Welcome to my personal website. I live in Boulder, Colorado with my wife and toddler and love to ski, surf, mountain bike and hike. I’m a problem solver at heart and the Founder CEO of Buffer. I’m striving to carve my own path in business and life.
Take a look around. This is my personal writing and experimentation space. I write long-form articles as well as shorter posts, and I also have a portion of my notes publicily accessible.
Follow me everywhere:
We've recently shifted our AI strategy at Buffer. Rather than packing AI features into the product, our focus is making Buffer great to use with AI. It's about flexibility, interoperability and extensibility. We're making Buffer delightful to use and build upon.
The more comfortable you feel sharing your strategy openly, the stronger it likely is. If you feel worried about competitors knowing your strategy, it's probably weak.
Buffer's API is here. Whether you want to build workflows and agents for your social, build social sharing into your product, or a tool on top of the Buffer platform and userbase, we've got you covered.
We're building the API to become the primary layer of the product rather than an afterthought. We believe that going forward, people want to work with Buffer through many interfaces: MCP, CLI, our official apps, and 3rd party apps. Our launch today is a major commitment to this direction.
Within 6 to 12 months, every software product will need an API, MCP, and CLI. More and more, people expect to be able to interact with your product through automation, AI and agents. Historically, platform was a later stage of maturity play. Going forward, you won't really thrive in this new world without a platform.
Today we crossed $25M in ARR at Buffer, a significant milestone for us 🎉
This one has extra meaning for me because now that we're above $25M we're closer to $30M than we are to $20M. This comes after spending literally ~8 years around that $20M number.
I just got home from the 13th Buffer retreat in Barcelona, and what an incredible week it was.
We've been working remotely for most of our 15+ year journey, and we've found that our company retreats are an essential part of the recipe for working effectively together and forming bonds that lead to a strong culture and results.
People see growth and profitability as a tradeoff: when you dial one up, you turn the dial down on the other. In my experience, the times we've grown the fastest have also been the times we've been the most profitable.
A healthy freemium base is a growth savings account. Every month a portion upgrades. Remove the free plan and you get a one-time cash-out that looks like growth, but you're really just stealing from your future.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about interfaces recently. What is the value of a great user interface in a world with AI-assisted and agent-driven work? Since ChatGPT, Claude and other chat-based AI assistants were introduced, some have suggested that UIs are not necessary or optimal anymore. I have a slightly different take.
I believe what's really going on is that chat-based AI assistants give you so much power and flexibility that generally isn't available in most UIs, and due to this fact, we would often choose a chat-based interface over something else.
I feel like there needs to be an iOS ssh client that has voice-first input. I'd love to keep my Claude Code sessions going via mobile just by talking. Does this exist yet?
For many years at Buffer, any time someone moved on we'd backfill their role by default. About 5 years ago I changed my approach: by default don't backfill.
I found that defaulting to backfilling roles meant that the team remained in a maintenance mindset rather than being in a builder mindset. Backfilling means assuming that we should keep things as they are, rather than allowing ourselves to reflect on whether there's another way.
Michael Porter's productivity frontier concept is playing out in real-time. We have 1-2 years where the frontier is getting pushed out by AI before it settles. We get to decide: wait for best practices to emerge, or engage in rebuilding? At Buffer we're choosing to be in the mess of the frontier.
I'm happy to share that the brand new Buffer API is in Public Beta 🎉
It's ready to use for personal automations and to create enhancements for your Buffer account. Use it via MCP with your favorite AI, use it with n8n, or start developing on top of it via Claude Code or Codex (or even hand-written code!)
AI is enabling innovation with new possibilities and also driving operational improvements across all roles.
My hunch is that in the longer term, the operational gains will be adopted by most businesses and not be a true differentiator.
Something I've been having a lot of fun with recently: I've been building custom AI agents that help me with my weekly and monthly reviews.
I already had my GTD productivity system pretty well documented in Obsidian, and I had Claude Code create agents based on the documentation to help me do my weekly review, which I'd been struggling to keep up with each week. The agents are just markdown files that have the weekly review process documented including using Todoist via the command line to fetch my active projects and next actions. I can just ask Claude Code to fetch and run the agent, and it walks through the weekly review with me. It can do some pretty powerful reasoning around rescheduling, my capacity, and even things I might miss. It asks me questions and based on my answers it makes all the changes in Todoist on my behalf.
I'm delighted to share that 2025 was one of Buffer's strongest years in our 15-year history. Key results for the year:
One of my favorite parts about having a great year is that we get to do a very meaningful profit share for the team. We distribute 15% of profit in the form of our profit share bonus, and with our results for 2025 that's $377,005 we're distributing, an average bonus of $5,164 per person.
A pattern I've noticed as a CEO is that people will sometimes try to save me time by presenting just the specific question or items they're hoping to get sign off on.
I'm sure that in some ways I've caused this pattern by presenting as busy, and probably in other ways it's a learned habit people have developed from their career experiences. It's probably somewhat natural to try to save the CEO time, and many CEO's may be quite efficient at making decisions on much less data than I am.
In my experience, shipping faster isn't usually the answer when growth stalls. It took years of decline to learn this.
What truly drives sustainable growth is a strong strategy, differentiation, and a sound business model.
I write a lot more than I publish, and one of my goals for 2026 is to release more of my writing. I'm going to think aloud and learn in public much more. If this resonates for you, here are a couple of great quotes I've recently come across to nudge you to publish more too:
"Get comfortable publishing things that aren’t perfect. I know many people who wait too long to publish and, well, never do. They do this for years. If they’d gotten the ball rolling back then, they’d be better writers today. It’s weird: you’d think regular private writing would be sufficient to get better. But it isn’t. There’s no stakes. No feedback. The only way to get better is to ship." – Drew Breunig
It’s a good idea to aim to progress in other dimensions of life throughout the duration building a company.
I've come to believe that while working on a company (in my case Buffer) you should be progressing in other dimensions of your life. Generally, any sort of progress is not linear. Meaning that sometimes you’re seeing significant growth and progress, sometimes you'll be going through a flat patch, and sometimes even declining.
"The most underrated thing about profitability is how much peace of mind it gives you. Once you're profitable, you stop worrying about survival and focus on what really matters: building something great." - Karri Saarinen
I enjoyed the thoughts from Karri, the co-founder and CEO of Linear on profitability, hiring, tenure and more. Many of the reflections ring true based on my experience with Buffer.
I believe that when a business shifts to value extraction instead of value creation, it's the beginning of the end.
With Buffer, I’m trying to operate with what I’d call an “under-extraction” philosophy. Create real value for customers and lean into generosity in how we package it.
Buffer just turned 15 years old! And we're fortunate to be closing out our best year in the past 7. We have 69,000 customers, a $23M annual run rate, and will achieve over $2M in profit in 2025.
To mark 15 years of Buffer, here are 15 of the key lessons I've leaned first hand as a founder CEO. These may not all apply for you, but I hope some are useful and they at least get you thinking:
Today we're launching Community, which we've built to help you to stay on top of comments and replies across all your social channels. Available now on all Buffer plans, including our free plan.
Posting is only half the equation for success on social. For nearly 15 years now, Buffer has been a great tool for publishing. To really see results, you need to participate in the community too.
This is one of my favorite charts at Buffer right now.
It's the chart of our number of paying customers. And it might look like we've just experienced some awful churn, but that's not what it is.
Am I proud of this?
This has become one of the most important questions I regularly ask myself. I also ask people in my team: are you proud of this?
Did you know that out of the first 10 people at Buffer, 3 were customer support folks?
It combined two of the most important early decisions I made with Buffer:
Yesterday I sent the Buffer shareholder update with our August results to the ~80 alumni and investor shareholders. We also share these publicly so that we can be open with you, the Buffer community, around our results, the latest updates and what's coming up at Buffer.
Here are Buffer's key metrics for August 2025:
Don’t have a free plan unless serving the people who use your free plan is truly part of your mission. If you’re thinking about your free plan just as a step to a paid plan, you’re unlikely to build a successful freemium model.
A good free to paid conversion rate is 3-6%, and this means that 94-97% of users on the free plan will never pay. If you can’t appreciate and enjoy serving those folks, and truly build something of value for them, I don’t think you’ll make a freemium model work and you should just have a trial.
In 2020, after 9 straight years of growth, Buffer declined 4.96%. We would go on to decline a total of 20% over 4 years. How does it feel as a founder to go through this experience? Here are some of my journal entries from the initial stages of the decline:
January 13th, 2020
"We're starting off with a decline, and this is concerning."
There are a few beliefs I've followed as I've built Buffer. One of them is that as I attain personal freedoms through the success of Buffer, I aim to extend those same freedoms to the team.
Very early on, this was in the form of location independence. I wanted to travel the world and have new experiences as I built Buffer. I could have given myself this benefit without extending it to others, but that didn't feel right to me. So we became a fully remote company, all the way back in 2013.
"They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process." – Richard Feynman, on his notebooks
"If you could wake up tomorrow with significantly more positive, focused energy to invest at work and with your family, how significantly would that change your life for the better?" – Jim Loehr
I recently re-read The Power of Full Engagement, a book I first read over a decade ago. When I read it in my twenties, it had a profound impact and led me to make some real changes. In the past few months, I found myself thinking about this book once again. It's all about energy management, and if any of this resonates for you, I recommend you take a look at it.
A couple of days ago I sent out the monthly Buffer shareholder update for May 2025. This goes out to all our investor and alumni shareholders (~80 people on the list) and we share it publicly as part of our value of transparency.
Here are Buffer's May 2025 metrics:
For transparency to be a genuine value of an organization, it cannot simply be something you join and benefit from. It requires active participation and contribution from every person in the company. This should stretch everyone. It should feel a little uncomfortable at times because transparency is not easy, but the benefits are real.
Wow, we did it! We have officially achieved a new all-time-high ARR at Buffer 🎉
Our previous all-time-high was $22,384,598 on February 6, 2020. Today, our ARR stands at $22,395,427.
Something interesting and rather unexpected has been happening for me. At Buffer, we're very close to reaching a new all-time-high level of revenue (ARR). This has been a long journey with many ups and downs.
Our previous highest ARR was on February 6th, 2020. We hit $22,387,856 in ARR. Following this peak, we experienced 4 years of decline. It came from several missteps, indecision, and being too reactive. In order to turn it around, we made significant strategy changes and a ton of operational improvements. In 2023 we stalled our decline, and in 2024 we grew strongly again (12.56% growth). We're on track for greater growth in 2025 (already 10.25% growth since the start of the year).
Feeling so much gratitude for this wonderful group of humans as I return from the 12th Buffer company retreat in Antalya, Türkiye.
51 weeks of the year, we work together across 49 cities in 21 countries. To get to spend a week in the same place is very special, and this retreat hit a particularly high note of how tight-knit, high trust and effective this team feels right now.
My experience as a founder CEO has been that I go through alternating phases of feeling clouded, and then those clouds lifting and clarity around important decisions emerging. When the clouds have cleared, I feel in flow and focused and I can give direction to my team.
Whenever I am feeling clarity, before long I inevitably hit a new patch of feeling clouded around certain issues or opportunities that newly arise. I've come to believe that these cycles are part of the journey, and that as hard as it can sometimes feel to be clouded and indecisive, there is value in those clouds.
Here are Buffer's March 2025 results:
This is part of the update I sent out recently to alumni and investor shareholders of Buffer (80 people on the list).
I've been having a fairly profound shift in motivation and purpose in the past few years, as I've continued to build Buffer (14 years and counting) while becoming a parent (we have a one year old and an almost four year old).
Whereas in the past, Buffer could occupy the central and primary spot in terms of my purpose and motivation, that's not the case anymore. Having a thriving family is important to me and is its own very strong why for me. It's important to me that I have a great relationship with my wife and that my kids grow up having great memories and a high-trust connection with me.
I've been adjusting the way I lead at Buffer, moving away from primarily 1:1 interactions with my direct reports, towards striving for as much transparent and group-based collaboration in projects as possible.
This wasn't an obvious move for me, as I've always valued the alignment, depth and trust that can be achieved through 1:1 conversations. But over time I've found there are real costs to over-reliance on 1:1 collaboration, and some significant benefits of collective brainstorming and decision making.
"An overall master plan to guide a business for the next ten years is unrealistic on the part of its author and is seldom worth the time and energy" – Charlie Munger
We had our team-wide All Hands earlier this week, and each month we celebrate the team anniversaries (we call them Bufferversaries) 🎉
It's so heartwarming to me that we have such a long tenured team. Can you believe there are 49 collective years put into building Buffer here?
I recently shared that last year at Buffer we achieved our first profitable year of the past three. As a result, we carried out profit sharing again - something that's very meaningful to me as I'm focused on building a business where when we succeed as a team, we all reap the rewards of that success together.
We achieved a net profit of $202,459, which for a $20M+ ARR business may not seem impressive. And indeed, in prior years we have achieved net profit in the millions.
Do you find it challenging to keep up the level of consistency you'd like in posting to social?
I personally find that sometimes I'm in a flow and I'll be posting several times a week. And then other times, I can get pulled in other directions and go dark for weeks.
2024 was a profitable year for Buffer, something we've really celebrated as a team after two years of losses. We closed the year with a net profit of $202,459.
But perhaps the most exciting part for me of achieving a profit is that we were able to distribute our profit share bonus again.
Did you know that we publish all of our Shareholder Updates transparently at Buffer?
We have a publicly viewable shareholders section of our website where we add the exact updates that I send out by email each month to our investor, team and alumni shareholders of the company.
Today is a special day at Buffer - we just crossed $20M in ARR 🎉🚀
What makes this extra special for all of us, is that this is the second time we've reached this milestone. This has been a years-long whole-team effort to turn a decline back around to growth and thriving. It has been hard-earned and we've been through a lot to get back to this place.
I recently joined Mark MacLeod on his podcast The Startup CEO Show. It was a lot of fun to talk with him about the journey of building Buffer and some of the values and principles I lead the company with.
We covered a variety of topics:
It's a little hard to believe. Fourteen years ago today, I launched Buffer from my apartment in Birmingham, in the UK.
Early on, my dream was just to create a tool that made it easy to Tweet consistently, build it for myself and others, and make enough money to cover my living expenses and go full-time on it. The number for me to be able to work on it full-time was £1,200 per month, and that felt almost out of reach in the beginning.
It's a little hard to believe. Fourteen years ago today, I launched Buffer from my apartment in Birmingham, in the UK. The launch came seven weeks...
It feels like blogging and personal websites are back. And tinkering and sharing experiments, too.
I suspect this never actually went away, but I think in the absence of a social network based on open standards, it became less interconnected.
Very rarely are there correct ways when it comes to how to build a business. Trying to find the correct way is a trap. What we must strive for is to find our way.
The challenge is most of our upbringing is focused on drilling into us that there is a correct way for everything.
Here's a reflection on Buffer's Q3 which I recently sent to shareholders:
We ended Q3 2024 with $1,602,052 in MRR or $19,224,628 in ARR. This represents 3.46% growth from Q2, which is our strongest quarterly growth in almost 5 years. We also grew paying customers by 2.89% to 57,666, our strongest growth in over 6 years. We continued our trend from Q2 of profitability in each month of Q3, and achieved a net income of $125,289 for the quarter.
If I were to rebrand Founder Mode, I would suggest Back To Basics Mode or First Principles Mode.
What strikes me about Founder Mode is that what it's really about, is cutting through the cruft of process and structure in a company, and getting back to the core of what made it exist in the first place.
We recently crossed $19M in ARR at Buffer… for the second time.
It's been a journey, to say the least. We first crossed $19M in ARR in September 2018. It's hard to believe that's six years ago.
We've fallen into a habit at Buffer of collaborating primarily through recurring group and 1:1 meetings. As an organization, we have many docs filled with agenda items for these 1:1 and group status meetings.
It's something I've been reflecting on for a while, and I had a theory that if we could transfer all of those agenda items to be individual discussion topics in an async, transparent collaboration space, we would benefit immensely.
I've been reflecting on working in, vs working on the business. Many will advise you to get out of the business, and work "on the business" instead of "in the business".
My experience of achieving the best outcomes has been different. No doubt, you need to ensure you are spending enough time working on the business at a higher level, setting the vision and strategy, and spotting new opportunities. But I've found the best way to do that is to be in the business enough to have the context to arrive at great high level conclusions and decisions.
If as a founder of a growing company you’re not working with a coach (even better, a therapist too), you’re most likely not uncovering your own flaws and ingrained issues that will ultimately hold back the business sooner or later.
Here are Buffer's August 2024 results:
This is part of the update I sent out yesterday to alumni and investor shareholders of Buffer (80 people on the list).
I'm tinkering today with my personal website, and in particular my Posts page. This page is my own implementation of the POSSE concept (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).
The big upgrade I've made for myself today is that it's now bi-directional. In that, I can create a post from my notes (Obsidian) and easily push it out to all networks, or (this is the new part) I can post something natively (e.g. on Threads) and then easily pull it into my notes and publish it to my website. It's semi-manual in that I need to run a script, but it's working nicely!
The web is feeling really fun again right now, in a way I haven't felt in probably over a decade.
It's the resurgence of open standards with the open social web (Fediverse, AT Protocol), and I also feel like I'm seeing a rise in personal blogs and writing again, too. There's a lot more tinkering going on again, it's inspiring.
I'm excited to share that I'm starting a regular newsletter 📰 🎉
My goal with a newsletter is to give you insight into how I operate while building a long term, independent, profitable business with big ambitions. You'll be able to tap into what I'm reading, highlighting, and thinking about as I work towards building Buffer to the next level. Every newsletter will be packed with value and I'm sure you'll find one or two nuggets that make you think.
Something you may not know about Buffer:
We've raised just $4M in total funding over our almost 14-year journey, and generated over $170M in total lifetime revenue. Our last round was almost a decade ago in 2014.
After many years of wondering whether I should invest more in video content creation, I've decided that for a while I am going to primarily focus on writing. I like James Gill's comments on writing vs audio or video:
"A wonderful thing about writing is it tends to last a lot longer than audio or video. It’s easier to find via search, and can more easily be edited to bring it up to date." – James Gill
I love this approach to leadership and sharing the culture and strategy from Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, the CEO of Lego:
"The culture I’m trying to create is one where every year when we celebrate another record result, I get up on the beer box and I say, “Thank you for doing all of the things I never asked you to do.” I don’t want to control. I want to create context. I want to create clarity of culture and strategic choice, but then I want people to surprise me. I don’t want a place where people are doing what they’ve been told to do, because that stifles, that creates bureaucracy, that creates fear."
It’s a good idea to aim to progress in other dimensions of life throughout the duration building a company.
I have a belief that while working on a company, in my case Buffer, you should be progressing in other dimensions of your life. Generally, any sort of progress is not linear. Meaning that sometimes you’re going through a flat patch, sometimes you’re seeing significant growth and progress, and other times you’re even declining or going backwards.
My personal opinion: once you see a business offering incentives for customer research (e.g. a starbucks voucher), it's a sign that a few things have gone wrong. And ironically, it likely means they're not very good at genuinely listening to customers.
I've found that there are much better ways to drive engagement and excitement to connect with us as a business, than gift cards or financial rewards. For this reason, at Buffer we have generally not offered any of these sorts of incentives for providing feedback.
Buffer has now existed for almost 14 years, and throughout that time I've seen a lot change in social media, and in our space of tools to support people and businesses with social. We're an outlier as a product and company that has existed for that kind of timeframe with our mission and values left in tact. We've been fortunate to be able to scale to 56,000 paying customers and over $18M in annual revenue while taking our own unique path. We've maintained control of the company and our ability to go boldly in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team.
This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. These networks have been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to.
I just sent the monthly shareholder update for June 2024. This goes to all of our investor and alumni shareholders (75 people on the list) and I share it publicly as part of our value of transparency. Here are the highlights:
Buffer's metrics for June 2024:
I'm delighted to share that we have introduced support for Bluesky in Buffer. This is an important moment for us as a company, and there are a number...
Today, we added Bluesky to Buffer!
Bluesky is an important new social network pushing forward an era of decentralized social media. Bluesky puts a focus on individuals maintaining ownership over their content, the connection to their audience, and control over the algorithm and experience.
It's here - Buffer now supports Threads! 🆕
Head to your account or sign up for a new one to connect your Meta Threads profile and enable planning, scheduling, posting and analytics. ✨
This week I'm starting to ease back into working on Buffer after 12 weeks of family leave. It's been wonderful to be able to focus on mama, our baby boy and his big brother, and I'm also feeling mentally energized to dive back in. 2024 is a big year for Buffer and we have some significant announcements on the way, starting with one very soon today 🎉
Are you in or near Boulder, Colorado? My wife is hosting Outer Range Brewing at her cafe, Creature Comforts this Friday, 4-7pm. Great beer in a great setting.
Would be fun to see you there!
How should CEO salary be determined?
I recently reflected on this from first principles, and this is what I arrived at:
We’ve been working to turn around a decline for a few years now at Buffer.
Last year everything finally came together, in 2023 we had our least decline in the past 4 years, and we’re now growing in 2024.
I spent this week reflecting on 2023 to write Buffer’s first annual shareholder letter, and I’ve decided to share it publicly.
We ended the year with $17,950,440 in ARR and 55,975 paying customers. 2023 was a turnaround year for Buffer by a variety of measures, and we are set up for growth and profitability in 2024.
For over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been transparent.
That said, over the years, our salary formula has been stretched and needed to adapt. At times, we have fallen short of our true level of commitment to transparency.
Do you need to put the link in the comments instead of the post on LinkedIn?
→ It’s critical
→ It depends on your goal
→ It doesn’t matter at all
I just finished a super valuable and fun Buffer marketing leadership meetup here in Boulder with Hailley and Simon. We were also fortunate to have Maria join us for a day to discuss product strategy overlap and go to market.
I’m always reminded of the intangible impact of the casual conversations and getting to know each other as humans that mostly happens over lunches, dinners and walking between places.
2023 was a transformative year for the Buffer product. We launched countless improvements and have made commitments to modernize the product, add flexibility, and always be on top of new networks to help you navigate fluidly and win in the shifting landscape of social media.
Here are the 11 most popular improvements we shipped last year:
Buffer AI Assistant 🤖
→ Generate new posts, repurpose existing posts, and come up with endless new ideas.
13 years ago today, I launched Buffer.
It’s hard to believe my little side project turned startup turned business is now a teenager. In recent years, I’ve reflected a lot on how to build Buffer to exist and thrive long-term.
Today we’ve launched Tags 🏷️ in Buffer!
→ Use Tags for Posts, Sent Posts and Ideas
→ Filter Ideas in the Create space by Tag
→ Add Tags in workflows, e.g. content added via Zapier
→ Available on all plans, limit of 3 on the Free plan
A great strategy should lead to strong differentiation and lasting results. Ensuring the strategy and culture are aligned can enhance execution and enable you to create something really special.
I think about strategy as, what are the key puzzle pieces that describe approaches or actions you can take in pursuit of the mission, that are uniquely yours to take. What are the things that you can do, that others cannot do?
🌶️ Spicy comment from a recent NPS promoter (score 10) customer:
"Amazing! I hope that you continue to have free plan which is great for small businesses (and don't stab us in the back in a few years like Hootsuite)."
Hi everyone - we’re looking for Senior Product Designer to join Buffer and be part of taking our UX to the next level. This is a fun opportunity, here are a few details:
On the role:
→ You’ll jump into a team with a focus on delivering world-class user experiences
→ Buffer has always been known for being simple and intuitive whilst having a ton of power baked in too, and we’ve recently made an investment in paying down our tech and UX debt to maintain this position
→ Work on a product used by 150K monthly active users and 57K paying customers
→ Earn an annual salary between $140K - 172K USD based on experience and location
For many years, I felt that work on maintenance, organizing or tending to the garden of a system, was not a great use of my time. I always felt I’d rather be working on the actual project, product, initiative, whatever it might be.
Recently, however, I have felt the immense value of doing regular maintenance activities, such as ‘digital gardening’; the act of perusing notes and finding connections between them to add as backlinks, expanding upon points, reading and saving quotes and insights. Another example is maintenance of my project and todo list and ensuring I have clear next actions in place. Energy I put into this pays dividends as it helps me be more productive on the projects themselves. I easily win back more time than I put in on these types of activities.
“People remember the exciting moments. People get excited for the shiniest things. But often, success comes from the boring: being consistent, executing relentlessly, not letting things slip.” – James Gill
I agree with this, and in recent years have found myself being very motivated by diligent consistency and execution. To me, Apple are inspiring in that they don’t drastically change their products in terms of form factor or functionality, but chisel away over the long-term towards a clear vision they’ve thought hard about. Small improvements made regularly, and maintaining pace over a long time horizon can really start to add up to great results.
Context is crucial when it comes to whether advice is right for you or not. There’s so much dogmatic advice floating around these days, it’s easy to be sent down the wrong path.
Here are a couple of great quotes that can serve as a reminder to be mindful and do your own thinking when taking on advice:
My admiration for long-term companies has grown significantly. I find myself fascinated by companies that exist for decades and even more so by founders who find a way to keep evolving, increasing their ambition, and remaining energized.
I wrote that almost 3 years ago, and only feel it more today.
https://joel.is/10-years/
“One of my lessons relearned is the profound problem-solving power of the walk. I used to be world-class. I’d get stuck on some writing question, feel the subtlest hitch in my flow, and, SPROING, I’d be up out of my chair, spring-loaded, already halfway around the block.” – Robin Sloan
https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/what-would-a-wizard-read/
Regular walks have been a key part the way I work for the best part of a decade now, though I’ve also had periods of time where I’ve let the habit slide. These days, I have a similar response to my mind feeling clouded, or feeling stuck on a problem or a deliverable: I get up and go for a walk, and usually I’ve resolved it by the time I’m back at my desk.
As an $18M ARR business, I found the latest SaaS Growth Report from ChartMogul on how SaaS businesses grow from Zero to $30M ARR interesting and useful.
My favorite insight: “After even 10 years in existence, only 13% of startups are able to reach the $10M ARR mark. It’s hard.”
https://chartmogul.com/reports/saas-growth-report/2023/
“Imagine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew.” – Mike Caulfield
https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
“Increasingly, founders are seeking freedom from the risk and control of the perpetual pursuit of venture capital. Instead, they’re ready to reroute their time, efforts, and attention to building enduring companies on their own terms.” – Terrence Rohan
https://trohan.com/2023/08/20/raise-less-build-more/
Managers are individual contributors too. They contribute process changes, documentation, strategic plans, lead by example, and jump in as a partner when it’s necessary.
I have a bit of an issue with the term individual contributor. It can make managers feel like they shouldn’t be “doing” anything. But being a great manager means making stuff happen.
We recently strengthened the concept of an Alpha phase at Buffer. Alpha is our internal testing phase, where we make new functionality available very early, exclusively to the Buffer team.
Here are some of the details and benefits:
“If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come.” – Rick Rubin
I’ve observed and experienced this. Generally, when you have an idea, if it’s a good idea then others are having it at the same time. For me, this leads to two conclusions:
Hi everyone - I’ve just updated my /now page with what I’m currently up to, including being a toddler parent, my wife opening her cafe, current strategy for Buffer, and my journey with note taking systems and digital gardens: https://joel.is/now/
"Our vision is that Threads will enable you to communicate with people on other fediverse platforms we don’t own or control."
I find this a very interesting aspect of the new Meta social network. I'm looking forward to hearing more about their steps to incorporate open standards.
https://thenewstack.io/threads-adopting-activitypub-makes-sense-but-wont-be-easy/
"Good businesses have margin. Profit margin? Yes. But also margin for your time, your emotional and physical health, your relationships, your sanity, and your integrity. You're a human, and humans need breathing room." – Justin Jackson
https://justinjackson.ca/margin
Around a year and a half ago, I established a broader leadership group beyond our executive team at Buffer, including anyone who is a manager or a senior individual contributor. It's been helpful in a number of ways.
In the early stages of a company, until around 50 people, a leadership team of adequate size can handle the most important decisions and have enough context into the organization.
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. We’ve dedicated the week of August 22nd to a brand new internal initiative called Build Week....
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. I’m happy to share that we’ve established a long-term goal that salaries at Buffer will not be...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. In July, we shared that we were looking for a product leader to help us take Buffer forward in...
Sometime in late 2018, the concept of having a support network clicked for me. This was the year that I started working with Mandy, my second...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. Today marks ten years since I launched the first version of Buffer. What started as a landing...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. We've been building Buffer for coming up to ten years now. We’re currently a 90-person fully...
“When spring comes, snow melts first at the periphery, because that is where it is most exposed” - Andy Grove
This quote comes from Andy Grove, Intel’s former CEO, and which I was reminded of in the most recent book I finished reading, Seeing Around Corners by Rita McGrath. The idea is that snow melts first from the edges, at the periphery. This is where the first changes occur and are evident. This “snow melting” idea is powerful and very true within a business context, too.
When market changes are happening, the first people within Buffer to know it are generally those who are at the edges of the organization. Those who are talking directly with customers, most likely within our Advocacy or Marketing teams. Some members of those teams have found that when we eventually get around to making changes, those changes are things they’ve been wishing to see us implement for weeks or months. “Finally!”, they might think.
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. For the month of May, Buffer will operate under a 4-day workweek (at full pay) across the whole...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog.
Ever since the world got turned upside down by COVID-19, it’s been “business as unusual” for everyone – Buffer included.
I sent this update out to Buffer’s investors one week ago. I hesitated on whether to share it more widely, as I know a lot of companies have been impacted more severely in these times. That said, I believe it makes sense to lean into our company value of transparency, since there may be some companies this could help, and it shows Buffer customers that we will be around beyond this pandemic and are here to serve them long-term.
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. In mid-2017, I hit burnout in a really big way and wound up taking a 6-week break to recharge. I...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote this blog post about the next step in Buffer’s social media...
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brian Rhea on the Bright & Early podcast. Listen above, and see more details here.
I recently the pleasure of being interviewed on the Heartbeat Podcast by Claire Lew. Listen above, and check out the full transcript.
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. Working remotely and having the opportunity to work from home, coffee shops, coworking spaces, or...
A lesser known fact about me is that I have invested in 9 companies. It’s something I’ve not written about yet (other than a quick mention on my /now...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. Can you remember where you were seven years ago? I was in my apartment in Birmingham, UK, coding...
I've recently found myself reflecting a lot on being a distributed team, and the nature of a company where the team works from remote locations to...
By now we have a fairly long history of doing retreats at Buffer. We’re now a 75 person team, and we just wrapped up our 8th company retreat in...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. We’ve always done things differently at Buffer. For me, this has always come from a natural...
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. In the past couple of months, I’ve had a number of thoughts around the growth Buffer has...
One of my favorite things to do is to help others who are at an earlier stage of the startup journey. I had a lot of false starts before Buffer. I...
In December, my friend and co-worker Brian casually mentioned to me that he would love to go traveling and explore Asia. I love Asia. I lived in Japan...
In my recent travels around Asia, I’ve had the great opportunity to meet a lot of local founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. One of the things that...
We’ve been lucky at Buffer to receive a number of acquisition offers along our journey so far. When I mention this to people, a key question that...
I think there's an interesting concept that's prevalent, which I believe could actually be quite dangerous. It's the idea that as a CEO or executive...
As a teenager I had a period of many years where I stopped reading books completely. I even remember a time where I couldn't imagine reading books at...
Since the beginning of Buffer, we've always shared all of our learnings and failures. Over time this developed into a more defined goal and principle...
I think I’ve just about got to that point with Buffer where sometimes when I stop to reflect on things I think “wow, we’ve actually been doing this...
One of the incredible side-effects of doing retreats 3 times a year with my startup is that I get the opportunity to travel and experience completely...
We’ve recently reached the point with Buffer where I’ve started to think about a lot of key higher level choices. As a CEO these can be difficult...
For the first two years of Buffer we didn’t use C-level titles. In February last year it started to make much more sense for me to use the CEO title,...
In the last 6 months, we’ve quietly shifted the direction of Buffer. Our adjustment is now almost complete and we’re charging ahead with our new...
I’ve always found it interesting to think about co-founder relationships. I’ve been in a few myself, some which were not completely successful and...
One of the most exciting parts of the culture we’ve developed at Buffer for me is our international retreats. It’s also potentially something we’ve...
It’s no secret that I’ve personally been hugely impacted by Eric Ries’ work and the Lean Startup movement. Buffer would not be where it is today...
It’s often interesting to look back and think about how much I’ve learned in the past year or two. Especially areas where I almost had no...
I've written in the past about how I see the role of a CEO to be one where you are repeatedly firing yourself. Joe Kraus brought my attention to...
It’s an exciting time for Buffer. Toby Osbourn just joined and we’re now 16 people. Toby joined us as a Backend Hacker, and he’s been a joy to work...
Three of our key values at Buffer are “Always choose positivity and happiness”, “Have a focus on self-improvement” and “Live smarter, not harder”. As...
One of the things I enjoy most about building a company is to focus on culture, and to think about how we can create a team which is a joy to be part...
Buffer is a fully distributed team. It’s a decision I had to make at the end of 2012, and it’s interesting to reflect on that decision now. I am happy...
This article is inspired by Startup Edition in response to “What advice would you give young entrepreneurs?” I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to...
I’ve written in the past about the evolution of our culture at Buffer. One of the things we started to do at around 6-7 people as part of the culture...
As a CEO I often ponder how I can help the team be as productive and happy as possible. As part of our decision to be a distributed team at Buffer,...
For the first two weeks of last month, I religiously tried to follow a new routine I created for myself: a 7 day work week routine. The idea was quite...
Something I’ve found difficult to completely embrace, but which understanding has been super important, is the idea that there is a ratio for...
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. - Henry David Thoreau I can distinctly remember that for the month of...
I remember when I was 12, I was desperate to grow up. I think most of us are when we’re young. Similarly, when you’re getting your startup off the...
It’s a long time ago now, however I still remember it very well. When I first went about creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Buffer, there...
I’ve done a lot of traveling throughout my journey with Buffer. I started in the UK, and since then I’ve lived in Hong Kong and Tel Aviv as well as...
My co-founder Leo and I are headed to Hawaii tomorrow morning for a 10 day trip. I just emailed the team, and I thought in line with one of our core...
"Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good" - Gretchen Ruben One thing I have realized for myself, is that although I have an existing solid routine of...
In the recent months I’ve realized I am very much in a bubble. Everyone I know is building a company. Amongst my circle of friends, that is the norm....
For a number of years now, I’ve found that I generally always had a “training partner” for my entrepreneurial goals. A few years ago, this was my...
One of the most interesting and simultaneously challenging realizations I’ve had is that as a founder, especially the CEO, you essentially have chosen...
A few weeks ago I restarted one of my favorite habits: a daily evening walk. I want to share a couple of reasons why I love this habit so much, and...
Through my journey from a founder whose role it was to essentially build the product and code all day, to growing into a CEO role with more management...
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In...
One thing I realised over the holiday period is that my definition of failure in a couple of things had changed considerably since the year before. In...
A couple of months ago, my co-founder Leo gave me an interesting suggestion: he said I should try disabling all notifications on my iPhone. I find...
Startup ideas that involve two sided markets are notoriously difficult to get off the ground. It’s the age-old chicken and egg problem. You need lots...
Yesterday I noticed the Who’s Hiring? thread pop up again on Hacker News. If you’re hiring, it’s a great place to share that fact. Since around half a...
"Those that get up at 5am rule the world" - Robin Sharma Those who know me, know that I love my morning routine. I’m always making adjustments to it,...
I was recently back in the UK for two weeks and had the chance to speak at an event in London about the incredible journey with my startup in the last...
"We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and...
I often reflect upon the differences between my previous startup and Buffer, and think about what changes to my mindset affected the better outcome...
It’s now 2 years since I launched Buffer, and the company has grown from just myself (working from my bedroom) to a team of 7. In the last few months,...
Before I had any success with Buffer, I helped many startups with their ideas. I attended events, spoke at events and even created my own meetup for...
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle I’ve been obsessed with thinking about, adjusting and...
Paul Graham has a fantastic article on the topic of scheduling work as a maker and as a manager, which I’ve drawn insights from and I know many others...
For some time, I’ve gradually realised that my day is not only occupied by tasks from my todo list. Often, there are lots of other tasks which deserve...
There are a few key things which looking back I remember I was very bad at. One of them was asking people for advice. I think a key turning point with...
The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and and I found it amazing how this book, which has now sold...
In the past couple of years, I’ve been through a number of interesting experiences through building Buffer. One of the things I’ve ended up thinking...
Recently 37signals published an article titled Some advice from Jeff Bezos. This wasn’t your usual advice, and I found it interesting to read and how...
I’ve had a fascinating journey with Buffer, and having started in the UK and living in San Francisco for 6 months, I’ve also had the opportunity in...
I’m a huge believer of the lean startup movement and the concept of validating ideas as quickly as possible. I think wasted time and resources are...
Update: I originally posted this article with the title “Incorporate your startup only when you’re forced to” and I had amazing feedback, particularly...
I was recently talking with Eytan Levit, a really interesting founder who’s had a lot of amazing experiences. We were chatting about some of his...
Last week I had the great pleasure of grabbing dinner with Jon Bradford, and having him stop over at my place on his way to speak on a panel at an...
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson Around 2 years ago I stopped...
I’ve had a few different experiences in the last couple of weeks which made me reach a big realisation. What I’ve discovered is that the context of...
The last two years have been truly incredible. What started in my bedroom in the UK has taken us across the world to San Francisco, Hong Kong, Tokyo...
"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly...
In the last week I’ve talked with a few early stage startup founders about pricing. It seems pricing is often a large block for many. It’s...
Now that it’s almost two years since I first had the idea for Buffer, and with the year and a half before that which I worked on my previous startup,...
Choosing a name is one of the parts of a startup I find the most difficult. It’s also something you can easily get hung up on. We all know that the...
Right now I’m sat in a great coffee shop in Tel Aviv writing this blog post. It’s got a casual feel to it which is relaxing, yet there are people here...
Last month I wrote about my discovery that helping others makes me happier than spending the time seeing a movie or doing some other “pleasure...
I met with Jesse Nowlin a few days ago, a great founder who’s really hustling. We spent some time discussing his idea and I shared some of my...
This is the second article in my achieving overnight success series where I aim to dispel the myth of overnight success. To do this, I look into how...
Buffer has been a crazy ride since I first had the idea back in October 2010. As we’ve grown the startup from nothing to 250,000 users, a $600,000...
When you’re building a startup, the startup itself has a reputation and credibility around it. The startup has tremendous power. As the startup rocket...
For the last 3 months I’ve regularly been meeting startup founders here in Hong Kong to try and help them with the biggest challenges they have. It’s...
When to incorporate is one of those topics which comes up time and time again, and there is much conflicting advice out there. I’m lucky enough to...
"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in...
I’ve realised there was a time I didn’t believe people would pay for a product. In my mind, it was a myth. As an entrepreneur, it’s so vital to...
Looking back to the start of Buffer, one of the things I think may have helped a lot with gaining traction fast was to involve users in the validation...
Recently there have been a few occasions at Buffer where we’ve hesitated about next steps or thought about spending longer on certain tasks. As a...
I’ve mentioned many times before on this blog that I learned a huge amount through my previous, not so successful startup OnePage which I spent one...
This morning, my alarm sounded at precisely 5:50am. Within a few minutes, I was up and had my running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt on. Minutes later at...
We’re lucky enough to have reached the stage with Buffer where we have had to start to think about growing the team. For the first 10 months the team...
Whilst researching for the Achieving overnight success: Kevin Systrom piece I published two weeks ago, I was excited to see that one of Systrom’s...
"Work harder on yourself than you do on your job." - Jim Rohn A long time ago, I came across the amazing quote above, which was said often by Jim...
Frequently startups pop up and take over the press, framed as an “overnight success” taking just a year or two to reach some incredible milestone. For...
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with some outstanding first-time entrepreneurs on a few different days during this week. In almost every case I can...
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the idea of simply trying harder with everything I choose to spend my time on. It seems like an...
I recently received an email asking some advice about co-founders, specifically about whether a 50/50 ownership split makes sense for a startup. This...
It’s almost exactly a year since I started documenting my startup lessons learned through this blog, and since my first post last November, I’ve...
Over the past few years of my journey with building startups, I’ve made a conscious effort to absorb as much of the fascinating insights and learnings...
It’s been a while since my last blog post, and I’ve recently been pondering why that may be. It’s not that I’ve been doing less than when I was...
It is easy to look at successful founders and see them as genuises, as people who were without a doubt going to be triumphant. When we look at people...
A couple of things have happened this week that made me think a little about what failure means for startup founders. Firstly, one of my favorite...
Some of you may know that I just left everything behind in the UK and together with my co-founder Leo arrived in San Francisco to base ourselves and...
I want to give a special thanks to my co-founder Leo who listened to and discussed some of these thoughts with me before I turned them into a blog...
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about when the right time is to start marketing a startup. In my previous startup, we were hesitant to attempt to...
If you are a first time startup founder, or have done a few projects but are still working either full-time or freelancing part-time, you are likely...
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain When you’re building a startup, it’s very...
I believe that when you’re building a startup, it is as much about developing yourself as it is about developing your startup. This week I’ve stepped...
Last time I wrote about how to start your startup in 4 steps, and the first step I mention is to “Have an idea”. This can mean becoming serious about...
Having started my latest venture just over 5 months ago, and having just reached ramen profitability, I want to share some of the elements which made...
My first post on this blog was one where I pondered whether exercise is a requirement for sleep. The post was actually triggered by my inability to...
When I look back on the times I’ve done the most productive work on my startup, it has always been when I’ve had a great balance of work and rest. It...
Something I’ve mentioned before at the start of a post is that I often look back on quotes, blogs and books I’ve read by some of the great minds of...
I’m writing this from Javea, Spain. I arrived here a couple of days ago and I’ve been pondering the relationship between work and rest in a startup....
One of the most important differences for me personally in how I’ve run my current startup compared to the last one I founded has been how I treat the...
As a fledgling entrepreneur in the midst of a growing startup, I try to read quite a lot around the subject. I’ve been deeply involved in startup...
I often like to look back on when I was just getting into startups. I think there is a myth in entrepreneurship which not only do many newcomers...
"I’ve had many many many products, the vast majority of the things I’ve written, or created, the organisations I built fail, but the reason I’ve...
I’ve been pondering recently about how my latest venture has very much felt like cycling between creating order from chaos and then ending up with...
Whilst building my latest startup, which I’m glad to say is picking up nicely, there have been times when things have started to go a little crazy. It...
A short while ago I wrote about one of the ways I think people could bootstrap a startup from zero funds. I called it "working in waves". Of course,...
People who know me know that I like to make things systematic when I can, and doing so helps me make sense of things and have confidence in my...
I would like to ponder whether making mistakes is actually a necessary part of the process of achieving whatever form of “success” we are striving...
I’ve spent the last year and a half after graduating from the University of Warwick juggling working on startups and working as a contract web...
Recently I have struggled to get to sleep at night. When I need to be up at 8 and working away on either my own projects or exciting client projects...
