| From: | Joel Gascoigne |
| To: | Shareholders |
| Subject: | February 2023 Shareholder Update |
| Date: | March 10, 2023 |
February 2023 Shareholder Update
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.
Key numbers
- 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.
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.
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 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). 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!
