| From: | Joel Gascoigne |
| To: | Shareholders |
| Subject: | August 2023 Shareholder Update |
| Date: | September 19, 2023 |
August 2023 Shareholder Update
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.
Key numbers
- 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!
