| From: | Joel Gascoigne |
| To: | Shareholders |
| Subject: | January 2024 Shareholder Update |
| Date: | March 1, 2024 |
January 2024 Shareholder Update
ℹ️ Sent to shareholders on March 1, 2024
Hi there,
I hope you had a chance to read the 2023 Shareholder Letter. 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.
Key numbers
- 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
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.
