July 2024 Shareholder Update

💡 Sent to shareholders on September 3, 2024

Hi there,

See below for Buffer's July 2024 results and key updates. Hit reply if you have thoughts you want to share, or questions for me. We're also in the midst of closing our August numbers, which are looking great. I'll be in touch with those in the next week or so.

Notes:

• July marked our fourth consecutive month of profitability with a $10,739 increase in revenue compared to June. We also continue to see steady MRR growth.
• We're now seeing our paying customers increase consistently. This was a metric which was lagging back the growth we've been seeing in MRR/ARR. It's wonderful to now be exactly where we want to be: growing ARR through serving more customers.
• As we enter a new phase of growth, I'm reflecting a lot on how we can keep our growth momentum continuing, while remaining a lean team. In this way, we will see fairly rapid growth in our profit margin and our bank balance will continue to rebound.
• We're also currently considering more stock repurchases from longer term investors and alumni who are ready for liquidity and where we see a win-win opportunity in the share price. Depending on the extent to which we conduct buybacks, this will result in a drop in the short term to our cash balance.

Note-worthy updates and reflections

Bluesky Launch At the end of July we launched support for Bluesky within Buffer. We believe Bluesky is a significant step forward in the era of decentralized social media, and we’re thrilled to partner with them to make scheduling and cross-posting even easier for our customers. Users can now effortlessly create, plan, and schedule Bluesky posts in advance, complete with links, images, hashtags, and even threaded posts. Decentralized social has brought a new era of text-first networks—an area that has always been our strength. Read more of my reflections on Bluesky and decentralized social.

Analytics for LinkedIn personal profiles Analytics are now available for LinkedIn personal profiles connected to Buffer. Users can simply head to the Publishing tab and view their sent posts to see the number of likes and comments on their LinkedIn content. We've added a lot of power and insights to the sent posts tab in recent months. We're also reflecting as a product team on the distinction between analytics within our Publish and Analyze tools, as we have some discrepancies and confusion we create there.

SOC2 Compliance In July, we made SOC2 compliance a top priority after one of our social network partners flagged it as a requirement to be fulfilled within six months. Since then, the team has been diligently coordinating efforts and organizing the necessary work. Our goal is to complete this by the end of the year. Achieving SOC2 compliance is a valuable step towards being a more mature business and serving a wider range of customers. We're balancing this enhanced diligence with ensuring we continue to ship improvements regularly.

A change to Product team structure After nearly four years, we parted ways with our Chief Product Officer. While this marks a significant change, it also gets me closer to the product org, and presents an opportunity for the team and I to re-evaluate and refresh our product strategy and roadmap. We’re rallying around three central pillars: empowering users to build lasting habits around content creation and sharing, leveraging text as our core strength, and accelerating modernizing the product by paying down tech debt and improving UX.

Marketing performance Earlier this year, we started noticing a significant decline in page views on our blog, likely due to changes in Google's algorithm. However, through a dedicated focus on SEO and a refined editorial strategy, we not only recovered but also have seen remarkable growth. As a result, our blog traffic has reached levels not seen since 2018, and in July, we surpassed 1 million page views.

That’s it for July. I’ll be back in touch in a week or two to share our August results. In the meantime, please hit reply with any questions or comments.

Have a great week,

Joel, Founder CEO