin to 360), yet with the work required happening at different times. This is the first time we’ve done a real upwards review like this, and we’ve had great feedback from both individuals and managers about this new ability to share feedback, and gain those valuable insights into their leadership.


## **What’s coming up**


### **AI in the main composer** 


During April, we will be adding AI functionality to the main composer. Whereas the Ideas section is used by 8% of monthly active users, our main composer is used by 91%. Therefore, getting AI into the main composer is going to be a very significant step in our AI functionality and market position. We’re also digging deeper into UX improvements to ensure that we are adding AI functionality in the right way to truly reduce friction and help users get more value from Buffer, or speed up the pace of getting value.


### **YouTube Shorts**


We’ve been working hard on building out YouTube Shorts as a channel within Buffer, and this should be ready to launch towards the end of April or in early May. YouTube has been the most requested channel addition to Buffer for a long time, and YouTube Shorts will be our foray into this massively popular channel. We’re starting with Shorts as this will allow us to provide significant value with a feature that closely matches our existing functionality (Instagram Reels, TikTok). We plan to expand to fully support YouTube videos in the future, too.


### **Finalizing our new Twitter API contract**


After a frantic January and February of intense discussions with Twitter around the future of their API, we’ve heard from them again after a couple of months of them being quieter. They needed more time to arrive at a clear direction ahead, and we’re expecting to have that clarity within April. This will mean we finalize the new price for our API contract, and we expect to see roughly a doubling of this cost. This will impact our COGS and profitability and put us further away from profitability again, however with growth likely ahead I believe we will be able to recoup this cost. Ultimately, this means that the cost of providing Twitter is very high for us, and we do not make too much for providing Twitter to customers. Twitter is instead more of a required piece of the channel mix customers expect. With that said, there is a possibility that this consolidation of the market is to our favor and we see growth in Twitter usage within Buffer as people need to move from other platforms that can’t afford the API price increase.


Thanks for reading, and for your support for Buffer. If any thoughts arise from this, hit reply.


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi there, I’m here with Buffer’s shareholder update for March 2023. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. If you have any questions or something stands out, don’t hesitate to hit reply to discuss.

March 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on March 10, 2023_


Hi,


I’m happy to share Buffer’s February 2023 update. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- It’s been great to see our pace of MRR decline slow very consistently over the past 3 months since we introduced our self-serve legacy migration hub.
- MRR decline was -1.87% in December, -1.38% in January and now -0.60% in February.
- As a reminder, the migration hub allows our legacy customers to easily switch over to our new pricing, and for many of them this has been a price decrease, which is why we’ve seen an overall MRR decline, while the New Buffer segment has been growing healthily.
- We’re very happy to see continued strong growth of Monthly Active Users. Note: there was an error in the numbers last month, where I shared a -3.26% change in MAU. The actual change was +5.56%.
- We’ve also seen our runway increase by a few months. We’re very glad to have a solid runway while we work back to growth and profitability.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Our banking position** 


Buffer does not have any significant exposure to Silicon Valley Bank. Many years ago we moved over to Bridge Bank (part of Western Alliance Bank). The only potential minor impact to us of the events around SVB is that our UK bank account is with them. This is used purely for payroll and is kept at under $200K, only around 3.5% of our cash. We’re keeping an eye on the situation and whether there is any further fallout, as well as generally considering how we can best insulate ourselves from these types of outcomes.


### **Buffer’s AI Assistant**


We launched our AI assistant in early February, and it has been very well received. So far, we’ve integrated this into our Ideas section, and we plan to add it to the main composer soon. We’ve already followed up with an improvement that enables specific options for rephrasing, expanding and summarizing content. We’re also planning to add an AI Assistant feature to generate new content ideas based on your existing content. [More here.](https://buffer.com/ai-assistant)


### **Integrations in Ideas area** 


We’re continuing to improve the Ideas composer, and have added a variety of integrations to our existing Canva integration. Our complete list is now: Canva, Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, Google Photos, Giphy and Unsplash.


### **Post previews**


We’ve launched post previews for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. This is a new recent feature we added, and it’s incredibly useful for customers, removes friction and builds trust and confidence in Buffer, as they can see exactly what their posts will look like when they share them to the networks. [More here.](https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1630931405700988930?s=20)


## **What’s coming up**


### **Twitter API changes** 


After some intense negotiations, calculations and strategic decision making during February, Twitter pushed back the date multiple times and then shared they would be taking [a few more weeks](https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1626732269174943745) to make the planned changes. We’re in a holding pattern currently as we wait for more information, however we expect that things will go as planned and we will see a fairly significant increase of our Twitter costs which will directly increase our COGS. We are in a position to be able to absorb this.


### **YouTube as a channel**


We’re working hard to prepare to launch YouTube as a channel within Buffer. We will be starting out with YouTube shorts, which are the closest to existing content formats we already support (TikTok and Instagram Reels), and will allow us to get something out sooner and then iterate. We plan to support full YouTube videos in the future, too.


### **Ideas area tagging & organization**


We’re working on adding organizational features in the Ideas section of Buffer. The key functionality we’re planning to add is tagging and filtering of ideas based on tags. We’re also revisiting our campaigns functionality and will likely align this with tagging, so that it flows from ideas to drafts to published content to analytics. Idea Created has recently surpassed Comment Replied (use of engagement) and Start Page Published (use of Start Page) as a contributor to our Monthly Active Usage ([see chart](https://share.cleanshot.com/fj3kXybW)). AI was a key contributor of this, and we believe that adding organizational features will further increase usage of Ideas. Our overall hypothesis is to move earlier in the creation process, where we believe that people will have an order of magnitude more ideas than published posts, and we are confident that connecting these tasks can streamline the overall workflow for users.


That’s a wrap for our February update. Thanks for your continued support!


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi, I’m happy to share Buffer’s February 2023 update. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.

February 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on February 10, 2023_


Hi,


I’m back with a monthly shareholder update for Buffer. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- As a reminder, we expect a higher pace of MRR decline for a few months as we have introduced a way for customers to migrate to our latest plans, and on average our new plans have a lower price point.
- With that said, we are seeing very strong growth in our leading indicators (more below).
- We were happy to see a small net profit for January.
- One other reminder - we are planning for a ~$1m reduction in cash in the coming months due to our VAT liability in the UK.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Leading indicator growth**


As I mentioned last month, we’re pursuing a “down and wide” strategy of moving down-market to serve individuals (creators, entrepreneurs, influencers, professionals) as well as small businesses, and increasing the breadth of our product and serve customers beyond just their social media needs. With this in mind, we’ve been doubling, tripling down on freemium and streamlining various user flows. This has proven to give us some immediate wins in our most leading indicators, and thankfully these are being retained through the funnel too. Here are our January numbers of key leading indicators, and growth compared to December:

- Signups: 81,971 (+30.11%)
- Activations: 23,019 (+25.78%)
- New customers: 3,614 (+35.10%)

We’re still seeing a decline top-line, however in the coming months as we maintain strong leading indicators and see our legacy customers continue to migrate to our latest pricing, we expect to see a flattening of the decline and a shift to growth.


### **Mastodon as a channel** 


Our big launch in January was Mastodon, and despite still being an emerging platform, we saw very high engagement and excitement around our support for Mastodon scheduling. [See all the details](https://buffer.com/mastodon) of our offering, and if you’re already on Mastodon then [follow Buffer here](https://mastodon.world/@buffer), and [I’m here](https://mastodon.social/@joelg)! Mastodon is a fundamentally different type of platform, being federated (essentially decentralized) and based on open standards. As a business built on a variety of networks, this is a unique type of network that makes sense for us to invest in. Mastodon is a key milestone for us, being our 10th channel.


### **Twitter API changes**


You have likely spotted the API changes [announced via @TwitterDev](https://twitter.com/TwitterDev). This will unfortunately have an impact on us. Twitter is the largest line item of our COGS, and it is set to increase significantly. Thankfully, we have a 12-year relationship with Twitter and strong advocacy within the company and are working closely with them on a new package for our API access and usage levels. Customers will not be impacted on February 13, and we do not expect to make any immediate changes to our offering. Our goal is to maintain our offering and assure customers that we are a stable platform throughout the numerous changes that will happen over the coming weeks. 


## **What’s coming up**


### **AI assisted functionality**


We’re launching our AI Assistant in open beta next week! We’re starting with AI as a writing sidekick within the composer in our new Ideas / Create section ([preview here](https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1603405877851070464)). We’re building this on OpenAI, and we plan to start with a lightweight credit system tiered based on the pricing plan a customer is on. As we see usage, we’ll be able to calibrate the pricing and figure out what makes sense overall. Our hope and expectation is that the AI Assistant is used in ways that lead people to share more via Buffer, so we see expansion of revenue that offsets our costs. This launch will put a stake in the ground that we are incorporating AI in a thoughtful, useful way and over time AI can pop up and help in many parts of the product.


### **YouTube as a channel**


We’re in the discovery and design phase of building YouTube as a publishing channel within Buffer, and are aiming to launch in the next couple of months. We’ve found great success in adding new channels in the past year, and YouTube is of course a very significant one to add to the product. Since our pricing is per channel, we expect to see a positive impact to growth of rolling this out. We will be further along in development by next month’s update, so I’ll share a little more detail on the UX and functionality then.


Thanks for your support,


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi, I’m back with a monthly shareholder update for Buffer. See below for our numbers, updates, and what’s coming up. As always, hit reply with comments or questions.

January 2023


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on January 13, 2023_


Hi,

Happy 2023! I’m here to share Buffer’s December 2022 numbers and updates. Please hit reply with comments or questions. Let’s dive in:


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- December is typically our worst-performing month seasonally each year. This has been true for us here, however the December dip was less pronounced than we had expected.
- As mentioned last month, we expect a higher pace of MRR decline for a few months as we have introduced a way for customers to migrate to our latest plans, and on average our new plans have a lower price point. This has been true for us and is part of the reason we have a fairly significant decline in MRR for December, when we combine the seasonal dip and the impact of migrations.
- We are planning for a ~$1m reduction in cash in the coming months due to our VAT liability in the UK, so the bank balance and runway will see a drop soon when we handle that.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Twitter Threads**


We launched support for posting and scheduling Twitter Threads via Buffer. This has been one of the most highly requested features we’ve had and was a great launch. Usage looks solid and we had many positive comments via social, email, and in our Discord community. [More here.](https://buffer.com/resources/twitter-threads-buffer/)


### **Customer experience**


I thought it would be useful to highlight some of our incredible customer service numbers for 2022. We had 66k conversations with customers, which represented 7% of paying customers, and 3% of overall MAU. Our average first reply time was 3.1 hours, and 93.4% CSAT.


### **VAT liability**


Last month, I mentioned that we’ve been working through accounting for VAT liability we owe HMRC for UK customers dating back to 2015. The finance team, with help from the whole company and a new team of temporary contractors, have been very successful in minimizing the liability amount. We have been able to reduce the number from around $1m to roughly $800k. We will see this impact to our cash balance and runway in the coming months, and we are looking forward to being compliant and on the other side of this.


## **What’s coming up**


### **2023 strategy**


We will be continuing our strategy which we’ve made great strides on in 2022. The simplest way for me to describe our strategy would be “down and wide”. We’re shifting down-market to serve individuals (creators, entrepreneurs, influencers, professionals) as well as small businesses. This is a shift that we’ve already seen bear fruit in terms of an increase in signups from streamlining and simplifying our sign up process. The goal of going “wide”, is to increase the breadth of our product and serve customers beyond just their social media needs. The ultimate goal here is to increase our total addressable market, and diversify and insulate ourselves from the volatility of being purely in social media management.


### **January looking good**


Obviously I’ll have a full update in a month, but it is worth highlighting that so far January has been off to a very good start. The first full week of January has been our best week in terms of signups in over 20 months. We’re feeling confident that our renewed focus on freemium, individuals, and acquisition will yield great, sustainable results and growth as we progress through the year.


### **Mastodon support**


We’re working on supporting Mastodon as a channel within Buffer. Since Twitter’s change of ownership and the volatile product changes and experience, there has been a surge of growth for Mastodon. We’re moving fast to support Mastodon in Buffer, and we’re considering ways we can be involved in the community beyond this, too. Mastodon feels culturally and philosophically aligned with Buffer in many ways. Since pricing on our paid plans is now per channel, there is a good chance that introducing Mastodon support will also give us a slight bump in growth (it will also be available as one of 3 channels on the free plan). If you’re interested, we also put together a [Beginner’s Guide to Mastodon](https://buffer.com/resources/mastodon-social/).


### **AI assisted functionality**


We are also working on integrating AI assistance into Buffer. We’re starting with AI as a writing sidekick within the composer in our new Ideas section ([preview here](https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1603405877851070464)), and are also looking into adding it as an image integration option similar to Canva or Giphy, where you can type a prompt, generate an image, and add that right into your social post.

That’s all for this month. Thank you for your support of Buffer.



— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi,

Happy 2023! I’m here to share Buffer’s December 2022 numbers and updates. Please hit reply with comments or questions. Let’s dive in:

December 2022


> ℹ️ _Sent to shareholders on December 15, 2022_


Hi,


After experimenting with different formats and frequencies of updates, I’m resuming personally sending shareholder updates on a monthly basis. Please hit reply with any thoughts or questions.


> 📊 [MetricsTable]  
> _Check out this post on_ [_buffer.com/shareholders_](/6d72d21488984f0f9c02f967cc2967c7) _to see the metrics table._

- We are in a gradual decline of overall revenue and customers, and it is our top priority to turn this around in a way that is sustainable long-term. This month, we saw an important win of growth in MAU, which is the most leading indicator in these metrics, and is our 4th straight month of MAU growth.
- We had an unusually high net loss this month due to accounting for prepayments made in 2019/2020 which converted to credits now expiring for a retreat we cancelled due to the pandemic. This was not a direct cash impact, and without it net income would have been -$29,616.58.
- We anticipate a higher pace of MRR decline in the coming months, as we have now launched a Migration Hub (more below) which allows users to easily switch from a legacy plan to a new plan, and since this is voluntary to begin with, we will initially see a higher volume customers switching who will see a price decrease.
- We are planning for a ~$1m reduction in cash in the coming months due to our VAT liability in the UK, so the bank balance and runway will see a drop soon when we handle that.

## **Note-worthy updates and reflections**


### **Scheduling to Start Pages**


As a reminder, Start Page is our micro website builder or link in bio tool. At the beginning of November we launched the ability for anyone with a start page to include a block where they can share updates. The most powerful part of this is that you can use the regular Buffer composer to publish the updates. This is part of our continued focus on Start Page being our first native channel. [More here.](https://buffer.com/resources/new-from-start-page-schedule-posts-to-your-link-in-bio-for-free/)


### **Ideas**


We recently launched Ideas, a brand new section of Buffer where users can save an idea for a post. We want to significantly reduce the friction of getting those ideas into Buffer, and working on them whenever is convenient. You can add an idea easily from the dashboard, or using our browser extensions. For Buffer, we see a powerful opportunity to drive more active usage by lowering the friction here, for example people are likely to have many more ideas than drafts, and many more drafts than posts. We’re also getting earlier in the workflow, by being part of the content creation process, rather than purely content publishing. [More here.](https://buffer.com/ideas)


### **Migration Hub**


A key strategic choice we made a couple of months ago, is to launch new value onto our newer pricing and packaging (we call this New Buffer internally). Legacy plans still account for around ~60% of paying customers and MRR, and the time feels right to accelerate the shift to the current plans. We’re not doing a forced migration at this point, instead the Migration Hub allows customers to very clearly see the difference between their legacy plan and the current plans, in terms of functionality and price. At this early stage in introducing the Migration Hub, we are experiencing an even steeper decline of MRR, and anticipate a few months of this before things taper off. This is due to the New Buffer plans being priced slightly lower relatively vs the legacy plans. This is part of our strategy to go down-market to serve individuals and small businesses. Whilst this period is a little painful to observe, it is also coming with our first growth in MAU in a long time. It is my belief that we need to rip the bandaid off here and get the majority of our user-base on New Buffer sooner. In that sense, we are seeing the results so far that we hoped to see.


### **VAT**


We’ve been aware for some time that we may have a VAT liability to handle with the UK and EU, however the details have always been quite vague. In recent months, the UK in particular (HMRC) have increased their pressure on us and other SaaS companies to start accounting for, and paying, VAT for consumer customers. As a result of this, we conducted a deeper analysis of the requirements, and have been working with a consultant as well as connecting with other SaaS businesses experiencing the same situation. This unfortunately means that we ended up with a challenging and time consuming task of determining and verifying tax status for all UK customers dating back to 2015. We’ve thankfully made good progress and reduced our default VAT liability (if we did none of this verification and all customers were assumed consumers) for 2015-2022 from around $3m to under $1m. This does, however, mean we will see that ~$1m impact on our cash balance in the coming months. We will be accounting for this in the current year, so our net income will look quite significant, however this is not a recurring expense but rather a one off.


## **What’s coming up**


We are still facing a gradual decline of MRR and customers, and it is our top priority to turn around this situation and work our way towards sustainable growth, without compromising on our values or the DNA of the company. I remain confident that we will achieve this, and that once we get to that place, because we will have done so without cutting corners, we will see a healthy future in terms of our company growth.


In the next few months, we're doubling down further on our strategy of serving creators and small businesses with a freemium product.


We've seen good signs in the past few months that this focus is helping us navigate our way to a new phase of sustainable growth, and it's also a gap which is largely unaddressed in the market. Most of the competitors at scale have moved up-market and leave a gap for small businesses, and newer products with a freemium strategy lack the breadth of offering we are able to provide.


Our efforts here will include ensuring our offering is holistically structured as freemium, rather than just pieces of it (historically our publishing offering has been a strong freemium product but functionality we added on top has either been purely paid (analytics and engagement) or purely free (Start Page).


Our top goals are to increase acquisition (we currently get around 65,000 signups per month and would like to be getting ~80,000 per month, and continuing to add value in a way that is holistically freemium. I’m happy to report that all features we added to Buffer this year included some version for free users. In the past few months, we've seen a greater impact from our launches as they have added value for almost all of our MAU, and this will continue to be our focus. I largely attribute our stalling of the decline, and recent growth of MAU to this shift. This is important because I expect that signups and MAU will be the leading indicators of a turnaround in our overall growth.


Other efforts we are making to align with these product led growth efforts are rebuilding a vibrant community around Buffer, creating opportunities for some food to regularly try new functionality early, and continuing to provide exceptional customer service to all users. The goal is to create a loyal base of users who will bring us more users and customers through word of month.


## **Asks**


As a company, we’d love to speak with people at companies who are focused on small businesses and individuals with a free plan, ideally at scale ($15-25m ARR). This is a less common approach than B2B / enterprise SaaS and so I'm looking to keep building my network of founders and CEOs to exchange learning and ideas with. We’d also love to talk with executives product managers, product marketers working on these types of products. If someone comes to mind, please hit reply and mention them, or go ahead and make an introduction.


That's all for this month. Please hit reply to share a thought or question. I’ll be sending updates monthly going forward. If you don't want to receive this, let me know or click the link at the bottom.


Thank you for your long-term support of Buffer,


— Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO



Hi, After experimenting with different formats and frequencies of updates, I’m resuming personally sending shareholder updates on a monthly basis. Please hit reply with any thoughts or questions.

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