April 2024 Shareholder Update

ℹ️ Sent to shareholders on May 13, 2024

Hi there, I’ll be sharing the metrics and key updates for Buffer for April 2024. I’m happy to take any questions or comments while Joel is away.

For the first time since January 2023, we closed the month with a profit. Our Net Income for the month of April came in at $50,222. This brings our YTD loss down to -$359,000. Our New Buffer MRR/ARR segment grew by 1.51% and overall MRR/ARR grew by 0.20%.

Note-worthy updates and reflections

Create Launch

Last month I shared that we were preparing to launch Buffer’s new Board view to all users in April. This went live on Wednesday, April 17th. With the brand new Board view users can:

• Drag and drop their content ideas into fully customizable columns
• Visualize their progress from "To Do" to "Done"
• Organize content by format, channel, team member or however they’d like

This new space allows users to create and organize all of their content within Buffer. Users who were previously using Trello or another task management tool are loving this feature. Whether it’s an image, a blog post, or even just a random thought users can now: save it in Buffer, tag it, repurpose it for any social channel, and automatically publish it at the best time. Based on initial launch results we’re seeing that Board view converts new signups from the Marketing Page. And when reflecting on the Create features more generally, we’re seeing that users who start in the Create part of the app have higher retention.

Facebook Group Reminders

Earlier this year Meta announced their plans to sunset API support for Facebook Groups effective April 22nd. As a result, our engineers and PMs have been working to ensure our customers have a solution in place to continue connecting Facebook Groups. While automatic scheduling to Facebook Groups is no longer possible, Buffer will continue to support publishing to Facebook Groups using mobile notifications (i.e. reminders). On April 22nd, we released reminders for Facebook Groups.

With notification based publishing, users can still create their post in Buffer, receive a notification on their mobile device when it’s time to post, and then tap the notification and copy their post over to their Facebook group to finish publishing.

Notification publishing tends to give users more flexibility with what they can schedule, as they aren’t bound to any API limitations. For example, users can schedule a Poll or an Event. Additionally, while users previously needed to be an admin of a Facebook Group to schedule a post to the group, with notification publishing, users can now post as a non-admin group member.

Overall, as expected, posting volume has dropped with this change but channel connection only slightly declined, further validating that users are finding value in notification publishing.

Marketing

Our resources blog had one of its best months of traffic in April thanks to a strong focus on SEO, content refreshes, and some stellar new content that have extended our search footprint. Our design team is also making serious progress on refining the design style for our upcoming Web refresh. We’re excited for this refresh to go live in the coming months.

Profitability

While we are celebrating our first profitable month since January 2023, it is notable that profitability in April was primarily driven by a reduction in our OPEX spend. Our top line revenue declined by ~$6,400 from March to April. We’re looking more deeply into this alongside a general decline we’re seeing in some of our leading indicators like signups and activations. After a strong Q1, we believe that some seasonality is at play here and we are investigating different strategies to hedge against this.

That’s it for April. We’ll be back in touch in June to share our May results. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments.

Thanks for your continued support!

Jenny, Head of Finance