Buffer's 2017 in numbers

A science flask icon representing the salary formula

1

New Salary Formula

Every few years we iterate on our salary formula, which we use to calculate all Buffer salaries. We also publish the formula and salaries transparently. The latest update to the formula included a remote-first emphasis with benchmarks based on a single city, San Francisco.

Check out the Salary Formula!
Adnan working on his laptop

2

Learning Sabbaticals

For the first time at Buffer we experimented with learning sabbaticals: multi-month time off for current teammates to develop the skillsets they need to move to other roles. Two teammates took a learning sabbatical in 2017, acquiring skills for design and engineering.

Learn more about learning sabbaticals
The Buffer logo inside of a headset icon

5

All Hands

Being a fully-distributed, worldwide team makes our company-wide All Hands meetings a bit tricky to schedule but oh-so worth it to see everyone together. We had five All Hands in 2017 and are on a consistent bimonthly cadence. Plus, we experimented with smaller All Hands that highlight one team within Buffer, and we had two of those this past year: product and marketing.

A group of Bufferoos after a dinner party in Madrid, Spain

6

Days closed

In 2016, we closed Buffer for two days at the end of year to give our team an extra break. This year we took it a step further and closed Buffer from December 25 to January 1, giving the team six business days off.

Read more about why we closed over the holidays
A baby carriage

7

Buffer Babies

In total we had 7 Buffer babies join the Buffer family in 2017! We’re so grateful that we get to see adorable photos pop up in Slack and little happy faces in Zoom!

Joel Gascoigne speaking at Google Campus Madrid

18

Speaking Engagements

We’re lucky to have many teammates keen on speaking at conferences around the world. In fact, one of our teammates, Joe, spoke at six conferences just this year!

Open source code at Buffer

24.5

Percent of new code that was open sourced

Our engineering team has been working hard to make sure Buffer is more open source. In 2017, 24.5% of the code added to Buffer's codebase in 2017 was open source.

Read our guide to open sourcing
An icon of a TV screen showing three contestants on a gameshow

25

Gameshow Questions

At our 2017 Buffer retreat in Madrid we played a team-wide game of Jeopardy where we answered 25 questions about one another.

Learn more about our gameshow here
Caryn and Jenny working together at the 2017 Buffer Retreat in Madrid, Spain

36

Side Projects

The team at Buffer works on some pretty neat projects in their free time! This year we counted 36 projects currently in the works. You can check them all out in the link below.

Learn more about our side projects here
Icon showing a blog post being written

249

Blog Posts

Between our Social blog, the Open blog, the Overflow blog, and now our Customer Experience blog, we’ve published a lot of posts. Here’s the breakdown: 183 on Social, 47 on Open, 12 on Overflow, and 7 on Customer Experience.

An airplane and a martini

1,106

Vacation Days Taken

Last year we implemented a new minimum vacation policy at Buffer to encourage employees to take at least three weeks off. In total the team took 1,106 days of vacation, which is an average of just over 15 days per person.

Learn about how minimum vacation works
A person reading a Kindle on beach

2,173

Kindle Books

Our team does lots of reading (buoyed by a generous Kindle book perk). This year, the most popular book on our team was the The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team. As a result we spent lots of time thinking about artificial harmony at Buffer in 2017.

Check out all our top books from 2017
Some buffer swag socks

2,316

Swag Items

This year we sent 2,316 swags items — stickers, socks, shirts, and more — to our community and customers. The socks were a favorite!

Read more about how we think about swag
A group of Bufferoos working on their laptops at Google Campus Madrid

2,918

Dollars Spent on Learning and Development

This year we debuted a learning and development perk: $20 per month, per teammate. Teammates used the stipend for everything from books and courses to buying online kits and learning to crochet.

Read more about learning and development at Buffer

5,264

Updates to the Codebase

Our team has been busy updating code this year! Throughout the entire year there have been 5,264 pull requests across our private and open source repositories, last year there were 3,749 pull requests so 2017 was a 40 percent increase!

Read about how we empower engineers to build in the open

3,518

Bufferchatters

Every Wednesday we host #bufferchat in two separate timezones. This year we chatted about everything from Millennial Marketing and Customer Journeys, to Presentation Skills and Digital Nomading.

Learn more about #bufferchat

85,903

Support Tickets Solved

That's a lot of conversations and questions to have and our Customer Advocacy team loves making it happen! These tickets were put forward by 44,030 Buffer users and in total there were 106,859 emails sent by our team with 56 percent of inquiries getting resolved on the first email.

Read more about our customer advocates

45,906

New Customers

We welcomed 45,906 new customers to the Buffer family in 2017! We’re so grateful for each and every one of these new customers who make Buffer possible.

241,770

New Social Media Fans

As you might imagine, social media is a priority for us here at Buffer. We run various experiments and try to keep up a strong social presence. This year resulted in a total of 241,770 new fans and followers. Here’s the breakdown:

• 193,200 new Twitter followers
• 34,400 new Facebook fans
• 14,170 new Instagram followers

544,879

Podcast Downloads

2017 was the first full year of our podcast running and with 53 episodes this year we were thrilled to have over 544,879 downloads of those episodes!

Listen to the podcast here

1,050,000

Minutes on Zoom

As a remote team we rely really heavily on Zoom. In 2017, we had an average of 25 meetings per work day plus we spent a total of 1,050,000 minutes on Zoom. That’s over 729 days!

Read all about the tools we use to work remotely

2,317,400

Social Accounts Connected

With Buffer you can connect and manage multiple social media accounts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. This year we had 2,317,400 social media accounts connected to Buffer! (That’s a lot of social!)

Facebook: 1,135,127
Twitter 537,440
Instagram 390,299
LinkedIn 219,446
Google + 142,919
Pinterest 42,019

15,680,689

Revenue Generated

2017 was a big year for Buffer as we crossed $15 Million in annual recurring revenue (ARR)! The year before we were at $12.4 Million ARR.

See our transparent revenue dashboard

325,279,525

Posts Sent

Buffer users send out a ton of posts every year. In 2016, they sent 261,419,836 posts sent through Buffer, and this year the increase was 24.4 percent!

Facebook: 92,899,295
Twitter: 159,220,103
Instagram: 27,107,296
Pinterest: 3,087,144
LinkedIn: 19,340,236
Google+: 23,589,622

140,000+ people like you use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month