Joel Gascoigne's blog

Fourteen years

2024-11-30T12:27:00Z

Fourteen years

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 after I started working on the project on the side as a contract web developer. For a few weeks, I called it bfffr until I realized that no one knew how to pronounce it. Sometimes it's better to be clear than clever. So it became bufferapp.com. Even then, people thought we were called Buffer App for a while! Eventually we were able to acquire buffer.com and clear up the confusion altogether.

When I started Buffer, I had no idea how far it could come. This was a case where the dream formed over time, rather than being fully formed on day one. There's a dogma that you need to have complete clarity of the vision and outcome before you even start (and go all-in and full-time, which I also disagree with). I think there's a beauty in starting with a small dream. It just so happens that every big thing started small.

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. Today, Buffer generates $1.65 million per month, serves 59,000 customers, and enables fulfilling work for 72 people. I've had many dreams with Buffer, each one progressively becoming more ambitious. To me it's always felt like I can just about see the horizon, and once I get there, I see a new horizon to strive for. I've tried to embrace that Buffer can continue to evolve as I, the team, and customers do.

A lot happens as a founder and as a business in fourteen years. I started the company when I was 23. I was young, ambitious, and had so much to learn. My naivety served me well in so many ways. At the same time, I like to think that the years have given me a more intentional, decisive approach to business.

Broadly, it feels like we've had three eras to the company so far. In our first era, we found traction, we built swiftly and with fervor, we grew a special community of users and customers, and we did it all in our own way. We were a remote company before almost anyone else, and were part of the earliest days of building in public. There's so much we did right in that first era, though we also had wind in our sails which masked our errors and immaturity.

The second era of Buffer was marked by growing pains, a struggle to understand who we really are, missteps and through that, transformation, clarity, and new beginnings. These years were very much the messy middle of Buffer. They were also where I experienced my lowest lows in the journey so far. As hard as this experience was, I am grateful as it was the path I needed to walk in order to grow as a leader, cement our independence and long-term ambitions, rediscover Buffer's purpose, and start to operate with greater conviction.

We're a couple of chapters into our current era. With a renewed focus on entrepreneurs, creators, and small businesses, we started making bolder moves to serve them and create a more unique offering in what had become a very crowded and commoditized space. Through a clearer strategy, strengthening our culture, and improving how we work as a team, we emerged from a multi-year decline. Last year, we turned the ship around and had a flat year. This year, we're on track for over 10% growth and a profitable year.

It doesn't feel like a coincidence to me that this final era has also been the phase where I've experienced one of the most joyful and demanding experiences as a human: becoming a parent. I have a wife and we have two young boys, and they mean the world to me. I also started prioritizing my community of family and friends, as well as cultivating hobbies again. I spend time on my health and fitness, try to keep up my skiing, and recently picked up playing the piano again. Time has become a lot more precious, and with that, clarity and conviction are more vital than ever. As much as it sometimes feels hard to fit everything in, to me, it's the whole package that makes life fulfilling.

When I really stop to take a step back, I feel very lucky that I've been able to do this for fourteen years. It's a long time in any sense. In tech and social media it feels like almost a lifetime already. And yet, just like those early days when I could barely imagine reaching £1,200 per month, I'm still looking toward that next horizon. I see a clear opportunity to help entrepreneurs, creators and small businesses get off the ground, grow, and thrive long-term.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash.

The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media

2024-07-30T15:00:00Z

The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media

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 of reasons that adding Bluesky is personally meaningful for me. With Bluesky, we now support the three major social networks pushing forward a new era of decentralized social media: Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. We have been intentional about moving fast to add these channels to our tool.

Supporting independence and ownership in social media

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 leadership and values left in tact.

We've had to work hard at times to maintain control over our destiny. In 2018, we made the decision to spend $3.3M to buy out the majority of our VC investors and be able to go our long-term path. We have continued to carry out buybacks each year since 2018, and at this stage we are majority founder and team owned.

One of the things I'm proudest of is that we still wholeheartedly serve individuals and creators, and have not gone up-market as many other long-running companies in our space have done. 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. Through intentional choices over the years, we have maintained a level of optionality over our future that most do not have.

This independence is something I don't take for granted. Keeping ownership of our company, and through that ownership having an ability to boldly go in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team, is very important to me.

This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky and Mastodon. 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.

The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term.

At Buffer, we will be doing everything we can to support the growth of new decentralized social media options, because we believe that individuals and small businesses should maintain control over their content and the connection to their audience.

The resurgence of the open web with social media protocols

I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon as the prominent implementation), and AT Protocol from Bluesky.

Open standards in social media could be as powerful as open standards have been for direct and private communication (email). What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web.

The Internet was built upon open standards — HTTP, URL, TCP/IP, DNS, HTML. A vast many valuable internet businesses have built on these "shoulders of giants." ActivityPub and AT Protocol are built with open standards philosophies, and could similarly enable a new playground of innovation, with openness, ownership and interoperability at their core.

I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in third-party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space.

Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do.

Bluesky is bringing innovation back to social media

If you haven't had a chance to take a look at some of Bluesky's recent product and platform announcements, I highly recommend that you go and read them. In particular, what they've done with introducing custom feeds as well as starter packs gets me very excited about some real innovation from a social network.

When I saw starter packs introduced, it immediately felt like a no-brainer feature for a social network, and such a powerful thing, especially for an emerging social network, to offer. Starter packs allow anyone to create a "getting started pack" for a new Bluesky user. This can include a set of recommended follows, and up to three recommended custom feeds (more on those below). This enables their passionate users to be able to personalize an introduction for people not yet on Bluesky. It's a smart way to activate users to play a meaningful role in onboarding new people to the network and grounding them with an existing community to interact with. Of course, Bluesky benefits by likely getting more people onto their new network than they would otherwise.

Custom feeds are an incredible innovation that put the choice of algorithm for the social network in the hands of the wide range of users and different niche communities that exist on the network. The way that the Bluesky team have built custom feeds enables a ton of flexibility for the types of content alogrithms can serve up, and creates a marketplace for browsing and enabling different custom feeds you can choose to view. Something I've observed from the Bluesky team is their commitment to, and intentionality around, building tools for the governance of the network itself.

It's very meaningful that on Bluesky you can choose your own algorithm and you can adopt an algorithm that someone else has written, or create your own algorithm for what content shows up in your feed. And I think it's very smart that Bluesky has done this — because it's both innovation and it's strong strategy because it's a highly defensible move which many of the other networks would not be able offer. It would be very unlikely for the commercial social networks to move away from the company, the network themselves, holding on to ownership of the algorithm and what is served up to you.

I had a wonderful conversation with Rose Wang from the Bluesky team a couple of weeks ago and one of the topics we got into was around the values that are embedded in the Bluesky team and the work they're trying to do. It was clear to me how thoughtful and intentional they are being around the governance of the network and the flexibility they're building in to allow users to really shape the community and what is important to them.

Something I appreciate about Bluesky is that their goal is to create a social network not controlled by a single company, while also ensuring that it comes together as a cohesive and easy-to-use experience. Decentralized social media can be daunting and feel complex and inaccessible to people initially, and so I think intentional work going into the simplicity of the experience is paramount.

With great innovation from the Bluesky team such as starter packs and custom feeds, along with their focus on simplicity, I strongly encourage you to go and take a look at this new social network. This is a platform and community that's worth taking a deeper look at, participating in and investing time into.

Join us in participating in a new era of decentralized social media

By supporting Bluesky, along with Mastodon and Threads, we are playing our part in moving forward this promising new era of social media. Many of us in the team have been personally drawn to these networks for their special and supportive communities. We're here to see decentralized social media grow and become more meaningful for more people across the world. That's why we've put our scale, brand and resources into building awareness and providing tools to make participating on these new social networks more streamlined.

I encourage you to add Bluesky to your channels in Buffer, and start participating in the social network today. Learn more and get started by visiting our Bluesky page.

Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash.

Build Week at Buffer: What it is and how we’re approaching it

2022-08-21T13:00:00Z

Build Week at Buffer- What it is and how we’re approaching it

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. We’ll all be putting aside our regular work for a single week to come together in small groups and work on ideas that can benefit customers or us as a company, ideally with something of value shipped or in place by the end.

The inspiration for Build Week

Before building Buffer, I had several formative experiences attending “build a startup in a weekend”-type events.

Two I attended were run by Launch48, and another was Startup Weekend. Anyone could sign up to attend no matter what skill set or experience level they would bring. As long as you were willing to roll up your sleeves, build something, and contribute in any way, you’d be very welcome.

The focus was on building something rapidly from end to end, within the space of a weekend. Teams would be capped to a small number, around three to five people per team, so the groups could move quickly with decision making. Once the teams were formed, you’d get to work and start doing research, building, and marketing (often all in parallel) to move as fast as possible in building a minimum viable product and achieving a level of validation.

At the end of the weekend, teams would present what they achieved, what they validated, and what they learned.

Through these events, I met people, formed strong bonds, and stayed in contact for years with them afterward. Some teams even became startups. It felt like highly accelerated learning, and it was intense but fun, very energizing and inspiring.

I’ve been thinking about how this could translate to Buffer and why it would be so powerful for us in our current season, which is where Build Week comes in.

What is Build Week?

Build Week is a week at Buffer where we’ll form teams, work with people we don’t typically work with, and work together on an idea we feel called towards.

The highest level goals of Build Week are to inject into the company and team a spirit of shipping, creativity, and innovation, making progress and decisions rapidly, comfort with uncertainty, and ultimately going from idea to usable value out in the world in the space of a week.

When it comes to the type of projects we’ll work on and the skill sets required to accomplish them, the goal is for those to be far-reaching. While it may seem like Build Week would be more suited to engineers specifically, our goal is to achieve the outcome that everyone realizes they are and can be a Builder.

Ultimately, being a Builder in Buffer Build Week will mean that you are part of a team that successfully makes a change that brings value, and it happens in the short period of a week. Everyone on the team has something to bring to this goal, and I'm excited by the various projects that will be worked on.

How we’re approaching Build Week

With our high-level vision and ideas for Build Week, several months ago we got to work to bring this concept to life and make it happen.

The first thing we did was form a team to plan and design Build Week itself. Staying true to our vision for Build Week itself, where we want to have small teams of people who don’t normally work together, this is also how we approached forming the Build Week Planning team. With this team in place, we started meeting weekly. Overall, it has been a small time commitment of 45 minutes per week to plan and design Build Week. As we got closer to the actual week, we started meeting for longer and having real working sessions.

Our final design for Build Week consisted of three key stages: Idea Gathering, Team Formation and Build Week.

For the Idea Gathering stage, we created a Trello board where anyone in the team could contribute an idea. We used voting and commenting on the cards, which helped narrow the ideas to those that would be worked on during Build Week. We gave people a few days to submit ideas and received 78 total contributions. This was a big win and a clear indication of a big appetite for Build Week within the company.

The Team Formation stage was a trickier problem to solve and determine the process for. Initially, we had hoped that this could be entirely organic, with people gravitating towards an idea and joining up with people who are also excited to work on that idea. Ultimately, we realized that if we approached it this way, we would likely struggle with our goal of having people work with folks they don’t normally work with, and we wouldn’t have enough control over other aspects, such as the time zones within each team. All of this could jeopardize the success of Build Week itself. So we arrived at a hybrid, where we created a Google Form for people to submit their top 3 choices of ideas they’d like to work on. With that information, we determined the teams and made every effort to put people in a team they had put down as a choice.

And the final stage is, of course, Build Week itself! The teams have now been formed, and we created a Slack channel for each team to start organizing themselves. We are providing some very lightweight guidance, and we will have a few required deliverables, but other than that, we are leaving it to each team to determine the best way to work together to create value during the week.

If you're a Buffer customer, one small note that as we embrace this company-wide event and time together, we will be shifting our focus slightly away from the support inbox. We will still be responding to your questions and problems with Buffer; however, we may be slightly slower than usual. We also won't be publishing any new content on the blog. We’re confident that this time for the team to bond and build various projects of value will ultimately benefit all Buffer customers.

Why right now is the time for Build Week at Buffer

2022 has been a different year for Buffer. We’re in a position of flatter to declining revenue, and we’ve been working hard to find our path back to healthy, sustainable growth. One key element of this effort has been actively embracing being a smaller company. We’re still a small company, and we serve small businesses. Unless we lean into this, we will lose many of our advantages.

We want to drive more connection across the team in a time where we’ve felt it lacking for the past couple of years. While we’ve been remote for most of our 11+ years of existence, we’ve always found a ton of value from company retreats where we all meet in person, and we’ve suffered during the pandemic where we’ve not been able to have these events. Build Week is an opportunity for us to do that with a whole new concept and event rather than trying to do it with something like a virtual retreat which would likely never be able to live up to our previous retreat experiences.

There’s a big opportunity for exchanging context and ideas of current Buffer challenges within teams where the teams are cross-functional and with people who don’t normally work together. This could help us for months afterward.

Build Week can also be a time where strong bonds, both in work and personally, are formed. My dream would be that after Build Week, people within their teams hit each other up in Slack and jump on a spontaneous catch-up call once in a while because they’ve become close during the week.

We’ve had engineering hack weeks for a long time now. Those have been awesome in their way, but they have been very contained to engineering. And while those events created a lot of value, they often lacked perspectives that would have enhanced the work, such as customer advocacy, design, culture, or operational perspectives.

As a company, we want to challenge some of the processes we have built up over the past few years. Build Week is like a blank canvas – we clear out a whole week and then diligently decide what we need in terms of structure and process to make this concept thrive and no more. This can act as inspiration for us going forward, where we can use the week as an example of rethinking process and questioning the ways we do things.

The opportunity that comes with Build Week

If we are successful with Build Week, I am confident that we will surprise ourselves with just how much value is created by the whole company in that one week alone. In embracing being a small company, we’re currently striving to challenge ourselves by moving at a faster pace without over-working. I think this is possible, and the completely different nature of how we work together in Build Week could give us ideas for what we can adjust to work more effectively and productively together in our regular flow of work.

The opportunity for value creation within Build Week goes far beyond product features or improvements. Build Week will be a time for us to build anything that serves either customers or the team in pursuit of our vision and mission, or strengthens and upholds our values. We can stretch ourselves in the possibilities – there could be a marketing campaign, a data report, improving an existing process in the company, rethinking our tools, creating a new element of transparency, bringing our customers together, etc.

Wish us luck!

I believe Build Week can be one of the most fun, high-energy weeks we’ve had in years. I expect we can come out of the week on a high that can fuel us with motivation and enjoyment of our work for months. That is a worthy goal and something I think we can achieve with a little creativity and the right group of people designing and planning the event.

Of course, part of the beauty of Build Week itself is that just like all the ideas and the freedom to choose how you work in a team, we don’t know everything we’ll learn as a company by doing this. It could be chaotic, there could be challenges, and there will undoubtedly be many insights, but we will be better off for having gone through the process.

Please wish us all luck as we head into next week. There’s a lot of excitement in the company to create value. We hope to have new features to share with you in the coming weeks, and we’ll be back soon with a post sharing how it went.

Have you tried something like Build Week before? If so, how did it go? I’d love to hear from you on Twitter.

Photo by C Dustin on Unsplash.

Our vision for location-independent salaries at Buffer

2022-02-25T15:27:21Z

Our vision for location-independent salaries at Buffer

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 based on location. We made our first step towards this last year, when we moved from four cost-of-living based location bands for salaries to two bands. We did this by eliminating the lower two location bands

The change we made resulted in salary increases for 55 of 85 team members, with the increase being on average $10,265. When the time is right, we will be eliminating the concept of cost-of-living based location bands entirely, which will lead to a simpler approach to providing generous, fair and transparent salaries at Buffer.

In this post I’m sharing my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall.

Location and Salaries

It’s been interesting to see the conversation about location and salaries unfold both within Buffer and beyond. We’ve heard from many teammates over the years about the pros and cons of the location factor, and of course we’ve watched with interest as this became a regular topic of conversation within the larger remote work community.

I've had many healthy debates with other remote leaders, and there are arguments for eliminating a location component which I haven’t agreed with. I don’t believe pay differences across locations is unethical, and it has made a lot of sense for us in the past. However, the last few years have seen a lot of change for remote teams. A change like this isn't to be made lightly, and at our scale comes with considerations.

Our Compensation Philosophy

Compensation is always slowly evolving as companies and markets mature and change. We’ve been through several major iterations of our salary formula, and myriad small tweaks throughout the last 8 or so years since we launched the initial version. Part of the fun of having a salary formula is knowing that it’s never going to be “done.” Knowing that the iterations would continue, Caryn, our VP of Finance, and I worked together to establish our compensation philosophy and document our principles on compensation to help us determine what should always be true even as the salary formula changes over time.

We arrived at four principles that guide our decisions around compensation. We strive for Buffer’s approach to salary, equity, and benefits to be:

Transparent
Simple
Fair
Generous

These are the tenets that have guided us through compensation decisions over the years. After we articulated them as our compensation principles, we were able to look at the location factor of our formula with new clarity.

There are a few key considerations that were part of our discussions and my decision to put Buffer on a path towards removing our location factor from salaries that I'll go into more detail about next.

Transparency, Simplicity, and Trust

Our salary formula is one of the fundamental reasons that we can share our salaries transparently. Having a spreadsheet of team salaries is a huge step toward transparency, but true transparency is reached when the formula is simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and importantly, easy to use.

In one of our earlier versions of the salary formula, we calculated the cost-of-living multiplier for every new location when we made an offer. That was cumbersome, and it meant that a candidate couldn’t truly know their salary range until we calculated that.

This was improved greatly when we moved to the concept of “cost-of-living bands.”. After that, different cities and towns could more easily be classified into each band. This massively increased the transparency of the formula, and I think it helped create a lot more trust in this system. Anyone could relatively easily understand which band their location fit into, and with that knowledge understand the exact salary they'd receive at Buffer. This type of immediate understanding of the salary formula, and ability to run calculations yourself, is where transparency really gains an extra level of impact and drives trust within and beyond the team.

However, with our four cost-of-living bands, there were still decisions to be made around where locations fall, and this has been the topic of much healthy and productive debate over the years. The conversations around locations falling between the Average and High bands is what led us to introduce the Intermediate band. And with four choices of location, it has meant there is some disparity in salaries across the team. With the benefits that come from the powerful combination of transparency and simplicity, alongside the increased trust that is fostered with more parity across the team, I’m choosing to drive Buffer’s salary formula in the direction of eventually having no cost-of-living factor.

Freedom and Flexibility

We’ve long taken approaches to work which have been grounded in the ideal of an increased level of freedom and flexibility as a team member. When I started Buffer, I wanted greater freedom and a better quality of life than I felt would be possible by working at a company. That came in various forms, including location freedom, flexibility of working hours, and financial freedom. And as we’ve built the company, I’ve been proud that we’ve built a culture where every single team member can experience an unusual and refreshing level of freedom and flexibility.

Since the earliest days, one of our most fondly held values has been to Improve Consistently, and in particular this line: “We choose to be where we are the happiest and most productive”. This is a value that has supported and encouraged teammates to travel and try living in different cities, in search of that “happiest and most productive” place. It has enabled people to find work they love and great co-workers, from a hometown near family where it would be hard to find a local company that can offer that same experience and challenge. It has also enabled people to travel in order to support their partner in an important career change involving a move, something which allows an often stressful change to happen much more smoothly, since you can keep working at Buffer from anywhere in the world.

Having a culture that has supported moving freely across the globe has been a powerful level of freedom and flexibility. That freedom has been matched with a salary system which adjusts compensation to accommodate those changes in a fair and appropriate way. However, knowing that your salary will fluctuate and can decrease due to a choice to be somewhere else, does limit that freedom and the ability to make a decision to move.

Moving towards a salary formula with parity across all locations, will enable an even greater level of freedom and flexibility. It feels clear to me that choosing to move is a personal or a family decision, and it is ideal if Buffer salaries are structured in a way that honor and support that reality. I’m excited that working towards removing our cost-of-living differences will help significantly reduce the friction involved in making a potentially positively life-changing decision to live in a different city or country.

Results, Independence, and Reward

At Buffer, we are not on the typical hyper-growth VC path. This comes with some constraints: we don’t have tens of millions in funding and unlimited capital to deploy in an attempt to find a rapid path to $100m and going public (thankfully, that’s not our goal).

This path also means that our experiences as teammates in a variety of ways are directly tied to whether we are successfully serving existing and new customers. For example, the level of benefits, ability to travel (in normal times), and competitiveness of compensation, are very much driven by our revenue growth and profitability.

But, this is independence too. The thing we often need to remind ourselves of, is that while we may feel more constrained at times, we have full freedom of what we do with the success we achieve. Making a choice like this is one example of that.

It is my intention as founder / CEO that as we succeed together as a company, we all benefit from that success and see adjustments that improve our quality of life and create wealth. We are in a position of profitability which allows us to take a significant step towards removing the cost-of-living factor from our salary framework, which I believe serves those goals. And removing it entirely will be determined by us successfully executing on our strategy and serving customers well.

Reducing Cost-of-Living Bands

The way our salary formula works is that we benchmark a teammate’s role based on market data at the 50th percentile for the software industry in San Francisco and then multiply that by the cost-of-living band. So, a Product Marketer benchmark at the 50th percentile of the San Francisco market data is $108,838. Depending on the teammate’s location this would be multiplied by a cost-of-living band (Low, Average, Intermediate or High). For example, if they lived Boulder, Colorado, a city with Average cost-of-living, the benchmark would be multiplied by 0.85 for a salary of $92,512.

To best reflect our compensation philosophy, company values, and the path we want for Buffer, we have eliminated the Low and Average cost-of-living bands.

What we’ve done is brought all Low (.75 multiplier) and Average (.85 multiplier) salaries up to Intermediate (.9 multiplier), which we now call our Global band.

This is what resulted in 55 teammates seeing on average an increase to their salary of $10,265.

Our two bands are now Global (.9 multiplier) and High (1.0 multiplier).

This change is based on my vision for Buffer and how being a part of this team affects each of us as individually, as well as the direction I believe the world is going. I’m excited about the change first and foremost because it supports our goal of having a transparent, simple, fair, and generous approach to compensation.

This is also a move that raised salaries right away for more than half of the team. This point in particular gives me a lot of joy because I want compensation to be one of the incredible parts of working at Buffer. Money isn’t everything, and we all need kind and smart colleagues, a psychologically safe environment, and to work on challenging and interesting problems, in order to be fulfilled at work. Beyond that, however, money really impacts life choices, and that’s ultimately what I want for every Bufferoo; the freedom to choose their own lifestyle and make choices for themselves and their families’ long-term health and happiness. It’s important to me that people who choose to spend their years at Buffer will have the freedom to make their own choices to have a great life. And, for our teammates who live in much lower cost-of-living areas, a Buffer salary could end up being truly life changing. I’m really happy with that outcome.

The decision was also impacted by the direction that I believe the world is going (and, the direction we want to help it go). Remote is in full swing, and it’s increasingly breaking down geographical borders. I believe this is a great thing. Looking ahead 10 or even 5 years, it seems to me that we’re going to see a big rebalancing, or correction, that’s going to happen. I believe it’s important to be ahead of these types of shifts, and be proactively choosing the path that’s appropriate and energizing for us.

What next?

Our plan is to eventually get to one single location band, essentially eliminating the cost-of-living factor from the salary formula altogether. This will be possible once we can afford to make this change and sustain our commitment to profitability. So, this will be driven by the long-term results we create from our hard work, creativity in the market, and commitment to customers.

What questions does this spark for you? Send me a tweet with your thoughts.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash.

Welcoming Maria Thomas as Buffer’s Chief Product Officer

2021-01-06T16:32:55Z

Welcoming Maria Thomas as Buffer’s Chief Product Officer

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 our next phase. After speaking to an incredible group of talented folks in product, I’m happy to share that Maria Thomas has joined us as our new Chief Product Officer.

We’re now a 10-year old company, and in the past year I’ve done a lot of reflection on the purpose of the company and how we can set ourselves up to reach our potential and have the most impact. Buffer’s mission is to provide essential tools to help small businesses get off the ground and grow.

Maria brings with her a breadth of experience working in SaaS and working with small businesses. Her most recent roles have been as the VP of Product at Bitly for the past two years and Insightly for the prior three and a half years. These are both SaaS companies that served small businesses and navigated the ups and downs of all that comes with that segment, including having a large free user base. Maria also spent seven years building products for SMBs at Intuit.

The opportunity to bring on an executive is rare, especially at a company like Buffer, where we have some very loyal and long-tenured people and are striving to create a decades-long sustainable company. There’s much we can learn, however, from someone with experience of where we’re trying to go, and with Maria we have found a great blend of significant experience and expertise we can learn from and an excitement for the unique type of company we are. In particular, Maria and I connected and had great conversations around the freedom and creativity that can come with being unconstrained by VC investment and how that can help us have a more pure focus on the customer, and ultimately more compounding long-term success.

In Maria’s own words:

I am inspired and humbled to join Buffer. You have quite a following in the product management community. Several of my peers revealed that they’d had a long ‘crush on Buffer’ once they learned that I joined you as your CPO. I am thrilled to join a product-led company focused on helping SMBs, a profitable, transparent, sustainable SaaS business, and a majority female executive team.

We’re lucky to benefit from all of Maria’s great experience in product as well as her many years as an executive of similarly sized companies. Maria joined us late last year and has already had a significant impact, helping us to shape our goals and strategy for 2021. I’m confident that within the next few months, customers will start to see the positive and tangible results of her contributions.

Crafting a support network

2021-01-03T19:29:13Z

Crafting a support network

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 Executive Assistant. Caryn, who I worked with in that capacity for around a year and a half, had transitioned to lead Finance. The gap without this type of support helped me to reflect on the most ideal setup.

The journey to a support network

The first time around that I worked with an Executive Assistant, I had the thought that they could help me by taking on a lot of tasks I had been doing myself. And this is true in many ways. The second time around, I realized that the ultimate way an EA can help me to scale is to be a key partner in creating a support network around myself.

Rather than having my EA take on my tax filings, the best thing they can do is help me to find three people I can meet to decide on a great financial advisor to work with long-term. And this approach can be taken in many areas, and can be done yourself, without an EA. I now believe that the best way to reach your potential in life, is to form a support network for yourself and cultivate it over time.

In some ways, even thinking about getting this type of support feels like a privilege, and it is. At the same time, I believe thinking in this way should be something for everyone, at least in some form. We’ve all had mentors and people who have supported us in various ways, we’ve had parents or grandparents play that role. And for specific needs, we have people we can turn to: we have a dentist and a GP. We just may not have thought about this as a support network we cultivate and intentionally craft. And as a key example of one aspect of a support network, I’d argue, most of us should have a therapist.

Dedicated vs natural support

Friends and a partner are great pieces of your support network, too. But there’s a risk to over-reliance on those people to support you in tough times. It can take a toll on them, and it may line up with a tough time for them too.

In that sense, having naturally existing relationships as your only support can be risky and put you in a more vulnerable spot. Personally, I found that having a therapist I met with regularly helped me to process and work through some of my challenges and thereby have those challenges better formed and be in a more healthy place to discuss them in a different way with my partner.

This doesn’t mean to hold back from sharing challenges with a partner or friends, and often I do. In general, you communicate more regularly with your partner and friends than you meet with a therapist, so it’s likely that you’d share with them first. However, knowing that you’ll meet with your therapist in a few days helps to relieve some of the stress you feel and the urgency to find a solution. And when you do speak with your therapist, you have an opportunity to approach the challenge from a different perspective.

Relying on your co-founder for everything

I’ve found that having a co-founder also makes it easy to avoid getting more dedicated support such as a therapist or a coach. When you have a co-founder, it’s easy to rely on them for all of these support functions. This is a wonderful aspect of having a co-founder, they can be your best supporter. It’s also easy to build this reliance, because your co-founder is likely someone you speak with more than anyone else, perhaps even a spouse.

Not having a coach in the final year or two of working with my co-founder is something I consider a mistake. As we both became more burned out, and our vision for the company and natural choices of approach diverged, we couldn’t be the ones to help each other with those specific challenges. While I think the outcome to part ways was always going to be the right one, having a coach would likely have made the journey to that result smoother.

A key risk with over-reliance on natural relationships for support, is that they are not necessarily the best people to help you. They won’t be the best therapist, or the best coach, or the best financial advisor you could get. Additionally, these relationships are two-way streets. You can’t take too much otherwise it will feel one-sided and imbalanced.

Types of support to consider

Here are some of the types of support I’ve put in place for myself in the past couple of years:

Therapist
Coach
Executive Assistant
Financial Advisor / CPA
Peer founder / CEO group
Surfing and kite-surfing instructors
House cleaning

Other types of support I’m considering putting in place in coming years:

Personal trainer
Language tutor

In general, instructors and tutors fall into an overall category of being taught, which is something I’ve increasingly been leaning into. For my last few surf vacations, mainly due to Jess’ suggestion / request, I’ve had lessons almost every day. And there’s no doubt that I progressed faster than alone.

Of course, for most of us, cost is a key factor here. It is worth, however, establishing some of these relationships even if you do not set up regular sessions, even if you only have a one-off session.

As an example, I worked closely with a therapist for around two years. Since mid-2019, I’ve not met regularly with my therapist and have used some of the tools she introduced me to. However, I know that if I ever have a specific issue, or want to have regular sessions again for a few months, I can reach out to her. Having that existing relationship makes the barrier much lower for the future.

There are a couple of other benefits in getting professional support. Firstly, they will have their own network of other people who can help. For example, my financial advisor is connected to a group of people specialized in various different aspects, and was able to connect me with an attorney to help set up a trust. Secondly, if you set up regular sessions it will add a layer of accountability for yourself in that area, be it having your finances more in order or studying a language.

Start sooner than you think

If you’re an individual, it may feel like overkill to get some of this type of help in place. However, many of these elements of support are most effective as preventative measures, rather than necessary measures. It’s best to get them in place before a crisis, as the people you connect with can be ready and have relevant context, or even help you avoid the crisis in the first place.

And as a founder / CEO, I personally wish I had started to work on my personal support network much sooner. If you have a growing organization, don’t wait too long. As a founder, you generally get everything off the ground yourself and play every role. This can gear you up to have a mindset of solving everything yourself. But, if your company is starting to grow, if you’re starting to hire people, I’d recommend building your support network now. It will help you scale more smoothly, will make the journey feel calmer, and will equip you better for issues that will inevitably arise.

Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash.

Reflecting on 10 years of building Buffer

2020-12-03T20:57:15Z

Reflecting on 10 years of building Buffer

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 page to gauge interest, and then a very basic product that I worked on alone, has become so much more. Buffer is now a leading social media management platform and a team of nearly 90 people working remotely worldwide, with our own approach and culture.

Reaching this milestone means a lot for me, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on each year of the Buffer journey. As you’ll see, things have changed enormously over time, and I could not be more proud of where we are now.

2010: After getting paying customers, I shifted the focus to marketing.

I launched Buffer on November 30th, 2010. One of the things that inspired me to launch earlier than I may have otherwise, was an initiative someone started on Hacker News called November Startup Sprint. I decided to participate and committed to launching the first version of Buffer by the end of November 2010, which I only just accomplished. Something I learned from this experience is that you’ll always have additional features or fixes you want to finish before you launch, but actually putting something out there in the world is really what starts momentum.

I employed many of The Lean Startup techniques in order to validate the problem and the existence of an audience before launching. Thankfully, these steps and a healthy dose of luck resulted in some strong initial traction for the product. I had the first paying customer within four days of launch.

After the first paying customer, I took a step back, acknowledged that as a significant milestone, and decided a slight shift in focus was required. As an engineer, it’s easy to keep building, adding more features. I knew it was time to focus on marketing and further customer development. This is what led me to bring on a co-founder. It was time to keep the balance of development, marketing, and customer development with a product that had proved it was “good enough.” It was clear that there would be more people out there who would find value even at the early stage. This has been a valuable lesson I’ve tried to maintain: when the signal is there that the product is good enough, shout about it!

Read more about how I went from an idea to paying customers in seven weeks.

2011: Transitioning to working full-time on Buffer.

2011 was a year of transition for me, from contract web development work to working full-time on Buffer. Before starting Buffer, I was doing what I called “working in waves,” a method to have enough funds to work full-time on a project for a certain period of time. The idea is that you work a full-time job or contract work for a set amount of time and then work full-time on your startup idea once you have enough funds to support yourself for a set amount of time. Having tried working in waves, I would not recommend it as a long term strategy. Read my thoughts.

With Buffer, I was completely focused on hitting ramen profitability. I sensed that if I could get there, it would change everything. Ramen profitability describes a situation where you’re making just enough to pay your living expenses. For me, that first goal was £1,200 per month.

We reached ramen profitability early in 2011, and I gradually dropped the number of days of contract development work I was doing as the revenue grew. My co-founder finished his college year and had the summer free to focus entirely on Buffer. We decided to get on a plane and travel to what we thought of as Startup Mecca, San Francisco. This was, in fact, my first ever trip to the U.S., which I now call home. Later in 2011, strong revenue growth combined with a year of working on Buffer and some great education from AngelPad allowed us to raise $450,000.

2012: Becoming a fully remote company.

Becoming a fully remote company is a decision I made in 2012. During the few months I spent focused on whether to commit to Buffer being a distributed team, I sought advice from many people. I received some of the best advice from David Cancel, whom I had the chance to sit down and chat with over coffee. His key insight was that in his experience founding several companies so far, he has found that two scenarios work well, while one doesn’t work too well. He advised that we either be fully distributed or have everyone in the same office. David said that the time he had a main office with most people there and only one or two people working remotely didn’t work so well.

With this insight and further thinking, we became a fully distributed team. Here’s a screenshot from my email to the team sharing this news:

We immediately hired several people working remotely to quickly balance out the team from a group forming in San Francisco and ensure we were truly fully distributed. This was an immediate benefit to us, especially as a team focused on outstanding customer support since we quickly covered all time-zones. Read more about how I made the decision for Buffer to be fully remote.

Becoming fully remote didn’t mean we never met up in person, though. Over the years, we’ve found ways to incorporate annual retreats into our yearly planning and have prioritized this key time together for brainstorming, talking strategy, and setting the tone for the year ahead. See more about our past ten retreats in this post.

2013: Creating values and living by them.

In 2013, as we became a team of ten, we decided to articulate and document our company values. At the time, I knew we had already formed a strong culture, so I polled the team to ask them how they would describe it. From there, we came up with our original Buffer values.

One of our more unique values, default to transparency, which is the value that Buffer is known by the most, was put to the test this same year. In late 2013, Buffer was hacked. We shared transparently and quickly with our customers and the broader public what had happened and what we were doing about it. We alerted our community to the breach before knowing the source of it, and we provided updates on our progress every few hours for the first few days. Both our community and the public responded well to this openness, reinforcing my theory at the time that bugs and downtime can be a good thing, as long as they are rare and handled with great care.

We further committed to this value by making our salaries transparent at the end of 2013, which resulted in a spike of applications for open Buffer jobs, and is a step I believe contributed significantly to growing our brand.

Check out our transparency page to see a full timeline of transparency at Buffer.

2014: Our largest acquisition offer and deciding not to sell Buffer.

In the early years, we received a number of acquisition offers. The earliest offer we had for Buffer was not long after we had started, and it felt fairly easy for us to say no simply because we felt we had much more growth ahead and wanted to see where our path would lead.

However, in 2014 we received our largest acquisition offer to date. It was a nine-figure offer from a public company, and it stopped us in our tracks and made us truly step back and reflect. For myself, my co-founder, and for most of our team with early-stage stock options grants, it would have been a life-changing outcome. An offer like that drives existential questioning, making you really think about the purpose and fulfillment of what you’re doing. Ultimately, we believed there was significantly more growth from where we were, and we have since increased revenue 6x. Beyond the growth potential, however, it was the culture and the movements we had become part of (transparency and remote work, in particular), which led us to turn the offer down and continue on our path. The most memorable advice we received during this decision process was from Hiten Shah, who asked us simply, “Are you done?”.

Money will come and go, but experiences and learning is what I define as true wealth. This is why I try to frame a decision of whether to sell around the opportunities for learning and experience in each path. I reflected on how if I sold Buffer, I would sacrifice many future learnings. I asked myself if and when I would ever have the learning opportunity I did for the years ahead from that stage of Buffer. Here’s a longer post reflecting on not selling Buffer.

I made the decision to continue learning with Buffer, and this is a decision I feel great about to this day. Instead of an acquisition, we raised $3.5 million in late 2014 with a secondary liquidity component, in part to remove the pressure to sell and help us go long. Here I am six years later, still energized and happy with my gradual return, so overall, I believe that worked out. More recently, I’ve been focused on finding ways to separate exit from liquidity for myself and the whole team. This helps us take a genuinely long-term view on the business.

2015: Exploring self-management.

In 2015, after reading Reinventing Organizations, the entire team voted and agreed to become self-managed. We reorganized Buffer into a completely flat structure. At first, this felt energizing and invigorating. There was a great sense of freedom and ownership. Over the course of a few months, things started to feel off. People were easily lost, especially those that had just joined Buffer. More experienced people often didn’t quite see a place to help out and share ideas around which direction a project could take. The amount of freedom people had, with absolutely no guidance, expectations, or accountability, was pretty overwhelming.

Our self-management setup was a partial success for customers. One of the experiments we pursued during this time was to create a team specifically aimed at launching new functionality rapidly for customers. We launched Pablo, our popular image creation product, out of this team. The main challenge we found with these types of projects is resourcing, maintaining, and improving them over time. We’ve since become more deliberate about what we choose to launch rapidly while maintaining our culture of experimentation.

We eventually decided to move away from self-management. This period will always hold a special place in my heart, though I believe ultimately we are better placed with some hierarchy and structure. It reinforced to me that it’s okay to try big experiments and to go in knowing that not all of them will work. This is a mindset we’ve kept at Buffer and has helped us continue to experiment with the way we work. This type of exploration and playfulness generally becomes harder to do as you grow larger, and the boldness, optimism, and curiosity that it requires is something that I’m committed to supporting.

2016: Launching Reply, then facing cash-flow challenges and layoffs.

Early in 2016, we launched Buffer Reply, which was the result of an acquisition and a lot of great work to adapt the product to make it feel like a Buffer offering. This was a bold move to expand beyond social media marketing and into social customer service. As a company, we had always held ourselves to a very high bar for customer service, and we found the tools out there for managing customer service on social media to be lacking. We had some success with Reply, and over the next few years, grew monthly revenue from $4k at acquisition to over $70k at its peak. Ultimately, we found that the need for customer service on social media was less widespread and didn’t develop as we imagined it may, and also found that we were spreading ourselves thin with taking on very different types of products and customer segments, so we sunset Reply in 2020. The experience of Reply increased our ambitions as a company, launched us to serving more than a single customer job, and paved the way for us to build a social engagement tool, which is coming in early 2021.

After we concluded our self-management experiment, we felt a drive to grow the team more rapidly again. We ultimately grew from 34 to 94 people. With team growth, however, comes the need for new systems, and existing approaches start to show cracks and feel ineffective. Our revenue growth, while strong, didn’t keep pace with hiring, and we found ourselves in financial challenges.

With the prospect of only five months of runway before depleting our cash reserves, we made the excruciating decision to lay off ten team members. What was more disappointing than anything was that this was totally within our control. It was all caused by the fact that we grew the team too big, too fast. We thought we were being mindful about balancing the pace of our hiring with our revenue growth, but we weren’t. One of our advisors gave us an apt metaphor for what happened: We moved into a house that we couldn’t afford with our monthly paycheck.

We made an important yet challenging decision to solve our financial challenges ourselves rather than raising a bridge round of funding to see us through. It was a painful process to go through, and I’ve now experienced first-hand the loss of morale, the negative impact on culture, and the erosion of trust that layoffs can cause. This is especially true for a small, tight-knit, and mission-driven team. With all of that said, I’m grateful for the personal and company growth that this enabled for us. We immediately leveled up our financial operations and set down a commitment to financial stability.

This experience led us to truly figure out sustainability at Buffer and understand how we could be around long term. I believe we’re better off as a company for this and have developed some strong financial principles for our company, which have led to us being around and self-sustaining four years on. I’m proud of the results we have to show for these efforts. We’ve been profitable every quarter since we made these layoffs; eighteen straight quarters of profitability.

2017: Recommitting to a single path, stabilizing the company, experiencing co-founder conflict, and the lows of burnout.

2017 was perhaps the hardest year of the Buffer journey so far. After a difficult 2016, I focused on stabilizing the company, mending the erosion of trust with the team, and charting a clear, singular, and enduring direction for the company going forward. In the midst of this, significant conflict developed between myself and my co-founder, and several investors became involved in the disputes. This contributed to some of the lowest points of my career and experiencing severe burnout.

In the earlier part of the Buffer journey, we were lucky to have it all: great growth, funding on fantastic terms, building a generous, positive, inclusive culture, and maintaining a lot of individual freedom. Over time, some of these things started to feel like trade-offs, and we started to debate our path. Rapid growth vs. freedom, focus on culture vs. product, performance vs. nurturing. I don’t fundamentally believe these things must be at odds, but in late 2016, it felt that way to all of us. My co-founder and I started to increasingly fall on different sides of these choices. What was once a beautiful balance of complementary strengths and opinions felt like constant misalignment and mixed messages to the team. After many attempts at finding common ground, we agreed we had grown apart and developed differing visions. In early 2017, my co-founder and our CTO both moved on from Buffer.

After this significant change, I focused on stabilizing the company for the team and in terms of our financials. I articulated a clear path for the company focused on sustainable growth, product quality, and an empowering company culture. We had great revenue growth, and I made a decision to pause hiring for most of 2017 in order to build our profitability. We went from burning $30-150k per month in early 2016 to consistently generating more than $300k in monthly profit in 2017.

After an initial amicable parting and starting to meet as friends rather than co-workers, we started to open up about lingering unsaid frustrations. With this, resentment started to grow between my co-founder and I, specifically around the timing and scale of liquidity he could expect. Admittedly, as the CEO of an 85+ person company just recently coming out of layoffs and significant leadership change, this wasn’t my top focus. All of this led to high stress, low energy and capacity, negativity, and stubbornness. This also drove challenges in my relationship with my partner, Jess. I’m happy to say we got through it and got married in 2019.

Throughout all of this, I can look back and see that while I was exercising and keeping myself in good shape, as well as feeling optimistic about the future of Buffer, it was adrenaline that was carrying me forward. By the spring of 2017, the company felt much more stable, and the adrenaline was no longer needed. As soon as the adrenaline subsided, my body and mind could suddenly feel what it had worked through. That’s when burnout hit me, and I felt unable to function effectively. With great support from my leadership team, I took a six-week break to recharge and came back much better equipped to take on the rest of the year.

Read my full experience with burnout here.

2018: Spending $3.3 Million buying out investors.

After recommitting to a path of long-term sustainability in 2017, I had conversations with our main venture capital investors, and it became clear that our choice of path was not a great fit for the investment. Thankfully, we had been open about this possibility when we raised the funding back in 2014, and so we were able to open up conversations about a way to move forward. These discussions were challenging and uncomfortable, but pushing ahead with them allowed us to ensure Buffer was set up to run independently in the long-term.

These discussions, and over a year and a half of profitability, resulted in our ability to spend $3.3 Million buying out our VC investors. This was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in the Buffer journey so far. This was a key inflection point for Buffer that put us truly on a path of sustainable, long-term growth, and we’ve been better off for the significant increase in alignment in our shareholder base. I’m grateful to our VC investors for being open to this solution and to our many remaining investors who are excited about this unusual path.

At times, this move towards stability and setting ourselves up for the future has felt like a slow journey and has drawn focus away from customers, which I have found painful. With that said, this is foundational work on the core of the company — ownership — and has set us up to be able to be more customer-focused and have less distractions going forward. Additionally, it has helped us to maintain and continue to craft a company culture that puts people over profit, something I believe will pay dividends for years to come. With the benefit of hindsight, these decisions have driven long-term benefits for Buffer. For example, we figured out how to be profitable and sustainable, and as a result, we were better set up for unknown future events like the impact of COVID-19 and the global pandemic on our customers, team, and finances.

2019: Creating balance and setting myself and Buffer up to scale sustainably.

2019 was a different year for me in many ways. On the personal side of things, I established a routine living in Boulder, I got married, and refocused on hobbies like skiing. This was the year that I really worked on integrating my work and personal lives, rather than taking the early-stage mentality of sacrificing my personal life, relationships, and hobbies in order to spend more time and energy on work. While we had become financially sustainable, I truly believe this personal change made it sustainable for me to keep operating as CEO in the long-term.

At Buffer, after two eventful and foundation-building years for the company itself, I decided to turn this thinking to my role. Something that clicked for me towards the end of 2018 was that I would significantly benefit from setting up a support system around myself. Without an active co-founder, it became that much more critical that I have other types of support to fill that gap. I decided to take a new approach this time, putting together a group of people rather than relying on a single person. In late 2018, I brought on a new Executive Assistant and tasked her with helping me to form this support network, which I decided would include a coach, a financial advisor, and regularly connecting with other founders. In addition, I was regularly meeting with a therapist since mid-2017. By the end of 2019, this support system was fully established, and I am confident this group has made me a better leader over time.

2019 also marked the beginning of starting to reflect on my role, and the initial step I took towards the end of the year was to make a decision to hire a Product leader. This was the final area of the company I chose to fully let go of, and we recently brought on a great CPO to lead us and level up our product strategy, quality, and operations.

2020: Building a resilient company and taking a step back to think about purpose.

We are almost at the end of 2020, and I think calling this a tough year would be an understatement for many. This year our focus was on building a resilient company.

I started the year traveling and taking some time off in Thailand and New Zealand. As part of this, I had a chance to step back and start to reflect on what we had achieved and where I may want to take the company next. A level of clarity started to emerge about the type of customer, and type of company, that I feel energized to work towards.

Of course, by the end of February, COVID-19 was taking hold and already starting to impact many countries around the world. We were lucky at Buffer, as a fully distributed team with several people in Asia, that we had an early warning, and it became clear quickly that this would be a global challenge. We canceled our upcoming company retreat to Greece and started to focus on how to get the company through this period as unscathed as possible. Our mantra for the year became resilience, with a focus on people over profit and mental well being. A key decision I made was that I wanted to get through the year accruing the least debt possible in terms of impact on the team, issues such as burnout, customer satisfaction, and our financial position. We set up a COVID-19 customer assistance program, reduced some of our performance criteria and deadline focus, and implemented a 4-day workweek pilot.

This year, we experienced the worst customer churn we’ve ever seen at Buffer as thousands of our small business customers struggled to adapt and survive. We saw a consistent decline in revenue from mid-March to mid-June, and throughout that period, we crafted countless new projections and scenarios to ensure we could emerge in a strong position. Thankfully, the decline eased off, and since mid-June, we’ve seen modest growth.

With the financial impact of the pandemic stabilizing, I was able to turn back to some of the reflections I had around Buffer’s purpose and my CEO role. I worked with my coach and arrived at clarity that what we’ve always been focused on at Buffer is helping small businesses to succeed and do good along the way by providing tools to grow and serve an audience and inspirational content to rethink how businesses are built. As for my role, I’ve realized that the next key evolution is in truly reflecting on the work that energizes me versus the work that drains me. I love to focus on the high level of bold vision and strategy and the details around customer experiences and our culture. The in-between of operations and keeping the train running on time is less fun for me. I’ve been shifting my role, and Caro, our Chief of Special projects and someone I’ve now worked with on Buffer for over eight years has been stepping into operations to give us the best long-term outcomes.

It’s been powerful to take a step back and reflect on ten years of building a company. Looking back, there are a few additional observations I want to share.

In the early days, it’s easy to treat a startup as a sprint, but it’s really a marathon. It’s vital to pace yourself and take care of yourself. Regular rest is a necessity, and I’m going to continue to work towards incorporating rest and true vacations into my annual cycle. Additionally, as with life, there are seasons to a company. There have been stages of growth, market changes, and role evolutions. There are always periods with different focuses, and it is a continual journey towards ideal equilibrium.

I’ve learned that it’s hard to grow without compromising, and after doing so, you might have to work to find your purpose again. This is an example of the hard work it takes to create something enduring. If you are to be successful long-term, you have to take time to reflect and rediscover your passion, and sometimes make some bold changes to get back on track.

I’ve been fortunate and privileged and have achieved more than I could ever have dreamed of. I’m proud that Buffer has reached the 10-year mark and that with the help of many people, I’ve created a company that gives meaningful employment to over 85 people across the world. We’re far from perfect and still have much to improve and learn, but there’s a time to catch your breath and say, “we’ve created something awesome.” We have many people on the team who have been part of this wild ride for six, seven, even eight years now, and this blows my mind. It’s a significant part of any person’s life to spend working on something, and I couldn’t be more grateful to those people.

As I look ahead to 2021, while I’ve learned that it never gets easier, it’s always interesting, and there is never a dull week. 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’m excited to continue on this path of long-term sustainability and thankful to have an incredible team to work with, thousands of happy customers, and a foundation of profitability. It has felt liberating to have a structure that allows us to think in terms of years rather than quarters. I’m ready to dig in for another decade and see the heights we can reach and the value we can provide.

Whether this is the first post of mine you’ve read, you’ve been following along since the beginning, or you’re somewhere in between, thank you for taking the time to read this as I reflect on this big milestone in Buffer’s history. I’m so thankful for the incredible community and customers we have around us that let us continue to do what we do every year.

Buffer's product journey, and our next step to hire a VP of Product

2020-07-28T18:52:16Z

Buffer's product journey, and our next step to hire a VP of Product

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 remote team with over 70,000 paying customers and $20M in annual revenue. We’re proud to be a leader in the space of social media management, and to operate long-term as an independent and profitable business.

As a company, we’ve rallied around serving small businesses. We’re also passionate about challenging suboptimal approaches to how work happens and how employees are treated. Our current 4-day workweek experiment is an example of that.

An important philosophy of our journey has been having the freedom to build our product and workplace the way we'd like to. In 2018, we took an important action to maintain this freedom by spending $3.3 million buying out our main VC investors.

After a great decade with many accomplishments and interesting challenges, we’re looking for an experienced and driven product executive to partner with me as CEO to shape the future of Buffer.

Apply for the VP of Product role →

Before I get into why we’re hiring a VP of Product, I want to share a history of product at Buffer, how our team is set up, and our most recent revenue metrics as these are all aspects of Buffer that I know a product leader will have questions around.

A history of product at Buffer

I launched the first (truly an MVP) version of Buffer in late 2010. In the beginning, Buffer started as a solution to my own problem around consistently sharing content on social media. I then put the idea through a customer discovery and validation process to ensure it was a problem others had, too. We launched with a freemium model and were fortunate to welcome the first paying customer on day three. We then added some focused marketing, and over the course of the first year gained thousands of active users of the product. Initially a lot of our product direction came from those customers, listening to their problems and devising unique solutions.

In 2012, it was time to focus slightly more. We narrowed in on bloggers, individuals, and small business owners. We set down our first true product vision, which was to be the sharing standard for the web. We made big progress on this vision, becoming the first social media management solution to create a sharing button and completing integrations with countless news reading apps.

During this time, our acquisition and growth strategy was our freemium model. Ultimately we started to realize that this strategy would only truly work if we became a mainstream product used by millions. As we integrated more widely, the signups we gained from those partnerships led to much lower freemium conversion rates. As a result, by 2014, our growth started to plateau and we felt we reached the upper limits of how successful Buffer could become with this approach.

Since our product was most valued by and most active among small business customers, we leaned into that and launched Buffer for Business with new pricing plans tiered up to $500/mo. We succeeded in finding a new wave of growth, and the journey cemented our intuition that Buffer wouldn’t find success as a consumer product. This brought a level of focus that was refreshing, and pushed us to add more power to the product. We aimed to do this while still maintaining the simplicity our customers had grown to love Buffer for.

In 2015, we explored a team structure with no managers, and this played directly into our approach to product. With more autonomy on our team, we let our product strategy take a truly organic direction. During our period of no managers, we launched several new products. This included a “Buffer labs” exploration where we produced Pablo, our image creation product, as well as Daily, a swipe left or right approach to adding suggested content to your social media queue. Finally, the Pablo team shifted to launch Rocket, our first foray into the ads space. Daily and Rocket were ultimately sunset, and we learned a lot from each of them.

In early 2016, we acquired Respondly, a social customer service and engagement product which we relaunched as Buffer Reply. This was our most significant bet and investment to date and took us into the customer service industry for the first time. Customer service had always been a large focus for us as a company, and we were excited to be able to offer a product to help others in this space, too. At the time, the networks were making a big bet on social media becoming a significant channel for customer service. Customer service ultimately did not grow along the path we predicted, and the need for a fully fledged product here was mostly limited to Enterprise scale, which was too mismatched with our existing customer-base and knowledge in the team. We grew Reply from $4k to $70k in MRR, and chose to sunset the product earlier this year.

In the process of becoming a two product organization, we saw an opportunity to separate out social analytics from our main product focused on social media publishing and content planning. We leaned into this multi-product strategy and built our third product, Analyze. This separation gave us a better focus on the separate customer jobs and we have been able to grow this into a very successful product. Analyze currently generates over $1.5m in ARR.

By the second half of 2018, we had grown to $18m in ARR and over 75,000 paying customers. Still being a small team, we started to feel stretched thin, and we increasingly found product prioritization and pace to be challenges. I partnered with our head of research to run a process to determine a singular type of customer for us to focus our efforts around. We arrived at Direct to Consumer (DTC) brands as a type of customer who has built their business on top of social media and has innovated the most with social media marketing and customer engagement. This newly defined Target Customer for Buffer brought us a lot of focus, but at times felt like an over correction and came at a cost to product improvements for our existing customers, who are small businesses of all types.

Something that became clear over a few years, and during our customer research process to arrive at DTC brands as a customer persona to focus on, was that the the world of social media had become increasing visual. To address this shift, we spent most of 2018 and 2019 building out new functionality focused on Instagram. In addition to this work to expand our product offerings, we underwent a significant rebuild project for our main product, Publish. Rebuilds are never fun, but with this now complete we are able to move significantly faster and deliver a much improved user experience.

That brings us to 2020. Our current focus is to become a brand-building platform for small businesses, with DTC brands as one of our primary customer personas. This year, it became clear that the multi-product approach was creating friction for customers, so we are working to adjust our pricing and overall experience towards a single solution. We’re in the midst of launching Engage, a social engagement product for small businesses that came out of our experiences growing Reply. Engage will be bundled as part of existing pricing tiers, at various levels of functionality.

I’m looking forward to this next chapter of Buffer, and to a future where we can become a comprehensive toolkit for small businesses to build their brand, grow, and create great relationships with their customers. We see a path to 100,000 paying customers and beyond, with many opportunities to solve more problems for that audience.

How our product team is set up

We’re primarily structured around the customer jobs we are focused on: Publish, Analyze and Engage. We also have two “shared services” teams focused on authentication, billing and onboarding (Core) and our iOS and Android apps (Mobile). Most teams have a Product Manager, Product Designer and somewhere between two and seven engineers depending on the needs of that product area.

The VP of Product we bring on board will manage Product and Design, and initially have six direct reports (four PMs, Head of Design and Partnerships Manager).

Our current financial metrics

We’ve been profitable since 2016 and in 2018 we chose to leverage that profitability to buy out a portion of our investors in order to retain control over Buffer’s path. We reached $10 million in ARR in May 2016, and $20 million ARR in March 2019.

Here are our most recent revenue and product metrics from June 2020:

MRR: $1,704,768
ARR: $20,457,216
Customers: 69,596
ARPU: $24.50
Customer Churn: 4.76%Net
MRR Churn: 3.95%
LTV: $515

Revenue: $1,679,591
Operating Income: $235,375
EBITDA margin: 14.01%

We have a dedicated revenue dashboard (a work in progress!) where you can see revenue over time. Here’s what that looks like:

**The COVID-19 impact **
Many businesses have been impacted by COVID-19, including us. Buffer is in a strong financial position, we’ve thankfully had no impact on jobs and have remained solidly profitable. The shareholder update we sent in April shares a complete picture of our approach in the midst of the pandemic.

One thing I talked about in that update is that sometimes the best thing we can do for our small business customers isn’t immediately profitable for Buffer – including our COVID-19 support programs for customers with financial challenges. I have no doubt that we’re doing the right thing by focusing on people first. One of my business philosophies is that if we take care of our teammates and our customers as best we possibly can now, we will succeed in the long term.

This graph of our MRR in 2020 shows the impact we’ve seen on revenue:

Though we have experienced some anticipated decline, we are happy to see that it has started to climb again and as I mentioned, Buffer has pulled through in a strong financial position. We’ve spent the last few years building up to our current financial security, which means we can weather extreme levels of uncertainty. We’re fortunate and grateful to be in this position, and are proud of our financial diligence.

We’re hiring a VP of Product

At this point in the journey of Buffer, I’m excited to bring on board a VP of Product.

Before I share more of the reasons we came to this decision, I want to share a key area of weakness up front. While we've made great strides over the past few years, and we have a majority female leadership team, our current leadership team lacks diversity.

There's no doubt that as a result we lack key perspectives and have unconscious biases as a company. It’s a priority for us to change this dynamic and include within our leadership team backgrounds that have been typically underrepresented in tech. This will serve our customers and our team more fully than we have been able to so far.

Since we don’t grow our leadership team often, this is a rare opportunity for us. In addition to looking for a talented product leader, we also want this teammate to bring a new perspective to our leadership team and culture. Making sure we speak to a slate of diverse candidates is critical as we look for our VP of Product.

Below are a few reasons I came to the decision to look for a product leader:

Being a product-minded CEO can become a weakness
As a product-minded CEO, my journey has followed from my innate energy and passion for product development. An engineer by background, I shifted to product development early in our journey, and found a lot of enjoyment in crafting the experience for customers, which I believe has played a large role in where we are today.

Unfortunately, what can happen with a product-CEO, is that product can go from being the strongest area of the company to one of the weakest. At a certain point, product must scale up and become operationalized, and those strengths must become part of how the overall team functions. I believe in recent years we’ve seen some deterioration of product where other areas such as engineering have grown stronger, due to my desire to hold on and shape product more than is appropriate for the size have grown to.

I’ve recognized that I need to take a different approach to fulfill the vision and goals I have, in order to keep the product as a core strength of ours. It needs to happen through someone else, rather than through me alone.

I’m looking to bring more balance to all areas of Buffer
I believe for a company to thrive, all areas in a company need to work in harmony and that my role as CEO is set down vision and support all areas.

Over the past few years, I’ve been very focused on product, which has caused an imbalance in how much I’ve been involved in other areas of the company. This is to the detriment of our customers, team, and all stakeholders.

By inviting this functional leader to our leadership team, it will mean I can be more equally balanced across all areas of Buffer. We will be able to push forward, and I can work more closely with leaders to set vision and strategy, across all areas in tandem.

Therefore, bringing on an experienced VP of Product will help us level up as a product organization. We will be able to introduce more streamlined processes, and by having a person dedicated to this area solely, we will improve the way product interacts with other related and interdependent areas, such as engineering, marketing, and advocacy.

**We’re looking for outside perspective **
For this role, I am making the choice to bring in someone from the outside instead of considering someone growing from within the company. This is new for us, and I’m excited for the opportunity for growth we have with a fresh perspective on the executive team.

In our journey so far, we have overwhelmingly had leaders grow from individual contributor roles into senior leaders. I believe that it’s beneficial to have a majority of leaders grow from within the company as there is a clear alignment of our values, empathy towards team members, and a sense of loyalty towards our mission.

With that said, having 100% of leaders grow from within creates a lack of diversity in our mindset and approach. Without outside experience, we will have knowledge gaps as a leadership team, and can become set in our ways. The VP of Product role is an excellent opportunity for us to find someone with some extensive outside experience.

A key thing we will be focused on in our hiring process is that a person’s external experience is compatible and additive to Buffer’s approach and values.

More about this role

For this role, I’m seeking a partner in product strategy and execution. Since product is at the heart of Buffer, this is one of the most important roles and one which will make decisions impacting all other areas.

We’re looking for a product leader with deep product management and design fundamentals and expertise, as well as strong people management experience and stakeholder collaboration. I’m aiming to find someone that can both tap into the insights that I have to offer and stand strong and push back when they believe I shouldn’t be involved.

It will be helpful for a potential VP of Product to have experience in a smaller company environment, and ideally has led a product team through significant growth, for example growing a SaaS product from $10m to $50m or more.

The other key difference with Buffer is that we’re focused on SMB, with a large number of paying customers and free users, and we have no sales team. This changes the type of work involved at the product leadership level, and this will be something the right person is energized by.

The new VP of Product will have the opportunity to craft a unique strategy to help us serve customers, differentiate Buffer, and see great growth over the next 5 to 10 years.

Joining Buffer at the leadership level is a rare opportunity. We’re a highly customer-focused team and are squarely on a path of long-term sustainability. This is an opportunity for a great product leader to play a key role in creating much more value for customers and building something special that endures.

I’m looking forward to meeting people who are up for this challenge.

Apply for the VP of Product role →

Please reach out through this job posting to apply and someone from our hiring team will be in touch with next steps.

If you want to recommend someone who you think would be great for this role, please fill out this form.

More about Buffer’s journey

If you’d like to learn more about Buffer’s journey over the years, here are a few podcast episodes where I’ve talked about starting Buffer, fundraising, transparency, and profitability.

Snowmelt meetings

2020-05-25T18:56:19Z

Snowmelt meetings

“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.

When I read the chapter with this title in Seeing Around Corners, it set off a light bulb in my mind. I found myself thinking about how many individual contributors within Advocacy, or within Marketing, or other areas such as Engineering, I’ve spoken with recently. The answer? Not many at all.

One of my fondest memories of the past month was a town hall that I did with the members of our team in the APAC region. Our regular Town Hall was in the middle of the night for most of them so we arranged a time where I could chat with that smaller group of Buffer teammates separately at a time that worked for their time zone.

In this casual and smaller group setting, we were able to have an informal chat and after a while, the ideas, questions, and comments really started flowing. I learned a ton and was left feeling energized.

It was in the APAC Town Hall meeting that Mel, a Customer Advocate on our team, asked me whether we had established a clear stance for how much we can help customers throughout COVID-19. This really got me thinking. The next day I spoke with Åsa, our VP of Customer Advocacy, on the topic and we immediately put in place our first couple of customer relief efforts. And those initial steps have now turned into our COVID-19 Customer Relief Program. A lot of this was already starting to happen, but this direct contact with Mel was powerful for me and spurred me to put more of my attention and weight behind the initiatives.

Since being reminded of this concept, and feeling a few first-hand experiences, I’ve started to question the balance of how much time I spend working directly with Buffer’s leadership team, versus how much time I spend interacting with the teammates who interact directly with customers. I’ve also found myself wanting to get back to answering customer emails from time to time.

When I’m shaping our overall strategy, it’s essential that I have regular contact with folks from all different parts of the organization. I’ve realized, therefore, that spending time with people I don’t regularly work with is a vital part of my role, now and always. It’s a way to recognize upcoming inflection points sooner and to act on them earlier. In a sense, by spending time at the edges, I develop an ability to “see the future.”

I’m currently implementing “snowmelt meetings” with Buffer teammates and am looking forward to speaking with more of the team more regularly over the coming months.

We’re trying a 4-day workweek for the month of May

2020-05-05T18:22:16Z

We’re trying a 4-day workweek for the month of May

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 89-person team.

We’re in a period of time where there’s a layer of added anxiety and stress in all of our lives. At Buffer, we’ve been encouraging taking time off, and relaxing productivity expectations, in addition to shifting internal deadlines, but we decided it’s time for us to put some real team-wide changes in place to back up these adjustments.

This 4-day workweek period is about well-being, mental health, and placing us as humans and our families first. It’s about being able to pick a good time to go and do the groceries, now that it’s a significantly larger task. It’s about parents having more time with kids now that they’re having to take on their education. This isn’t about us trying to get the same productivity in fewer days.

One of my goals as CEO for this period of time is to put people over profit and to do all I can to get Buffer through this as unscathed as possible. An extension of this, I’ve decided, is ensuring that we accrue the least debt possible during this time so that we can emerge from COVID-19 and have some great months for customers and Buffer. One debt that is likely growing within companies right now, is burnout. This is a key initiative we’re putting in place to reduce that impact.

How we came to this decision

Our People team did a few quick surveys with our team during our April All Hands and the feedback we received validated our theory that that in addition to the general anxiety many of us are facing right now, teammates are struggling with not always feeling comfortable or able to take time off.

Here are the results from our All Hands survey:
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And our results from polling parents at Buffer:
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One thing that has been top of mind for us is that this month of trying a 4-day workweek isn’t about pushing everyone’s anxiety or distraction into a single day and expecting the other workdays to be “back to normal.” We know many Buffer teammates will still have caregiving and other responsibilities on some or all of the working days, and flexibility is still supported and encouraged. This day off is to augment that flexibility and give everyone a coordinated break where they won’t feel like they’re behind or catching up when they return.

What our 4-day workweek schedule looks like

We asked each area to choose which typical workday will become an “off day” for May, all members of an area will take the same day off, and some areas (like Engineering and Product) coordinated this together. The chosen day remains consistent for the full 4-week period of the new working schedule. We hope that doing this by area helps with the feeling of needing to ‘catch up’ from a day off.

For our Customer Advocacy team, we did things slightly differently to ensure coverage for our customers. Our Advocates have alternating Wednesdays and Fridays off. If they have Wednesday off in Week One, then they’ll have Friday off in Week Two, and vice versa. This was done because having Wednesdays off ensures we are available for early week volume spikes and feels restorative as a midweek option as team members will only have two days back-to-back work on those weeks. We also normally have lower volume on Friday and team members can enjoy a longer weekend on those weeks.

Our Advocacy leads are keeping an eye on any increase in inbox volume to ensure this doesn’t lead to added stress. We’re keen to balance team wellbeing with delivering a great customer support experience.

What happens after May?

We’re getting feedback from the team on the impact of this change using TinyPulse and taking stock of how things feel overall. Depending on the results and outcomes, we could possibly see a 4-day workweek continue for another month or longer, or we could return to a more typical workweek.

We’ll follow up after this month-long period to share more about how the 4-day workweek has gone for us. During this time, we’re not necessarily making permanent policies or setting precedent. Instead, the goal here is to be nimble and adaptive in discovering what is the best setup at Buffer for our customers, teammates, and the company right now.

Buffer's investor update on COVID-19 impact and approach

2020-04-08T15:51:00Z

Buffer's investor update on COVID-19 impact and approach

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.

Buffer’s purpose is to help small businesses thrive – now more than ever. Many businesses are impacted right now, and the best things we can do for them aren’t immediately profitable for Buffer – including our COVID-19 support programs for customers with financial challenges. But I have no doubt that we’re doing the right thing by focusing on people first. If we give value right now, we’ll receive value for ourselves in in the long run.

I’m grateful to the whole Buffer team for the many ways we’ve sprung into action, reacted and moved fast with the changes needed at Buffer to help each other and our customers through COVID-19.

Hi all,

I hope you’re staying healthy in these uncertain times. I’m getting in touch to share an update on the impact of, and our response to, the COVID-19 pandemic and the volatile economic situation.

I’m glad to say that Buffer has been about as prepared as I could imagine being going into a situation like this. We had one of our highest months of net profit in February at $450k and we have $6.4m in the bank.

So far, we are seeing an increase in churn and contraction, and have observed two weeks of negative MRR change, which we are monitoring daily. We of course do not know the full extent of the impact this situation will have on Buffer, but so far we have confidence we are in a strong financial position to get through this relatively unscathed. Here are some more specific details across various areas:

Team

On March 4 we made the decision to postpone our annual retreat. This was scheduled for June, in Athens. By early March there were a handful of cases in Greece and we made an early decision to postpone the retreat, to give our team as much certainty as possible and thereby reduce anxiety.
On March 13 we asked the team to cancel all upcoming work travel and avoid planning anything else.
We have been working remotely for most of the Buffer journey, and so the disruption to our normal company operations is certainly limited compared to other companies.
With that said, many people have been thrust into brand new “work from home” conditions such as having a partner also working from home, having kids at home and homeschooling, taking care of relatives, and generally feeling much more limited in their freedom to create the right balance for their day to day work. Not to mention the anxiety of the fast-changing news cycles and the way those in power are responding to the situation.
We’ve told the team that it is very normal and expected during this time to feel distracted or stressed. We’ve lowered our productivity expectations and encouraged taking more time off.
We’ve increased the amount of virtual get-togethers within the team to create more connection in these times of social distance. While we know that COVID-19 will impact all aspects of how we work, we also introduced a dedicated #covid19 channel on Slack to create a space to share personal impact, general news, inspiring approaches and fun reactions to the pandemic.
We’ve shared with the team that if they become ill with COVID-19 or are caring for someone ill with COVID-19, they can take up to 12 weeks off (fully paid), knowing that their job is secure.

Finances

February net profit: $451k, January net profit: $402k.
Cash: $6.4m
We have a line of credit we are able to draw a further $3m on if necessary
As these numbers show, we are in a strong position. Even if we dropped revenue by several hundred thousand, we would still be profitable and have infinite runway.
In a drastic worst case scenario where we drop to a $100k loss per month (dropping our income by $550k from our February numbers), we would still have 64 months of runway (over 5 years).
We’re doing a thorough budget review, and are coming up with several different contingency plans where we can easily reduce some of our expenses, if we see MRR numbers change quickly.
We’ve also recouped some costs by postponing the retreat and canceling ongoing work travel.
February MRR: $1,854,998. ARR: $22,259,976.
We are on track to end March with around $25k net decline in MRR.
It’s likely we will see some further MRR decline in the weeks / months to come.

Customer impact

Around 10% of our customers are physical businesses, and those were the first we’ve seen impacted by COVID-19. Of course, many of these businesses immediately needed to stop their operations, or adapt drastically.
We’ve accordingly seen an increase in churn and contraction in the past two weeks, with the highest impact the week ending March 22. We observed less of a decline in the past week, which so far indicates the worst week was that first week of full lockdown across most of the US and Europe. This could, of course, look very different in a week or two.
We saw a -$14k net MRR movement for the week ending March 22.
We saw a -$7k net MRR movement for the week ending March 29.
We’ve implemented a couple of COVID-19 support programs for customers who have contacted us and shared financial challenges as a result of the pandemic.
Firstly, for customers who have had to halt their operations and do not have a need for Buffer right now, we have offered the option to pause their subscription for two months.
Secondly, for customers who have seen a large impact on their income, and still have a need for Buffer, we are offering two months of free usage of the product.
We believe that these two initiatives will help customers, and in the process help Buffer, by enabling us to retain more customers during the next few months.We are now in the midst of discussing more ways we can help both existing and prospective customers. We are considering loosening trial restrictions, and thinking about ways we can help beyond financial help, such as offering educational resources around remote work.
We are constantly balancing how much we can help our customers, with the financial precautions we need to take as a company to protect our team and ensure the business can smoothly navigate these uncertain times. I believe that fundamentally, helping customers right now also helps Buffer, but it is a balancing act while we have incomplete information.

Overall, despite the immense ongoing challenges across the world in this pandemic, I am seeing a lot of creativity from small businesses in the way they are adapting to meet this new reality. I’m also seeing a lot of gratitude and generosity from communities everywhere, to help small businesses and healthcare workers. This connects deeply with our overall purpose at Buffer, which revolves around helping small businesses grow and thrive.

My personal reality these past few weeks has oscillated between the immediate reactionary needs of the business and the team, and a deeper reflection around our purpose and future opportunities. In many ways, this new reality has deepened and expanded the ideas we have around how much we can help small businesses. Many businesses are impacted at once right now, and I believe it is bringing into question an often universal assumption: that all of our business activities should be revenue generating.

A clear focus on our purpose of helping small businesses would instead mean that, at times, the best activities to fulfill that mission may not always be revenue-generating for Buffer. Right now, the best thing we can do for some small businesses isn’t immediately profitable for Buffer. In the long-run I have no doubt that if we contribute significant value we will be able to capture enough value for ourselves. As this situation evolves and improves, I will be taking these ideas to heart in thinking about how we can serve small businesses in more normal times, too.

Thanks for reading. I hope you and your loved ones are hanging in there through these difficult days and forced lifestyle changes.

Joel Gascoigne
Co-founder and CEO, Buffer

My experience with burnout as a startup founder

2019-10-28T22:28:00Z

My experience with burnout as a startup founder

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 want to fully share my story here and include some things I wish I’d done differently in the hope that this can help anyone else experiencing burnout.

How it began: A year of change, stress, and loss

Looking back, the lead-up to my burnout goes back to the end of 2015. My co-founder and I were growing apart on our vision for Buffer’s future, which continued throughout 2016 despite several in-person meetings where we tried to find common ground. In mid-2016, financial challenges resulted in layoffs at Buffer and in early-2017, Buffer’s co-founder and CTO both left the company.

It was a whole lot of change, stress, and loss in a short space of time. Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, has said “you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years” and it sure felt that way.

Beyond the work stress, my partner Jess and I were having challenges in our relationship, too. With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize both Jess and I had a lot of external stressors at the time that clouded everything and made us negative, stubborn and heavy. I’m happy to say we got through it and recently got married.

Adrenaline was carrying me through

Throughout all of this, I can look back and see that while I was exercising and keeping myself in good shape, as well as feeling optimistic about the future of Buffer, it was adrenaline that was carrying me forward. I knew I needed to get the company through this major transition period. I cared so much about Buffer and about everyone, and nothing was going to stop me from solving it.

I remember, for example, speaking individually with every person in the company over one-on-one video calls about my co-founder and CTO leaving in the two weeks after those changes took place. I spoke with more than 80 people individually. I had the adrenaline and drive to do that, and it was such a good decision.

We also had a whole company retreat shortly afterward. This was a hugely important moment for me to be able to talk to the team in person and explain all the events of the prior year. I had to restore the team’s confidence in Buffer after all the changes and also just connect with people. It took a lot of energy.
Speaking at an event during our first team retreat following the team departures at Buffer. I didn’t know it then, but I was running on adrenaline.

By the spring of 2017, the company felt much more stable. As soon as the adrenaline subsided my body, and mind, suddenly realized everything I’d gone through. That’s when the burnout really hit me. The adrenaline had been masking things.

‘I had nothing left’

This is how I’d describe my experience of burnout: I lost motivation. I just didn’t care. I knew I cared deeply, but I had nothing left. I couldn’t get up in the morning. I felt very sensitive and emotional. It was like anything could set me off, and make me well up. I cried a lot, by myself and with people close to me.

To share a journal entry I made from that time: “I’m feeling this general dull sadness or struggle in me.” And another: “Everything feels harder, and I’m generally feeling a cloud over me and more low in energy and pessimistic than usual.”

I knew I needed to do something because in my burnt-out state I couldn’t lead the company. Eventually, through a lot of extremely kind support from my leadership team, I decided to take a break from Buffer. I wrote a memo to the team sharing my plans and delegating responsibilities, then I signed out of Slack and almost immediately started taking leave.

I didn’t plan anything specific for my time off, and I didn’t even have a specific date that I planned to be back. I just wanted to return when I knew I was in a better state emotionally and mentally.

How I recharged on my break

The first few days, I did nothing. I woke up late, I watched YouTube, I went climbing with a friend, I went on long walks. I don’t think it would have helped for me to make any bigger plans. And this is how it was for a few weeks. I started to exercise a lot, too, because I had all the time in the world. My spirits started to rise and I eventually did actually make some plans. I chose to go to the Dominican Republic for a week and learn to kitesurf.

Sometimes people ask me how I resisted checking in on the company. The answer is that I was so drained and unmotivated that it didn’t enter my mind. I had delegated responsibilities, and I had full trust in my team.

This break is also the time that I started meeting with a therapist – something I had initially been resistant and a bit skeptical about. Huge thanks to Hiten Shah for his recommendation and kindness on this topic. Regularly getting therapy is something I cannot recommend highly enough. To this day, I still meet with my therapist every three weeks.

About three to four weeks into my break, I felt much better. I felt lighter. I got my energy and motivation and excitement for Buffer back again. I vowed to be better about self-care, and have made changes that I believe have significantly improved my self-care routine. I believe the burnout I went through is avoidable – and hopefully, this can help anyone who may feel like they’re potentially on the verge.
Fully recovered at our last team retreat in San Diego this spring!

Preventing burnout: My biggest lessons

One of my biggest takeaways was the importance of perspective and taking a break. We’re lucky at Buffer to have people in their sixth, even seventh year at the company. After so long working on something, especially with the intensity of a startup, it’s natural for there to be a build-up and dip in motivation. I believe we all need a reset every five years or so.

As a company, one of the things we’ve done to prevent burnout is put in place a true sabbatical policy at Buffer.

No matter what kind of company you work for, there are some simple things you can do as an individual that I would recommend to help prevent burnout.

Create a habit of disconnecting and taking one true vacation each year. This is really important preventative work; it’s very easy to never take a true vacation.
Have a hobby that gets you to disconnect. A key turning point in my burnout recovery was rediscovering the hobbies that I enjoyed doing before Buffer, like skiing, surfing, hiking, and mountain biking. I recommend finding things you can progress on and feel an achievement from that aren’t work.
Get a therapist or coach, even if you don’t feel like you need one or you’ve never done it before. From my experience, it’s better to have those relationships already established than to be at a low point and then be searching for a therapist or coach on top of everything else.
Finally, if you are feeling burnt out and are thinking about taking time off, do it without plans. If you feel like you should have some big sabbatical plans, it may only add more stress to a time where you’re very sensitive.

Burnout can happen to anyone

If you haven’t experienced burnout and you don’t know what it is, it’s very easy to believe it could never happen to you – especially if you’re earlier in your career.

I hope sharing my story here – including all the things I wish I’d done differently – can help others who might be close to or actively experiencing burnout. I truly believe that if you take the time to recover from burnout, you can come back stronger than ever.

Buffer’s evolution and expansion

2019-08-20T22:58:00Z

Buffer’s evolution and expansion

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 journey. I described Buffer’s multi-product vision of the future, which included Reply and Analyze. This idea was such a huge vision and change for us as a company, and it’s taken a few years to fulfill it. But now, looking back the vision in that blog post, it’s our current reality at Buffer.

We’re now a fundamentally different company. While we’ve traditionally been solely in the social media space, now that we have three products we are expanding into brand building.

Buffer is here to help the new and most innovative companies being started today********build their brands.

Building a brand is one of the most important and one of the hardest things for growing an early company. We believe there’s a unique combination of circumstances and new technology that will bring about significant change in the creation of the best new brands of the next 10 years.

We believe that creating a brand today involves being an active participant in your community and your customers’ lives. You share interesting content to build connections and you actively and promptly respond in order to solidify those connections and create loyal champions for your product and company. You need a way to easily measure your progress and know what actions to take and adjustments to make to your strategy.

With this shift in our direction in mind, we publicly launched Analyze just this month, which brings us to three products: Publish, Reply and Analyze. This step has been monumental as we went from a company with just one product to having three fully built products. In the time since that original blog post, we’ve also rebuilt our codebase, refreshed the branding for the Buffer websites and products, and we’ve released several new features (like Shop Grid and Hashtag Manager) to continue to help our customers build their audiences and grow their brand on social media.

Back when I was writing that post, our multi-product vision was a big bet and investment for us, and we had no idea that it would work out. At the time, we moved around our engineering teams and resources so that our teammates were split evenly between the three products, even though one of those products didn’t exist yet and the other was making very little revenue. That left our most profitable and core product, Publish, to be run by only a third of our engineering team.

This structure shifted the company, but as you can see in this chart, it’s been paying off. And in part thanks to this strategy, we recently surpassed $20 Million in ARR, a significant milestone in the SaaS world.
MRR over timeMRR over time by product
While Reply was initially a very small part of Buffer’s overall revenue, it now makes up 2.9% of all of our revenue. Similarly, with Analyze, we had our first paying customer February 2018, and now we have over 1085 paying subscribers and Analyze makes up 2.8% of Buffer’s total revenue.

Buffer is also still fewer than 90 people, and our revenue per team member is especially meaningful in all of this. Currently, our revenue is $244,215 per teammate. Often in the tech industry, companies with $20m in revenue will have hundreds of employees and north of $30m in funding. Buffer, on the other hand, has had under $4 million in funding, and we even spent $3.3 million of accumulated profits to buy out a majority of our Series A investors. Given all of this, I’m very proud of how our team has achieved the $20 million milestone and managed to keep our freedom to do things the way we’d like to in the future as well.

Reflecting on our journey to get here, we started out very focused. The first version of Buffer helped people schedule to Twitter, and after that, we expanded out. It’s in the expanding out that it’s easy for companies to become less focused because you want to grow and customers start asking for more things. When this happens if you’re not careful, then your customers form your roadmap and take it in many different directions instead of one unified direction.

This happened to us at Buffer for a few years and I didn’t want it to happen again. As a result, we’ve also put a lot of energy into determining our target customer as a company this past year. Having a specific target customer has allowed our team to become so much more focused. It’s also allowed us to serve our community better. In a way, it’s a tool that we think will allow us to keep growing as a company and as a set of products. We’d rather try and be truly great for one type of customer and build a high-quality product for that customer, instead of becoming a company that expands in all directions and becomes lower quality all around. Our target customer is now helping us determine the vision for each of our products and Buffer as a whole.

During these times of change and larger shifts as a company, there likely is some disruption and change for our customers as well. We want to be mindful that some of these changes may feel frustrating and be a departure from past, better, experiences.

As we transform into a multi-product company, it becomes harder for customer service team members to provide great service. We are adjusting our processes and structure to excel in the new multi-product world and we’re making these changes in order to be able to reach and maintain high standards for product quality and customer service in the long term.

We’ve committed to the end result of this expansion being a more flexible platform and a great product and customer experience.

What’s next

We’ve done a lot of work behind-the-scenes with our infrastructure in the past few years. These projects haven’t been exciting for customers in the short term but set us up to iterate faster in the future. We’ve expressly set Buffer up so that we can continue to expand in the future.

While we don’t have a fourth product in the works right now, we’ve created a strong foundation for ourselves, and we’ll be keeping an eye on the things our target customers are looking at to determine the area we should grow into next.

The shift over the past few years has turned Buffer into a company with multiple products and as a result, multiple revenue streams. Having several revenue streams is setting us up to be a more sustainable, profitable, and long-term company. It means we can continue to be here for our customers and have the ability to make bets on what will be the most valuable to them. We’re excited to continue helping our customers build their audiences and grow their brands.

Thank you for being on this journey with us!

Bright & Early Podcast with Brian Rhea

2019-02-19T12:00:00Z

Bright & Early Podcast with Brian Rhea

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brian Rhea on the Bright & Early podcast. Listen above, and see more details here.

The Heartbeat Podcast with Claire Lew

2019-01-17T16:45:00Z

The Heartbeat Podcast with Claire Lew

I recently the pleasure of being interviewed on the Heartbeat Podcast by Claire Lew. Listen above, and check out the full transcript.

We spent $3.3M buying out investors: Why and how we did it

2018-09-10T23:23:00Z

We spent $3.3M buying out investors- Why and how we did it

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 out our main venture capital (VC) investors.

Starting the conversations, negotiations, and process of this buy out was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in the Buffer journey so far, and it was the culmination of more than a year of work. This is a key inflection point for Buffer that puts us truly on a path of sustainable, long-term growth.

Here is the full journey of how we decided on this path for the company, including all the details and numbers involved in carrying out a stock buyback of seven of our sixteen Series A investors.

Buffer’s funding history

Here is a summary of funding raised for Buffer since we started in 2010:

October 2010: Buffer was born and initially bootstrapped through revenues
August 2011: Buffer was accepted into AngelPad startup accelerator, with initial $120,000 investment
December 2011: Buffer raised a small seed round of $330,000, to bring total funding to $450,000
December 2014: Buffer raised Series A of $3.5 million, to bring total funding to $3.95 million
July 2018: Buffer bought out main Series A investors (investors representing $2.3 million of the $3.5 million raised)

In general, we’ve taken the approach of being profitable and having decent revenue at the time of raising funds. As a result, we’ve been able to raise funding on good terms and keep a fair amount of control. Following each round, we eventually dipped into negative cashflow as a result of accelerated hiring but always had a manageable plan to get us back to profitability.

Finding and working with a non-traditional VC

Back in 2014 when we raised our Series A, my co-founder and I had the objective to put together an atypical round. As mentioned in our funding announcement, there were several things that made our Series A different from a traditional startup Series A:

Raising a relatively small amount ($3.5 million in funding when doing $4.6 million in annual revenue)
Not giving up the usual 20–30 percent of the company (we raised $3.5 million at a $60 million valuation, giving up 6.2 percent)
Not giving up control (no investor board seat)
Taking liquidity to de-risk and go long ($2.5m of $3.5m was for founders and early team)
Not being boxed in to an IPO five to seven years from raising funding

In our search for a unique investor happy with our conditions, we found Collaborative Fund, and they agreed to lead our Series A funding by putting in 60 percent of the funds. With them as our lead, we found other investors who also approached things differently and we were very proud of the outcome.

At the time of the Series A, we felt on top of the world. We had around $4.6 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) and were growing revenues around 150 percent per year. We were at a point where we felt like we could “have it all,” and in many ways we did: we got the VC funding at the ideal terms, we kept control, we took some liquidity, and we continued to operate with full transparency and as a fully remote team. Based on our growth rate, we didn’t foresee any problem in giving a great return to Series A investors and were very excited to make a few bigger bets to see where we could take Buffer.

Although our goal was to see that growth trend continue, we shared openly that we may not want to raise further funding, sell the company, or IPO. We were transparent that we wanted to be able to keep questioning the way things are done. Specifically, we communicated that we wanted the option to be able to give a return via distributions, not an exit.

Collaborative Fund suggested that we account for these various paths within the structure of the Series A funding. We added downside protection for the Series A investors, in the form of a right to claim a return of 9 percent annual interest on their investment at any point starting five years after the initial investment. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how important this clause would become. Even our legal counsel commented that this was not something he saw too often.

The evolution of Buffer and our fit with VC funding

Buffer has had an interesting and somewhat rocky few years since that Series A funding. In mid–2015, in an effort to keep our growth rates high and comparable to startups with much more funding, we grew the team rapidly and tried to increase our pace of product development. We found ourselves with financial struggles after growing expenses without results following quickly enough. The rate at which our bank balance was decreasing made us realize that we didn’t have a proper grasp of our financials. Our financial situation presented a key turning point for us: Would we solve this by raising more funding or by cutting expenditures? In one of my most excruciating decisions, we chose to solve the situation without outside funds and did a round of layoffs to become profitable.

After making these tough decisions and changing some fundamental internal operations, we became profitable within a few months. While profitability was exciting, our growth rate suffered. Within the leadership team we started to discuss what growth rate we wanted to achieve. Whereas in the past we’d “had it all” and achieved growth alongside creating a unique culture with a fully remote team and high levels of transparency, it now started to feel like we had to choose between those things. It was suggested that some of the fundamentals that I had come to value could be removed to create a productivity environment that would increase the growth rate. I refused to compromise on the transparency and remote work aspects of our culture, so we started to explore slower growth goals, and what that would mean for the future of Buffer. Ultimately, my co-founder Leo and our CTO Sunil left the company in early 2017 based around this foundational vision decision.
Our efforts to become profitable to break out of financial struggles, compared with our growth rate decreasing over time.
As a result of the tumultuous events of layoffs, leadership misalignment and eventual departures, I was noticing a breakdown in some of our core values and what made us special and different. To me, these were fundamental values that shape not only how Buffer feels, but also how we perform. I decided to dig in, make some changes and grow back the trust of the team.

Those adjustments were not easy. Alongside growing our profitability and becoming sustainable for the long-term, I also had to figure out how my role would be different without my co-founder, and how to effectively manage the leadership team alone. It has been completely worth it, because we accomplished this all while staying true to our core values and unique ways of working. We opted for calm company growth that allows team members to bond and have time to become productive, rather than having a large portion of the team be completely new to Buffer. We became very profitable and started to work on longer-term projects to diversify our product offerings and revenue sources. This was in contrast to the more traditional venture-backed startup path of having a burn rate and relying on continual rounds of funding with the goal to maximize growth rate above all else. We could have hired outside senior leadership, grown the team considerably and pushed for hyper growth, but I believed that it was not the best path for Buffer.

As the months passed and we made progress towards long-term sustainability, our net profit margin grew from months of losses to 7 percent to consistently exceeding 25 percent. We started to have months where we had profit of $300,000 to $500,000 and the bank balance started to grow rapidly. The challenge with this, though, was that our growth rate had decreased. This was a trade-off I was willing to make. Naturally, the decreased growth rate, combined with my co-founder leaving, began some challenging conversations with Collaborative Fund. Buffer was not on a traditional venture-funded path anymore, and I have full empathy for how this made us less interesting in the eyes of our lead investor.

In the first half of 2017 I had a number of conversations with Collaborative Fund. They were around two years into their investment, and given Buffer’s refocused path of sustainable growth, the topic of the previously mentioned 9 percent return downside protection naturally arose. The downside protection offered a time-frame and guarantee of returns. While discussing this further, I was taken aback when I was asked whether I would step down as CEO in the event that Buffer could not afford the 9 percent annual return. Although it may be a reasonable question from a pure business perspective, and I was confident we’d be able to deliver, it shocked me to my core. The level of communication we once had started to break down after that and it triggered much reflection and some sleepless nights for me.

Why we chose to buy out our main VC investors

By late 2017, it was clear that Buffer had become less of a fit for VC funding. Month by month we increased our financial sustainability by growing our profit margin. We also worked hard to create and promote a culture where team members could enjoy their work for years without leading to burnout.

With healthy profits leading to our bank balance growing from $2 million to over $5 million, we could see that we were on a path towards being able to afford the 9 percent downside protection return for our Series A investors. By this point, our seed investors had been supporting the company for almost six years, and several were starting to ask when they may get a return.

The Series A class of shares included a protective provision which meant that Buffer was unable to offer liquidity for other shareholders (seed or common) without approval from a majority of the Series A. In order to get Buffer into a situation where we could more freely offer liquidity to early investors and team members, we knew that the first step would be to buy out the Series A investors and adjust this protective provision.

By moving ahead with a stock buyback for our Series A investors, we would be able to unlock this ability to give other shareholders a return, and we would put the company squarely on a path of long-term sustainability. I believe that the market is still wide open for Buffer to continue to grow, and I’ve fallen in love with the way we work and the incredible team and customers I get to work with. I began to pursue buying out our VC investors in earnest.

How we prepared for and carried out a stock buyback

The first key step in working towards buying out our main VC investors was to build up the cash reserves to make it possible. One way we did this was to ensure that our revenue growth rate exceeded our rate of hiring. Next, I reached back out to Collaborative Fund, and a couple of other key investors in our Series A, about the downside protection. I initiated the discussions and then handed this over to our Director of Finance, Caryn Hubbard.

Caryn did a great job of having productive conversations with investors and gradually converging with them on a deal that everyone could agree to. Our finalized terms were very close to the pre-determined 9 percent return included in the Series A terms. We moved the date forward and proposed that we could offer this return three-and-a-half years into their investment rather than after five years.

As part of the transaction, we also amended the protective provisions of the Series A shares to allow Buffer to have the ability in the future to offer liquidity to seed investors and common shareholders (mostly early team members). In order to achieve this, there were specific thresholds of approval we needed from each set of shareholders:

Approval from 60 percent of Series A shareholders
Approval from 50 percent of Preferred shareholders (combination of Series A and Seed investors)
Approval from 50 percent of All shareholders (including Common)

This took some delicate communication and investor relations work, which Caryn and I worked on together. Overall, it was straightforward to achieve these approvals once we explained our reasons for moving ahead with this stock buyback and the possibilities it would open up for the future. As I personally own over 45 percent of stock, meeting the final threshold of approval was simple once we had our investors on board.

Caryn worked closely with our legal counsel to put together the documents for these approvals, and to ensure we had considered every angle. The stock buyback was set up as a tender offer and followed specific tender offer rules. A key concept is that every shareholder receives the same information in order to make their decision on whether to sell shares.

With that, we started the stock buyback process. We gave every Series A shareholder the option to sell their shares at the agreed return. The resulting valuation was $80.8 million, representing a 40.5 percent return over three-and-a-half years.

All investors had a twenty-day period to make their decision on whether to sell, as part of the tender offer. Once we had all the responses back from investors, we processed the transactions (our biggest ever wire transfers!) and our legal counsel completed the transaction by transferring the stock certificates.

The impact of buying out Series A investors

Our two main VCs made up 60 percent of Series A shares. Beyond that, five more investors chose to sell their shares for a total of 67.29 percent of Series A shares bought back by the company.

Now that the stock buyback is complete, the ownership of Buffer has changed somewhat. The Series A investors now hold 2.65 percent of outstanding shares, and those with Common or Seed shares saw an ownership increase of ~5 percent.

Note: these charts don’t include our employee stock option pool. All team members at Buffer have stock options and, as they are exercised, other outstanding shares are diluted. Currently, a further 10 percent of Buffer is allocated to stock options.

The impact of the buyback on our bank balance was $3.3 million. Our balance after the transaction remained healthy at over $4 million. Our net profit has continued to be around $400,000 to $500,000 per month and we have already surpassed $5 million in the bank. If you’d like to follow along with our quarterly transparency reports with more of our financial information, they are available here.

Thanks for reading

We have been very happy to give investors a return and also create better alignment within our shareholder base towards the path we are on. I’m grateful that many Series A investors, especially angel investors from the seed round, chose to stay on board for the journey ahead. We will be considering stock buyback opportunities in the future, as well as alternative sources of funds, in order to provide liquidity for other investors and team members.

I’m confident that the small business market is still wide open for Buffer to continue to grow, and I’m committed to continuing to build great products our customers love and cultivate a workplace culture of trust, freedom and flexibility. These are the things that drive me and form my deeper personal purpose. This stock buyback is another step in the right direction that signifies to me that this will be a very long-term endeavor. Now, more clearly than ever, we have the privilege to continue thanks to the revenues from our paying customers.

I truly believe that we should be talking more about these topics as an industry, and I hope our experience can be useful to those who may be considering a similar path.

My morning routine as a remote CEO and why it’s always changing

2018-05-21T23:08:00Z

My morning routine as a remote CEO and why it’s always changing

Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog.

Working remotely and having the opportunity to work from home, coffee shops, coworking spaces, or wherever else I might feel the most productive, means that I can design my own mornings because they don’t necessarily need to be spent commuting.

I’ve gone through many different morning routines over the years, and I don’t believe there is one perfect routine for everyone or even just for me. My morning routine is constantly changing and evolving.

So many times I’ve gotten my morning routine into a really great place, and then suddenly something happens like I take a trip, and my whole morning routine is entirely thrown off. Once I’m back in my regular location and trying to keep working on my morning routine, I’ve found that I can’t jump back into the place it was previously I know I need to slowly build it back up. Often times I’ll go to the gym and do just one exercise to kickstart it again.

A little while ago I had the chance to do an interview about my routine with the folks over at My Morning Routine detailing not only my routine but my philosophy around how often it should change and what I do when I fail at my routine. Here’s an excerpt from my interview, the full interview is over here in this blog post and for more morning routines they have a book full of them.

What is your morning routine?

I try to make sure I get at least 7.5 hours of sleep. Sleep is important! Right now, I wake around 6:30 am and drink 500ml of water as soon after getting up as I can. I quickly check company emails for any emergencies, and then most days I do 30 minutes of cardio (swimming or running) and then 10 minutes in the sauna. Then I have a simple breakfast, before starting work. This gives me the best start I’ve found for my day, gets the endorphins going, and makes me feel refreshed and ready to make progress. I know my morning routine won’t stay this way forever, though.

How has your morning routine changed over recent years, and are you currently experimenting with adding or removing anything from your routine?

It’s always changing, and I believe that should be the case. Routines are powerful when they become rituals that no longer require conscious thought and willpower. However, without iteration, they can become stale and can be hard to keep up.

In the last few years, changes I’ve made have been to bring exercise earlier in the day, and make it a top daily priority. I’ve also recently developed the habit of drinking a significant amount of water early in the morning: usually one liter by 10:30am.

Do you do anything before going to bed to make your morning easier?

I prepare my exercise clothes or swimming gear, to make that zero effort. I put my phone on to charge on the opposite side of the room so it isn’t the first thing I have within reach when I awake. I have 30 minutes of reading time on my Kindle to wind down from bright screens and give myself the best possible sleep. Most nights I journal to get thoughts and challenges from the day out of my mind and processed.

Do you answer email first thing in the morning or leave it until later in the day?

I generally check email for anything urgent, but I very rarely answer emails first thing. There are more important tasks I want to put my freshness and a full tank of willpower into.

How soon do you check your phone in the morning?

I check it immediately for any urgent email and then don’t check it again until after exercise. During breakfast, I often use it to catch up on social media and read articles using Pocket, which I then add to Buffer to post interesting articles and my comments to social media.

What are your most important tasks in the morning?

It depends on the day. I generally theme my days. Some are focused on managing and supporting my awesome executive team. Other days I’m working on the product, putting together documents for strategy and process improvement or digging into customer research or product metrics to find opportunities. Once a week I have “deep work Wednesday”, where I aim to have little to no meetings, and use lengths of unscheduled time to read and reflect on high-level vision and strategy.

On days you’re not settled in your home, are you able to adapt your routine to fit in with a different environment?

I know that the routine will be harder when I am in a new location and environment. I strive for the core pillars of good sleep, exercise, and water first thing, and don’t try to achieve the same full routine I have when I have had several weeks to build up the consistency.

What do you do if you fail to follow your morning routine, and how does this influence the rest of your day?

I used to allow failing an aspect of my routine to negatively impact my whole day. I now see life as a continual fluctuation of routine. There is no constant but change, so if I fail, I know that I need to take away one or two layers of my routine, and get back to the basic pillars: good sleep, a mindful start, exercise, and water. If I fail, or I’m building back routine after some time away, I will do a quarter mile of swimming instead of a mile, or do 10 minutes of running instead of 30. The key is to do each element, even to a tiny degree. Once each aspect is minimally in place, I can build on it further.

I am an investor in 9 companies: How and why I started angel investing

2018-02-19T19:56:55Z

I am an investor in 9 companies- How and why I started angel investing

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 page). So here we are.

The first investment I made was in Kate Kendall and CloudPeeps. I became an advisor to CloudPeeps fairly organically, having known Kate for many years in the industry. Being an advisor, I had a chance to chat regularly and get to know Kate. I loved the product and her approach, especially the culture and community she was carefully crafting.

Then in December 2014, I got some liquidity by selling a small number of Buffer shares in a funding round, and so I was in a position where I could invest. The timing was perfect, as CloudPeeps were fundraising and I had been advising and making introductions to help with that.

I invested $10k in CloudPeeps, and since then have gone on to invest in 8 more companies.

How I think about the financial risk and opportunity of angel investing

It’s now over 3 years since I made my first investment in a startup company, and I’m yet to see any kind of return what-so-ever. I think it’s worth noting that investing in early stage companies is one of the riskiest forms of investment that you could make.

When I took liquidity in our Series A funding, I knew that I had the option to make some investments. I didn’t know much at all about investing my money. I never had a large amount of savings growing up and so it was never something I needed to know about. When I got the liquidity, I gradually educated myself about the various types of investments I could make, and I also started making my first investments in startups.

I think about ways to invest on a spectrum:

Low-medium risk: 401k / bonds
Medium-high risk: stock market
Very high risk: cryptocurrency / startup investment

While cryptocurrency has massive volatility, what makes investing in startups even more risky is that the investment is totally non-liquid. You can’t take your money out by choice at any time, you are tied to the trajectory of the company and the decisions of the founders.

It’s a well known fact that most new companies fail. Investing at the very early stages of a company, is certainly high risk high reward. It’s most likely that the company fails, but if it succeeds then the return could be high, because the investment will have been made when the company is very small.

I made a decision that I need to be comfortable losing all the money I invest into startups. This shaped my investment methodology. I am using other investment methods to try to grow my wealth. Angel investing is as much for personal fulfillment and what I want to contribute, as it is a way for me to make large financial returns.

Making investments for my own personal fulfillment

Since the earlier days of being an entrepreneur, I always had a dream that I’d like to one day help others through both advice and investment. One of the mindsets that has helped me to work through some of the tougher moments has been knowing that I can help other founders with those very issues.

I’ve also learned over time that helping others is one of the things that brings me the most happiness. I saw investing in startups as a new way to help others, with not just the financial investment but by being available as an advisor to portfolio companies.

And through my investments I am able to be involved in the early stages of companies again, something which I love. Buffer is now 7.5 years old, 70+ people and doing over $17m per year in revenue. It’s a very exciting time for us, but definitely a little different from the earliest stages.

Trying to make a small positive impact with my investments

Something I’m passionate about with Buffer and as a personal philosophy, is to try to make positive changes in the industry through the work I do. With Buffer, this is through the product and the way we operate the company. We believe that we have the opportunity and the potential to push forward how companies are run for the better.

One key example of this within Buffer is remote working. We have a fully distributed team, and this means that everyone in the company has much more freedom than they would in an ordinary organization. Team members can move for their own fulfillment or for the needs they have. Some team members have been able to travel a lot, others have had the comfort in being able to move across the country or the world for their spouse’s career. And some are able to work in their home country, where they would otherwise need to move away to make a better salary for their family.

Other examples of our efforts to contribute to a better future are through our transparency (making all of our finances, salaries and more transparent), and we also recently made our first charitable contributions as a company.

I’ve also been inspired by Clif Bar and Patagonia, whose founders have shared the idea that when we make an investment in something, be it with our time or with funds, we should challenge ourselves to think beyond desiring a financial return on investment.

At the end of the year I want to look at our balance sheet and see that we were good stewards of our business—a company that we are preparing for a long-term future. We choose how we define shareholder value, and we include product integrity, our people, the community, and the earth in the balance sheets. - Gary Erickson, Clif Bar

The return on an investment can be in the form of a resulting meaningful contribution to society or a community, through the investment helping to solve inequality, or by helping to solve environmental issues.

By making investments in startups, I am able to make a small impact on other companies too. I can help founders think through less usual and more impactful ways of running their company. I can be an investor who advocates for companies not just generating a financial return but also doing good in the world.

Helping founders achieve freedom and a maintain healthy mental wellbeing

Something I believe is not talked about or written about enough, is the toll that building a company can take on you as an individual. I’ve been through some very dark periods with Buffer, and I’ve hit some real lows along the way. I’ve been lucky to have a very caring team and family, and to be in a position where I was able to get help too. Working through challenges in this way has allowed me to have a much more balanced and healthy mindset to growing Buffer.

Unfortunately, I believe that as much as investors often try to be advocates of founders speaking up and sharing their challenges, often they are an additional burden in difficult times. Many investors don’t take a long-term approach that allows them to believe that helping a founder through hard times will ultimately give the best return.

All too often, I’ve also seen founders become constrained and lose freedom as their companies grow. They may have grown their company to several million dollars a year in revenue, and created fulfilling jobs for dozens of people, but they are overworked, and when they reach life milestones such as having a child, struggle to have time or take money out of the business to afford a better home.

I believe founders deserve better, and investors should support freedom and making a financial return along the way. I am a big proponent on founders maintaining freedom for themselves and their team, and taking a longer term sustainable approach to startup liquidity, instead of sacrificing health, finances and relationships for some hypothetical future exit.

With Buffer, I’ve been lucky to see a few different sides of startup investment. We have both angel investors and venture capital firms who have invested in Buffer, and I’ve seen a variety of styles with which people choose to operate. By being an investor, I can be a voice at the table of companies, to push for care around these issues and to provide balance compared to more traditional approaches. I’ve decided that beyond obvious bad behavior, I will always be on the founders’ side.

My process for making investments

Some angel investors have had a large exit with a previous startup, or had some other event which has put them in a position of a lot of wealth. I haven’t sold Buffer, and have no plans to anytime soon. By selling a portion of my shares, I’ve been able to get some liquidity, however I don’t have the level of wealth that other angel investors may have. In addition, since I am still running Buffer full-time, I also don’t have a lot of time to put into my angel investing activities.

Therefore, my process for making angel investments is more hobby than professional, and one optimized for the little time I have to invest. One way I have made things easier for myself is that I have, so far, always invested $10k. This is a hard and fast rule I have given to myself and communicate with companies I am in discussions with.

I am aware from my own experiences, that $10k doesn’t go too far for a startup and that it may not be desirable to have a small investor take up another slot on the cap table. I have found that with the ups and downs I’ve been through, many founders are excited to have me on board and get the additional advice beyond my investment. I feel lucky to be able to invest in the companies that will have me, and I will not be disappointed if I am turned down for being too small of an investor.

While I don’t have a lot of time to do extensive analysis, or treat my investments as a professional endeavor, I enjoy talking with founders and helping to solve problems. I therefore make time to be able to get on a call, or answer emails for founders.

Another decision which I’ve so far made, is that I will generally always do follow-on investment, when I can. If I can afford it, I will double down my investment when I get a chance in future rounds. My thought process on this is that since most companies fail, the ones that go on to raise more funding are more likely to be gaining success (this is definitely not a completely water-tight correlation, but I think it works well enough). This allows me to maintain my equity stake in a company as it raises more funding and I would otherwise be diluted.

My startup investment portfolio and timeline

I made my first angel investment in December 2014, and my last one in August 2016. Here’s the full timeline and my portfolio:

Dec 2014 - CloudPeeps
Jan 2015 - First Code Academy
Feb 2015 - inDinero
Apr 2015 - Conversio
Jun 2015 - HappyMed
Aug 2015 - Crew (now Unsplash)
Nov 2015 - Outsite
Apr 2016 - CloudApp
Aug 2016 - Akkroo

I invested $10k in all of these companies except for a couple which were in Euros and Pounds, where I invested a little more to make it 10k in the corresponding currency.

You may notice that I made all my investments in a 1.5 year period, and I’ve not made any in the last 1.5 years. There are a few key reasons for this. In Summer 2016, we had cashflow issues at Buffer, and as part of working through it I voluntarily reduced my salary by 40% until early 2017. This was a key reason I stopped making further investments.

In 2017, we had a number of big changes at Buffer, including my co-founder and our CTO leaving the company. I got heads down to help the company through the transition and I also made a decision to invest $250k of my own money into buying Buffer stock and providing liquidity to a couple of former team members. This has put my angel investing activities on hold for the time being.

Looking ahead

Although I have been in a holding pattern in terms of making further startup investments, I’ve very much enjoyed being an active angel investor so far. It’s been fun to be an active part of the founders’ journeys. I have so much more to learn to become a better startup investor and advisor, and I’m excited to continue this journey further. One of the key things I’ve taken away from this process is that if you don’t know much about something, one of the best ways to learn is to dive in and start doing it.

I have been lucky to have success with some of my other types of investments, and Buffer is doing great right now, so I think I will soon consider becoming more active in advising and making further startup investments.

Photo credit: Vitaly

The next step in Buffer’s social media journey

2017-08-02T23:30:00Z

The next step in Buffer’s social media journey

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 up the very first version of Buffer as a tool to schedule tweets.

So much has changed since then: the Buffer product has evolved, the social networks themselves have matured, and social media managers have grown exponentially in skills and influence.

Today, I’m excited to share an early look at what we believe these changes will mean for Buffer. The progression with the jobs of social media managers has led us toward an exciting new vision for what we plan to do with the Buffer product.

Over the next few months, we will align Buffer with the social media manager’s workflow by turning Buffer into a platform of social media products.

The original Buffer will become Buffer Publish.
Our audience engagement tool (formerly known as Respond) will become Buffer Reply.
We will launch Buffer Analyze for social media insights.

I’d love to share with you more about how we arrived at this vision, provide details of what we know so far, and hear your thoughts on this new direction for Buffer.

(Here’s a sneak preview of the future Buffer dashboard. Feel free to click in order to enlarge and explore.)

How we believe customers flow through social media jobs

After conducting a months-long research project into social media jobs and speaking with dozens of Buffer users, we began to form some hypotheses about the typical journey a Buffer customer takes. I’ve described it below and would love to hear if it resonates with you.

Overall, the journey begins with Publishing.

A customer will have a small business, maybe it’s even just them running their business alone. Perhaps they’re a coach, photographer, or personal trainer. The primary job at this stage is to have a consistent presence on social media.

Once the customer gets comfortable with Publishing, they begin to see results such as growing their following and receiving more mentions, replies, and interactions. This is when they look to handling this new Engagement that they are generating through publishing.

To begin with, they might make do using the social networks themselves or a single-network tool like Tweetdeck. Eventually, they’ll need a tool truly built for the task.

Once they have a fully running social media strategy with Publishing and Engagement, they will want to know how this strategy is performing. At this point, the customer has started to invest real funds into social media: both in terms of tools and with full-time salaries. This is the natural point at which they’ll start to seek an understanding of the performance of their strategy. As a result, they’ll need an Analytics solution that can help them understand what they’re doing on social and the results they’re obtaining.

Around a similar time as the need for Analytics, a customer will start to explore spending on Ads in order to gain a wider reach and to target specific audiences.

By far, the key reason we saw customers leaving Buffer over the last year was because we didn’t adequately fulfill********jobs beyond publishing — specifically engagement and analytics.

With our new product vision, our goal is to enable our customers to grow with Buffer and help them execute their social media strategy from start to finish.

We know that social media has matured far beyond being a place to broadcast content, and we believe consistent and authentic engagement with people on social media is as important as ever. In 2016, we acquired Respond (now Buffer Reply) to help us down this path. However, until now, it has been kept mostly separate from our other social media tools.

We’ve also learned that the value of creating content on social media is greatly amplified if you can truly understand how people interact with it. While we have made some great strides with the social analytics we provide, there is much, much more we can do.

Thanks to conversations with our customers and the social media marketing community, we learned that our product vision needs to evolve, and we’re excited about our vision to do just that.

The vision: A platform of products

The first step we are taking is evolving Buffer into a platform, with multiple products available in one centralized location. We’re thinking of it as a suite of tools, each sharing the characteristics that we hold dear at Buffer:

Simplicity: Carefully-chosen features and a refined, robust experience.
Empathy: Being accessible to all people, and offering real, human support.
Authenticity: Each tool should enable you to amplify your own, authentic voice on social media.

This is the family of tools we are working towards:

Buffer Publish
Create, schedule, and post your social media content with ease. This is the current version of Buffer you have come to know and love, and it will remain fully intact and as useful as ever. We will continue to include the current analytics.

Buffer Reply
Engage with your customers and audience from one streamlined inbox. Reply is available now, and you can start a trial here.

Buffer Analyze
Understand your performance on social with meaningful insights, beyond the analytics provided in Buffer Publish. Analyze is coming soon, and you can sign up for early access here. Analyze is now available to all!

At some point in the future, we’d also love to explore developing a Buffer Ads solution to help you manage your paid ads and sponsored content across the major social media platforms.

Here’s a bird’s-eye view of a potential way this could all function within the Buffer app in the future:

With this shift towards a suite of products, we also want to make it easier to pay only for what you need by allowing you to pick and choose the products that fit your stage of the social media journey. We haven’t made any changes to pricing yet and are eager to hear any thoughts or ideas you might have.

Thank you for the feedback so far

This is just the beginning, and we fully plan to keep evolving the functionality of these products as well as introducing new products to meet even more high-impact jobs for you.

Again, here’s a sneak preview of our new dashboard.

We would be thrilled if you’d like to help move us in the right direction. Feel free to Tweet me with any thoughts, or you can jump directly to our transparent product roadmap where we’re collecting feedback on these changes and more.

All thoughts are welcome. We couldn’t do this without you, and we’re as excited as ever to keep building, keep iterating, and keep making Buffer the very best it can be for social media marketers!

5 varieties of remote working in companies

2017-03-13T13:25:55Z

5 varieties of remote working in companies

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 accomplish our work.

Scaling remote working has been a challenge as the team has grown. Remote companies are still relatively rare, and therefore all of us who are choosing to have a remote-friendly culture, need to both:

work through the normal challenges of growing as a company and as a team
also put time into figuring out how remote can scale, where there is no real pre-existing playbook

One of the significant commitments we've made recently at Buffer, is to approach our company growth goals in a long-term fashion, staying true to our culture of remote working. This means we deliberately make time to try to scale remote working, even if this may at times feel it comes at the expense of short-term financial growth.

It is my belief that working to develop a great remote working culture is an investment that will pay dividends for decades to come. If we can make this work over the long-term, we set the company up for many significant advantages and great freedom for us as a team.

The levels of remote working

In my reflections, I came to the realization that remote working is a scale, and there are actually a number of different options along across spectrum from "not remote" to "fully distributed".

1. Not remote / office-based culture

Obviously at the far end of the spectrum we have what is today perhaps the most typical working environment for companies. In this model, you have your whole team in one or more offices.

This means that you typically have set down working hours (strict or loosely enforced). You will work from the office all day, and not have too much flexibility in your day, nor will you have the option to choose the work environment you enjoy and find yourself most productive within.

Of course, office-based environments are also awesome for a whole bunch of reasons. You more naturally have close bonds and friendships forming. You can whiteboard and brainstorm, which can be very productive. If you have people who are junior in their role, they can very readily and easily get help so they don't get stuck.

2. Office-based with a work-from-home option

Some companies which operate from a single office, have started to give team members the option to work from home one or more days per week. This is a great start, and perhaps a perfect way to start to experiment with a remote working culture.

This small degree of remote-friendliness will already test the culture and require a few key changes to how work is done within a team. For example, those days that team members are working from home, the team will need to mostly communicate through email, chat tools, or some other means than the face-to-face methods which can be relied on without thinking about it in an office environment.

One key challenge when you start to experiment with this setup will be avoiding the people who work from home feeling left out of discussions that lead to key decisions. When you have the majority of the team in one place and a few people not in the office, it's easy for those people to feel like second class citizens.

3. A remote team, in a single time zone

This is where this start to get more truly remote. In this category you'll have companies which are more truly remote. However, some remote companies still choose to have the team mostly in one time zone, or very few largely overlapping time zones.

This is a truly remote setup, so the way work is done certainly is different from a team based within an office. Text-based communication and collaboration tools will come in here.

At the same time, in this setup, you still have a lot of hours of overlap, if not full overlap, with everyone in the team. So at least you can rely on someone being available when you need to get work done. Therefore, a lot of the day-to-day work can still be done in a synchronous fashion and work well.

4. A world-wide remote team spread across numerous time zones

A step further is to have a team where everyone is spread across different time zones. This means that asynchronous collaboration becomes even more vital. You'll likely just have a few hours of overlap with other people in your team, and so this setup requires a little more structure to make communication and collaboration efficient.

Sometimes companies set up this way, will choose to concentrate certain roles in the same time zone. Other times, it will be a completely location-independent setup. In either case, you generally have team members staying permanently in their location, for a long duration of time. So you can at least have some consistency of the setup of each team, and can set up some forms of synchronous communication at the times of overlap.

The challenges with a fully remote setup like this are numerous, however there are also many benefits. One key one is around-the-clock coverage of customer support or engineering.

5. A fully distributed team with nomadic team members

The most extreme case of remote working, in my mind, is a fully remote team where some of the members of the team are nomadic and traveling.

Since Buffer's distributed team setup is based around our vision to create a workplace of the future, and also around our value to live and work smarter, this is the ultimate level I am currently striving for us to reach.

Currently, we see some challenges in reaching this level of freedom for team members, and a collaboration system that can be efficient with this setup. A key milestone I believe of this level will be that work continues regardless of people moving locations. Of course, moving to a new place can affect productivity and this is for people to be mindful about. However, I do believe there is a way that collaboration can happen, where aside from those productivity challenges, work can happen in the exact same way, regardless of location. This is what is needed to truly be able to work efficiently with nomadic people in the team.

I believe open source can be a great inspiration for the kind of asynchronous collaboration that is needed for this setup. Synchronous chat tools are problematic. At the same time, to cultivate culture and create bonds, synchronous chat tools and video calls can be effective here too. The key, it seems, is to separate "how work happens" from those synchronous communications.

Photo credit: ricardo

The power of company retreats: Thoughts after the 8th Buffer retreat

2017-03-09T17:40:30Z

The power of company retreats- Thoughts after the 8th Buffer retreat

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 Madrid, Spain. Here’s a quick history of retreat locations, timeline and size over time:

San Francisco & Lake Tahoe, U.S.A. (August 2013, 8 people)
Bangkok & Pattaya City, Thailand (November 2013, 10 people)
Cape Town, South Africa (April 2014, 16 people)
New York, U.S.A. (September 2014, 25 people)
Sydney, Australia (February 2015, 26 people)
Reykjavik, Iceland (July 2015, 31 people, 40+ with partners & family)
Hawaii, U.S.A (February 2016, 67 people, 90+ with partners & family)
Madrid, Spain (February 2017, 73 people, 100+ with partners & family)

It’s been a wild ride for us at Buffer, to this point where the regular company retreat is a very clear part of our culture. Each retreat has felt a little different, and the nature of the retreat evolves as the company grows and our vision and culture advances.

The purpose of a retreat, from a CEO perspective

As CEO of a 75 person remote team, I see the retreats as an essential part of the work we do together. I firmly believe that if we would operate the company without these regular face to face gatherings, we would be less effective and feel less connected.

When we were a team of less than 30 people, the retreats felt like they could be a productive day-to-day work time for us. A shift towards working together, but continuing with the projects we happened to be working on. In addition, when we were smaller, we would do the retreats more regularly (around every 4–7 months). By doing them more frequently, and having a smaller team, the retreat itself was not as much of a monumental event, because it would come around again quite fast. Today, we do it less frequently: this retreat was 1 year after our last one in Hawaii.

As a result, today our retreats serve less of a purpose of immediate productivity, and are more geared towards long-term productivity and meaningful connectedness of the team. We focus all of our sessions throughout the week on brainstorms and higher level discussions that will have an impact for months going forward.

As CEO, I find that beyond the opportunity I have to provide leadership, set vision and create alignment, the real purpose of retreats is to listen. I try my best to float in and out of different groups, whether for lunch or dinner, in sessions during the day, activities on off days or drinks in the evening. In these very different groups, I am part of the conversation but also sitting and listening, and trying to take a lot in. Of course there will always be blind spots for me as a leader, and so I lean on the leads I work with too, but I try my best to be present and soaking up the joys and frustrations that I hear expressed. Each retreat is an opportunity to take this in, and try to act to improve our culture and working processes further.

Timing of a retreat

The context within which a retreat happens is a key component of how it will feel, and the goals we try to have in mind.

2016 was a difficult year for Buffer, we had layoffs and then at the start of this year, my co-founder Leo and I came to the conclusion for him to move on from Buffer. Our CTO Sunil also decided to leave the company at this time too. A lot of change for a single year. It’s been rocky. We’re now in a great position and have rebuilt our cash reserves to over $2.4m since the low point of $1.3m around our cash flow crisis.

As a result, at retreat it was important to acknowledge the past year. Morale is still in recovery from those ups and downs, and the team gathering in Madrid could not have come at a better time. We had sessions in which people could open up about those feelings, and we also had a lot of serendipitous conversations around the future.

All in all, I think we did a good job of acknowledging the challenges, and also sharing the excitement with each other about our future. We shifted towards this throughout the week, and almost all teams focused on their vision for 2017. I shared a lot of my own ideas around the company and product vision going forward, and we have a huge number of opportunities based on our solid foundation of products, customers, culture and profitability.

Being a key part of retreat as an introverted CEO

I am lucky to have an incredible team I work with on retreat, and this year Stephanie really took on the task wholly and I didn’t need to be too involved in the planning. At the same time, I am leading the retreat in many ways, I officially start it and I run many sessions. Especially since retreats are not cheap (our budget for Madrid was $400,000) I strive to reflect on how we get the most out of the time and take a lot of personal responsibility for that.

The retreat itself is a week packed with so much energy and happiness. We are all incredibly excited to see each other after a year apart, and this year around 25 people were on retreat for the first time, meeting almost all the team for the first time.

I am an introvert, around 85–90% introvert vs extrovert in most tests I take. In the past, this has at times led to debilitating situations after long periods of social stimulation. Around 4–5 years ago, I started to understand myself much more clearly, and I now find in general I can take the action I need to in order to feel recharged most of the time.

During retreat, I took a 20–45 minute solo walk each day during the week. At an appropriate time in the afternoon between sessions, I’d just head out of our work space and go walk up the nearby hill. After a day with a lot of social interactions, my mind can feel clouded and I find it hard to think and articulate clearly when I am drained. It’s always fascinating to me how quickly I can recover from this and feel energized, sharp and ready to be amongst people again. A few times this was essential was before my fireside chat with the community at Google Campus Madrid, before our Sunday welcome drinks and before our Wednesday evening team dinner.

I have found that it absolutely is possible for me to enjoy the whole week, as long as I remember to be aware of my energy levels and take care of myself.

It’s been a hugely rewarding and energizing week. I am pumped for the rest of 2017, and I am confident we’re going to achieve some great things together. If there’s any single takeaway for me from the retreat, it is the reminder that I get to work with the best team on Earth.

Photo credit: Nico Trinkhaus

Change at Buffer: The next phase, and why our co-founder and our CTO are moving on

2017-02-20T23:37:00Z

Change at Buffer- The next phase, and why our co-founder and our CTO are moving on

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 desire to question things.

Why base your company and team in a single location? Why is it customary to keep salary information private? Why can’t someone exercise during their day and work unusual hours, as long as it’s a productive way for them to work?

Asking these questions – and seeking their answers – has taken us down an interesting path. It’s been a rollercoaster of a journey so far. We’ve made many mistakes, and thankfully had a lot of success, too. We don’t question things just for the sake of it; we ask “why?” because we fundamentally believe that so much of work could be done better, and feel better.

For much of this 6-year journey, I’ve worked alongside my co-founder Leo Widrich. And for the last 4.5 years I’ve worked with Sunil Sadasivan, our CTO who started as one of our earliest technical team members.

We’ve accomplished incredible things together. We went from nothing to 65,000 paying customers, an 80-person team and over 13 million dollars in annual revenue. More importantly, we’ve found ourselves in the midst of two generation-shaping movements: remote working and business transparency.

Now, for the first time, I’m looking to the future of Buffer without these two hugely meaningful leaders, teammates, and friends. Leo and Sunil are leaving the company in the coming weeks.
On our team retreat in Cape Town, South Africa: Carolyn, Leo, Sunil and me.

Wavering between two paths

It’s always been a little hard from the outside to “figure out” Buffer. We often describe the path we’ve gone down over the last 6 years as a series of pendulum swings.

We started off bootstrapped, then raised multiple rounds of funding. We experimented with self-management but for now have a more traditional management setup. We’ve waited to hire until it really hurt, and we’ve hired rapidly and recklessly when our views on ambition and growth changed.

Swinging the pendulum can be a healthy and productive way to test ideas and determine the right approach. Indeed, we’ll always want to experiment and allow a certain amount of this.

At times in the journey we’ve simply tried to do what we feel is right: improve the product, cultivate our culture, provide great customer support and let growth be the by-product of the work we do. Other times, we’ve found ourselves totally focused on our growth rate, trying everything we can to increase it, and agonizing about it dropping over time.

At best, this has felt like harmony of complementary approaches, and useful experimentation. At worst, and more often recently, it started to feel more like swinging between two very different kinds of companies.

The future of Buffer

These 6 years of experimentation and pendulum swings have been the best education I could ask for. They’ve helped to solidify my vision for what kind of company Buffer is and will be.

Today we’re recommitting to a single path and a unified vision.

We will be a long-term, sustainable, fully remote team that works hard on mission-driven work. We will be the most reliable social media tool in the market. And we will continue to push the boundaries of transparency, culture and freedom in the team.

We will strive for the kind of healthy, long-term growth that we believe will naturally follow as we focus on creating trustworthy products and providing unexpectedly delightful customer service.

We will continue to be a vocal presence in movements that align with our values, like the remote work revolution, radical transparency, and a focus on diversity and inclusion.

We will create space to build a uniquely empowering company culture (which we like to call “a workplace of the future”) by investing in creativity, learning, innovation, and joy at work.

Why Leo and Sunil are moving on, and what’s next for them

This is the vision I have for Buffer, and this is the long-term journey I’m excited for us to continue to commit to. We’ve accomplished a lot towards this vision in 6 years, and we have a lot more to do. It’s not the only path to success and joyful work by any means, nor is it one I would ask anyone else to commit to if their vision is different.

It’s bittersweet to look to a Buffer future without Leo and Sunil, who’ve had such an impact on our product and culture. But this is indeed a case of differing visions – neither better than the other, just different.
Sunil leading a session with a few of our engineers on our team retreat in Sydney.
In late July of 2016, we had an executive team offsite that included both Leo and Sunil, and that meeting resulted in the first articulation of this clear vision. We laid out explicitly that we would focus on growing sustainably, slowing down hiring, raising the bar for product quality over shipping frequency, and innovating our culture to create an empowering environment.

This was a vision we all agreed to, but not without a lot of healthy debate. Sunil shared openly at the time that he wasn’t sure he could get fully excited about the path we had laid out. It wasn’t Leo’s first choice of direction either, but he was inspired to see if he could grow into the mindset and make it work.

Throughout the following months, Leo, Sunil and I continued to work closely together. As more time went on and more decisions were made, it began to feel we were misaligned.

Through many conversations, it started to become clear that this path wasn’t truly fulfilling for the two of them, and they had a different approach in mind for building a company.

More often than not, Leo and I leaned towards different ends of the spectrum when it came to decisions like the timing of bringing in senior leaders, whether to continue to raise funding, the balance of work on product vs company culture, and requiring an immediate high bar for performance vs nurturing team members.

Sunil was keen to strive for product quality and great company culture, and he also wanted to do it while we grew the team, hired senior leaders, and aimed for further rounds of funding and a more traditional board setup.

Some of the decisions I was making were hard for Leo and Sunil to feel fully aligned with, and we had many candid conversations about the type of company we were excited to build.

Eventually, it became clear that they did not feel they could be their whole selves with the path that was laid out, or experience the personal growth they were seeking.
Leo and I on a tuk tuk during our retreat in Thailand.
I’m incredibly grateful to Leo and Sunil for jumping on board the Buffer journey so early and with so much risk. They’ve both truly shaped Buffer and me personally for the better. This is a bitter-sweet moment, as we look back on so many years of growth and good times together, but also look ahead to leaning fully into paths that feel natural and exciting for each of us.

What’s next for Leo? He’s planning to start something new, most likely a SaaS product around HR or diversity. He will remain a non-executive board member and advisor to the team. His love for the product and customers, our team and culture, as well as his almost 20% stake in the company mean he’ll always be rooting for Buffer. I’ll be closely in touch and happy to advise him with his new venture. Read more from Leo on his departure and next steps.

What’s next for Sunil? Sunil is planning to take some time to decide his next step. He might create another startup (he was running one before he joined Buffer). He is also considering joining an organization where he can have a large impact on engineering. Meanwhile, he is spending the next few months with Leo to experiment on some product ideas. Read more from Sunil on his departure and next steps.

How we shared the news with the team

Toward the end of 2016, Leo and I had several conversations about the future and took the holiday break to reflect. When we returned in the first week of January, Leo had solidified his decision to move on. Soon after I shared the news with Sunil, he gave me his decision, also.

With a change this big, I strived to balance taking a thoughtful approach to sharing the news, as well as being fully committed to our value of transparency, and not delaying too long. Here’s how we chose to share the news:

First week of January: Leo solidified his decision to move on, we discussed and agreed on it
Friday, January 6: Sunil shared his decision with me
Monday and Tuesday, January 9 and 10: I shared the news with the seven members of our executive team (area-wide leads from departments like marketing, finance, and happiness).
Wednesday, January 11: I shared the news with 3 more leaders and, as a leadership team, we finalized plans to tell the rest of the team.
Thursday and Friday, January 12 and 13: The rest of the Buffer team heard the news one-on-one, an element that was very important to me in delivering this news. I personally told 29 people, and I was grateful to rely on the team leads for helping inform the others.
January 16-25: Over the course of the next two weeks, I spoke one-on-one with almost every person on the team who had yet to hear directly from me. (I still have a plan to speak with everyone, there are around 15 people remaining!)
Thursday, January 24: Leo and I visited Collaborative Fund, the biggest investor in our most recent round of fundraising, to discuss the news.
Wednesday and Thursday, February 2 and 3: We let all other investors know (71 people).
Friday, February 10: We’re sharing the news publicly, with you.

Looking to the future

The clarity of this single, unified vision has already proven so valuable for the team as a whole. I’ll be doing a company-wide All Hands next week to discuss many of the details further.

In addition, we have our next company retreat coming up in three weeks in Madrid! This is perfectly timed for us to spend a whole week as a company discussing and brainstorming what it means to fully lean into the Buffer way from here on out. We’ll be keeping you fully up to date on our next few months here on the blog.

Thanks to so many of you who have been incredible supporters of Buffer throughout our 6-year journey so far. I am completely committed to the long-term growth of Buffer, and I am excited for what we’ll do together to improve our product and company in the months and years ahead!

From startup to scaleup: What we’re changing as we make the transition

2016-06-01T23:44:00Z

From startup to scaleup- What we’re changing as we make the transition

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 experienced in the last year and some interesting challenges and paradoxes that seems to be bringing us.

I’ve had a number of conversations with people in the team on this and I recently shared a version of what follows with the whole company to get their thoughts. It resonated with almost everyone, and as a result we’ve started to put in place some changes based on these realizations. I’d love to share it with all of you in the community here too – and get your thoughts!

We’re experiencing a lot of growth

It fascinates me that over half of the team has been part of the team for less than a year. A year ago we were around 40 people — today we are more than 90. This is incredible and is bringing so many new perspectives for us, and helping us move faster to create amazing experiences for users and customers.

One of the things that hit me about this is that a year ago, we were doing things quite differently than we are today. And rightly so: We need to operate quite differently as an 90-person company than a 40-person company.

This path of thinking leads me to reflect all the way back on the first and second year of Buffer, of which only a handful of us were around and can share how that felt.

I’ve come to believe that we need to grow up (scale up) to be better suited to being an 80-, 90-, 100-person company, and simultaneously stay true to our roots in some areas. I believe we can benefit from keeping some of the true startup mentalities that got us off the ground and to a point where we could grow to something bigger.

The difference between startups and big companies

About a month ago, I came across this amazing article from Julie Zhuo: Start-ups versus Big Companies: How they compare in what’s awesome and sucky

I love how balanced her piece is:

“Don’t let anyone tell you that one is strictly better or worse than the other. Both have their charms and their cracks.”

Perhaps the most fascinating thing for me about this article is that I equally found myself nodding and agreeing with what Julie said about startups, as well as what she says about big companies.

I feel like both apply to us right now, and it dawned on me that we’re right in the transition currently.

In a lot of ways we need to grow up as a company, which will likely mean adopting more structure and discipline and embracing this new ability we have to specialize and reach a higher bar for many roles. In other ways, we still need to be super scrappy in startup mode—taking big risks, acting on intuition and moving fast.

Here’s a little table I created from her points. Again, I love how both sides are balanced, with little judgement:

Startups:

Have one goal: hit p/m fit
Must take big risks
Make you feel directly responsible
Have higher highs and lower lows
Are a lifestyle, not just a job

Big companies:

Have “made it” to some extent
Focus on growing what’s already successful
Will be more risk-averse
Wear the burden of higher expectations
Take more time to try and do things for the long-term

Startups need people who:

Operate with good intuition
Are well-rounded, jack-of-all-trades
Are proactive, don’t mind ambiguity
Possess a healthy dose of optimism

Big companies want people who:

Are team players
Will raise the bar in a specific dimension
Are high potential in the long-term
Are strong connectors, good at aligning and connecting groups

Startups make you feel awesome when:

You move like a synchronized swim team
You continuously launch shit
You witness direct impact of your creation
You realize how much you’ve learned

Big companies make you feel awesome when:

You realize you’re having an impact on millions of people
Your company invests in ambitious missions because it has resources to
Someone spends time to invest in your career growth
You get to try a lot of different projects

Startups make you feel sucky when:

No one uses what you build
There are struggles because no one is an expert
Nobody invests in you
There’s personal drama / conflict
You are constrained

Big companies make you feel sucky when:

There are too many involved in decision making, and it feels hard to get anything done
You feel a looser connection to what your company is shipping
You no longer have context on everything going on
There will be decisions that have ripple affects that affect you negatively

The early days of Buffer

When I read through the article by Julie Zhuo, I found myself thinking back to the early days of Buffer, and how we’ve grown since then.

It was absolutely true back then that we had one goal: to hit product market fit. That’s all that mattered. If we didn’t achieve it, nothing else would be possible. It’s why I didn’t incorporate the company until we had revenues and got our first $120k in funding. The customers we were going after didn’t care about that, they just cared whether the product solved a problem. As Paul Graham says, “Build something people want.”

Back in the early days, I built the first version of Buffer in seven weeks of evenings and weekends while working full-time. I was the product creator, customer researcher, designer, front-end and back-end developer, systems and data analytics person. And until Leo joined, I was also the marketer and customer service person too. Of course, all those things were done pretty badly, because I’m far from an expert in any of these areas. Yet, I built and launched the MVP in seven weeks, and kept iterating pretty fast. And when Leo joined, between us we fulfilled all these roles for almost a whole year. We ended up growing Buffer 40–50% month over month for the first year of Buffer.

There was so much risk back then. So we had to make bigger bets. We had to try to make a big change every few weeks or even every few days. Small incremental tweaks wouldn’t get us the progress we needed. As a result, there were higher highs and lower lows. The website went down a lot, we tried a lot of stuff that fell flat on its face. It felt awesome and awful all at the same time, sometimes transitioning from one to the other within hours. It was chaotic. That’s where I think a lot of what Julie mentions is so true and so essential for startups. It’s super valuable to be a generalist with good intuition.

Thoughts on product areas and how we structure ourselves right now

I think especially Pablo and Respond are areas where I feel we could be striving for 30–50% month-over-month growth, which may seem crazy, however we achieved exactly that in the first year of Buffer, and we now have the marketing and brand power of Buffer to put to use on those areas (so maybe we can do even better!).

On the other hand, in the mobile apps and the dashboard / awesome plan, which are all more mature and have high usage numbers, I think we could potentially have a higher bar for quality, maybe even thinking about QA. These products have a ton of active users flowing through.

Buffer for Business interestingly feels like it sits somewhere in the middle, where we have a somewhat steady flow of new customers from individual and awesome, yet at the same time there’s a big ‘new product’ feel to it too, where we could be moving faster to crank out all the features we need to be something attractive to larger companies and agencies and unlock the option for us to do sales.

The pace we’re moving at is awesome, based on the setup we have. Everyone is doing great work, it’s just within the model we have. I think the biggest ‘aha’ for me here is that we have evolved our product team structure in the last year and we’ve been striving for the same setup in all areas. We have a product creator, 2–3 engineers, a customer researcher, product designer, data analyst, and sometimes a product marketer. The biggest flaw I see in my thinking in the last year is striving to have this setup for all areas.

What I’m now starting to realize is, we should probably think about the team makeup for an area very much based on the stage that area is at. Pablo and Respond have very different needs than Individual, Awesome Plan and Mobile.

3 reasons you shouldn't outsource your startup, and what to do instead

2015-05-21T17:33:49Z

3 reasons you shouldn't outsource your startup, and what to do instead

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 enjoy sharing my lessons from those failed attempts, and I also enjoy getting my mind back into those early days challenges, now that Buffer is almost 5 years old.

In the last week, I’ve had 5 sessions (typically around 30 minutes, in person or via Hangouts) where I’ve tried to help someone. I was surprised to hear the same challenge come up in 3 of those 5 sessions this week, so I thought it might be a worthwhile blog post topic too.

The thought process of outsourcing your startup

I think if you’re not technical and can’t code, it’s very natural to think that you can’t progress much with your startup idea unless you find help. Often the first thought is to either find a technical co-founder, or to outsource building the minimum viable product to a firm or a freelancer.

In my experience, both these options are almost always the less optimal approach for succeeding with your startup as quickly as possible.

Here’s why I think you shouldn’t outsource your startup:

1. Your goals and a freelancer’s goals are completely misaligned

If you think about it, the goal of a freelancer or a creative agency or firm is to serve many different clients, and to ultimately make money. Your goal when you have a startup idea is to reach product/market fit and make something that can get traction.

A big problem with these 2 differing goals is that the successful path for a freelancer to reach their goal is very different to the successful path for startup founders to reach product/market fit.

One of the easiest problems for a freelancer to encounter is scope-creep of client projects. If the freelancer or agency is setting a fixed price for the project, they need to take many steps to ensure that the scope of the project doesn’t grow beyond what was initially budgeted for. This means that in the beginning, they are going to want to set down a very defined specification of what this project involves. A freelancer’s goal is to make money and a key ‘tool’ for success is to be quite exhaustive with defining the initial specification for a project, and to avoid changes to the spec along the way if at all possible.

As a startup, your goal is to reach product/market fit. There’s a great insight Matt Mullenweg once shared which really puts into perspective why as startup founders we should launch as early as possible:

“Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.”

Therefore, the ideal approach for creating a successful startup is to put it out there as soon as possible and then iterate from there based on the new information that comes from usage and from doing customer development. This is almost completely at odds with the approach most freelancers will want you to take. Not only that, most freelancers or agencies are building websites for more established or more predictable businesses and they often don’t understand the nature of startups.

It’s not that a contractor or agency is doing it wrong, they’re just optimizing for their most common type of client project: to create a website. For example, it might be a website for a restaurant, a coffee shop, or a golf club. In the words of Eric Ries, these are ‘known problem, known solution’ situations. We know what a restaurant website should do. It should have a menu, show you where the restaurant is, etc. With startups, we live in a world of ‘unknown problem, unknown solution’ situations. We don’t know whether our new idea will work. It takes a whole different approach, and I think this is almost always misaligned with the way a freelancer will approach things.

2. It gets you into the wrong mindset of what it takes to get a product off the ground

Very much related to the first challenge, I believe that if you are thinking about outsourcing your startup, you likely already have the wrong mindset about how to create a successful startup.

I’m lucky to have been coding since I was around 12. When I got into startups, I was lucky to have that part of the equation taken care of. What I realized after a few years in the game was that my technical ability blinded me from what it takes to make a successful product. I just kept building, and that’s not the main part of succeeding with a startup.

I think that often if someone is thinking about outsourcing their startup, they’re also under the false impression that the key to succeeding with their idea is to get it built.

The idea itself is often way off, and most likely won’t work once you put it out there.

What it takes to create a successful product is eliminating all the unvalidated aspects, and finding something that users or customers truly want, that has product/market fit and can get traction. The interesting part about this, is that coding is actually not at all required to achieve this.

It’s my belief that, especially today, you can create a fully working (albeit potentially somewhat manual) version of your startup without coding at all. You can use tools such as Wufoo, Unbounce, WordPress, Google Forms, and other things to string together a set of interactions. You can fill in the gaps with hustling and manual work yourself. It won’t scale, but ironically that is the key to initially growth and understanding what is working and what isn’t.

Without coding at all, I think you can have an early (far from perfect) product and even start to get traction if you iterate and solve the unvalidated aspects of your idea. Once you start to get traction, so many doors will open up for getting help to code the product and make it much more beautiful.

Any decent coder is tired of hearing an idea guy come along and try to get them to build their startup. On the other hand, a decent coder will be extremely interested by a startup put together with no code that is getting really good traction. That’s something they can have a big impact on and has already been shown that it has huge potential.

3. The founding team should wear every hat

The other belief I have for why you shouldn’t outsource your startup is: the founding team should wear every hat. Here’s why:

it gives you the mindset that you can make anything happen, you just need to figure out the hacks and shortcuts to do it with your current capabilities
you retain full control over all parts of the process and can adapt and iterate super fast
when you reach the point of hiring people, you’ll know the difference between someone great and someone not so good
you’ll have a level of passion across many different areas of the startup. That can more easily help you be great at multiple things as you grow. It’s hard to hire passion and hard for someone else to thrive in something the founder doesn’t get excited about.

Therefore, I highly recommend you and your co-founders do absolutely everything in the beginning. In the early days, between the two of us Leo and I did development, design, database and sysadmin work, customer support, marketing, and more. I even built the first version of the Android app before we invited Sunil to the team to take it over. There’s almost nothing we do at Buffer now that myself or Leo haven’t done in the early days of the company. As a result, I get super excited about how far we can take things across all areas of the company, and I can speak on a deep level with anyone in any area.

What to do instead

I honestly believe that building your product yourself is the most optimal and in fact the fastest path to creating a successful startup.

It might seem counter-intuitive that building the product yourself could be the fastest way to success, when you don’t even have any coding ability at all. The thing is, I’m not talking about coding - I’m talking about building your product. In any way that you can. That could mean zero coding, or it could mean picking up things here and there (which I think is great, too).

The reason I think it’s the fastest path is that I believe you’ll struggle to find a great technical co-founder if all you have is your idea. And, I think if you work with a freelancer or agency, it’s unlikely you’ll have a working relationship that lets you cycle through the build-measure-learn loop and iterate towards product/market fit.

So, my recommended approach is to hack it together yourself, and at the same time keep meeting technical people in your local startup community. I believe there’s an inflection point where what you have is attractive enough for a technical co-founder to jump on board. If you don’t have a technical co-founder (or someone technical willing to join as first employee), I think you just keep hacking and doing customer development and validating your assumptions, to create something that gets traction.

ILO in Asia and the Pacific

11 cities in 3 months: The highs and lows of digital nomad lifestyle

2015-05-06T17:09:00Z

11 cities in 3 months- The highs and lows of digital nomad lifestyle

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 as a kid for 3.5 years, and I lived in Hong Kong for 6 months in 2012. It was a no brainer for me to jump on the opportunity and travel around Asia with Brian.

At Buffer, we’re a fully distributed team. We’re currently 31 people spread across 22 cities. We all work remotely, and it is a lot of fun. This also gives us the freedom to choose to be anywhere in the world, and to move or travel if we wish. Everyone is trusted to balance this with their productivity and getting the results for the teams they’re part of.

Being a fully distributed team, we still believe it is super important to meet and spend time with each other face-to-face. As a result, we have team retreats at different locations around the world every 5 months.

In December, our next upcoming retreat was Sydney. The result was that Brian was interested in traveling around Asia, I was keen too, and we had our Sydney retreat coming up. So we decided to spend a month in Asia and ‘travel’ our way to Sydney.

And that’s how it all started for me.

How an idea to travel around Asia turned into being a digital nomad in 11 cities in 3 months

I spent some time thinking and decided to take the plunge and give up my apartment in San Francisco and become a digital nomad with no fixed location. I had been in San Francisco about a year and was craving exploring again, having done a lot of travel in the 4.5 years since starting Buffer (which even contributed to us becoming a distributed team).

It just so happened that I needed to obtain a new US visa (I’ve obtained it now and have the O-1 visa) and I was required to go to a US consulate outside the country to get it, so I decided to make that one of my tasks while in Sydney.

I also had been lucky to be invited to speak on a SXSW panel which got approved, so that was a definite destination for the middle of March in my travel plans. I’ve found through my travels that I really enjoy breaking up long flights, so I chose to spend 2 weeks in Santa Monica to break up my travel to Austin for SXSW. Knowing that I’d only spend a few days in Austin for SXSW, I chose to spend a week in Houston right afterwards to get a more full experience of Texas (my first time in the state!).

All these factors combined, here’s where I ended up spending my time during the first 3 months of 2015:

San Francisco, California (May 2014 → Jan 2nd)
Tokyo, Japan (Jan 3rd → Jan 11th)
Seoul, South Korea (Jan 11th → Jan 18th)
Singapore (Jan 18th → Jan 27th)
Jakarta, Indonesia (Jan 27th → Jan 28th)
Singapore (Jan 28th → Jan 31st)
Sydney, Australia (Feb 1st → Mar 3rd)
Santa Monica, California (Mar 3rd → Mar 14th)
Austin, Texas (Mar 14th → Mar 16th)
Houston, Texas (Mar 16th → Mar 21st)
Honolulu, Hawaii (Mar 21st → June/July)

I spent time in 11 cities in 3 months, and stayed in 14 different places (2 hotels, 11 AirBnB apartments, 1 friend’s place).

Here’s how that looks on a map:

Why I decided to become a digital nomad again

The last 5 years have included a lot of travel for me. Here’s a rough timeline:

October 2010 - July 2011: Birmingham, UK
July 2011 - December 2011: San Francisco
January 2012 - June 2012: Hong Kong
June 2012 - August 2012: Tel Aviv, Israel
September 2012 - November 2013: San Francisco
December 2013: Traveling around Asia
January 2014 - March 2014: San Francisco
April 2014 - May 2014: Cape Town, South Africa
June 2014 - December 2014: San Francisco

As a result, I’m certainly not new to the idea of traveling. At the same time, I had been pretty settled in San Francisco for most of the last 2 years with some traveling around our team retreats. To give up my apartment and become a full digital nomad was an extra step. Here’s what made me take that step:

I feel like there’s so much to see, and I want to explore more while I’m (somewhat) young and single and have the flexibility

I started Buffer when I was 23 and I literally felt like I’d live forever back then, and that I don’t age. Having worked on Buffer for almost 5 years, I’ve realized that is quite a long time, and I’ve been getting older during those years. I expect that naturally I might be in a position some time in my thirties where I’ll want to settle in one place. In the meantime, I feel like there is so much of the world to explore, and I want to get out there and see it.

I have the opportunity to be an example of a whole new way of living your life

“Observe the masses and do the opposite.” - James Caan

A theme for my life for the last 5 years while building Buffer has been to always take the path less traveled, both personally and as a company. That’s how we ended up choosing to be super transparent, work as a distributed team, do a very unconventional $3.5m round of funding, be self-managed with no bosses amongst other less traditional choices.

Therefore, I felt a strong urge and that I might regret it if I don’t take this opportunity to become a digital nomad and be an example of a whole new way of living. It’s currently very rare to live in this way, moving around the world and working, with all your belongings in a single bag. Not only is it already rare to be a digital nomad, it felt less common still to be a digital nomad as part of a larger team with VC funding. I felt like it could be great for me to be an example of this being possible, and to explore it and share my learnings. Of course, it’s a lot of fun too.

I wanted to try truly experiencing solo travel

In my many travels in the last 5 years, I’ve always traveled with others (usually my co-founder Leo) other than one trip to Asia. I had read a lot about the joys (and the challenges) of solo traveling and I wanted to experiment with it. I found myself in a position where Leo was interested in travel, but not until later in the year, and he was focusing on building himself into communities more in San Francisco (something I admire, and will later describe, is a challenge I have).

The situation posed the perfect chance for me to try solo traveling. I felt especially excited as an introvert who feels quite happy to be alone. Solo traveling felt like it provides the perfect balance of being able to always find the alone time I need, but also being very incentivized to get out and meet new people myself, since I don’t have someone I know to rely on for my need for socializing. I actually find it exciting and much easier to meet new people when I’m by myself.

Some of the high points and successes in my 3 months of travel

Looking back, it was an incredible 3 months, a period of time I think I will long remember. Here are some of the high points:

1. I spent a month traveling with my friend and co-worker Brian, it was so much fun

If you have the opportunity to travel with a friend, be sure to take it. I was already great friends with Brian, but I think traveling around Asia with him for a month really gave us a chance to get to know each other even better. There were so many fun things we experienced together, like a traditional sumo wrestling practice, getting drinks with Japanese and struggling with the language barrier, traveling out to the North/South Korea demilitarized zone, and many more. I think we’ll both always look back on and laugh about some of those awesome times. What’s more, I think it makes our working relationship better too.

2. Experiencing some of the top cultural landmarks and sights in the world, all in just a few months

“A new psychology study suggests that buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them.” ScienceDaily

On the whole, I worked a normal week most weeks, and I did all of my travel between places and relocating to new accommodation on weekend days. So, I maintained a decent level of productivity (more on that later). Despite that, I had the incredible chance to fit in a crazy number of experiences into the 3 month period.

In the 3 month period, I had a chance to experience some absolutely incredible sights. The view from the Tokyo Skytree was awesome. I visited several temples in both Tokyo and Seoul. I had dinner at a ninja themed restaurant. I had drinks on top of the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. I experienced Ludovico Einaudi in the Sydney Opera House and saw a movie at an open air cinema with a view of the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I went surfing at Bondi Beach and Manly Beach in Sydney and at Waikiki and Diamond Head in Hawaii. I went for evening walks along Santa Monica beach. I ate breakfast in Beverly Hills and saw the Hollywood Sign. I experienced the SXSW conference and had dinner with Eric Ries, Tim O’Reilly and others in Austin, and I went to a Rodeo in Houston. And that’s cutting the list short.

I’m very aware how lucky I am to experience all of this. Many days I wake up and can’t quite believe it. I would guess that for many, this could be a list of things you’d see in a lifetime. It was truly a highlight to see so much in such a short space of time, and kept me energized.

When we did our $3.5m funding round at the end of last year, Leo and I were lucky to each sell a small portion of our shares and receive liquidity. I’m particularly happy that so far I’ve spent zero on any substantial new material possessions, and the only spending I’ve done has been on travel and experiences, as well as some investments. It’s early to tell, but so far this feels like one of the best uses for money. That doesn’t mean I’ve spent a lot on travel or these experiences. I believe this kind of travel is less out of reach than many people think.

3. Meeting lots of new people and catching up with friends

The cool thing about being in a new place is that you can’t help but meet new people. I find that I have this energy and excitement whenever I set foot in a new city, I feel like just the way I walk around with that extra curiosity and enthusiasm makes me more likely to get talking with people. I also find I’m more eager to reach out and meet people, whether by Tweeting that I’m around, or by meeting people through an existing friend in the city.

It was so much fun to catch up with old friends in almost all the cities I was in, and through those people meet new friends who I will stay in touch with for years to come. And one thing I’ve found in the past is that we live in a time where many people travel, and so it’s not at all out of the question that I’ll be hanging out with some of these people in a completely different city in the future.

4. Keeping up my gym routine while traveling

One of the things I was happiest about while traveling was that I almost completely kept up my gym routine. I found an awesome Gold’s Gym in Tokyo. In Seoul I struggled and found that there aren’t too many gyms, but once I arrived in Singapore I was eager to get back to my exercise routine and signed myself up for a 2 week pass at Fitness First and went several times a week.

All in all, I had 31 gym sessions during the 12 weeks, which is an average of about 2.5 sessions a week. I generally aim for 3-4 sessions a week, so this felt like a pretty good effort and outcome amongst all the challenges of being in a new place, finding a gym and having so many other things I also wanted to do and see.

In the last couple of years, I’ve generally focused solely on strength training, and enjoyed that a lot. In the last 3 months I also started doing some cardio again with a little running and more recently some high intensity interval training through tabata sprints. I added cardio and some bodyweight exercise to my strength training. I’ve been working towards achieving a muscle up for several months and went regularly to the outdoor gym at Bondi Beach in Sydney and continued my practice and finally achieved my first muscle up at Original Muscle Beach in Santa Monica.

5. Being in a new place and experiencing different cultures made me more open minded again

One of the things I didn’t anticipate, but in hindsight makes complete sense, is how much traveling would affect my interests and focuses. It’s something I’ve grown to love and crave traveling for.

For example, when I was in Japan, I naturally got very interested again in improving my Japanese, and I was able to practice it quite a lot (I lived in Japan for 3.5 years as a child, and tried my best to keep it up by studying it for 3 years alongside my Computer Science degree, but have let the language slip away quite a lot).

Another thing that happened in Japan was that I had the chance to meet a lot of Japanese Buffer users, and I realized how important localization might be for us to implement. I then proceeded to propose a task force within the team to work on localizing Buffer (as an update, that task force was put on hold to build Buffer for Pinterest, and may continue soon).

A final example is that when Brian and I were in Seoul, we visited the North/South Korea demilitarized zone and I was very motivated to learn about the history of Korea while I was there. I read Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, which I thoroughly enjoyed and found fascinating, and watched a couple of TED talks (here and here) by North Korean defectors.

I feel super lucky and find it very fun to learn about topics like this while also experiencing the actual place where the events happened.

6. I did a lot of speaking events while traveling, I was happy to be able to help many people this way

One of my favorite things to do is to be able to give back. I’ve written before that I’ve found helping others brings me a lot of happiness. In addition, as I’ve been lucky to be part of Buffer growing more successful, I’ve also experienced growing requests from people asking my advice on things. It’s got to the point where I don’t have the time to respond to every request, which is something I struggle with since I’d love to help everyone.

One great way I’ve found to scale my ability to help people is through speaking events, blogging and other ‘one to many’ methods. Additionally, I found that being in Asia and having only a week in each place, setting up some events was one of the best ways to be able to meet everyone who was interested in speaking to me.

The other key thing that came to my mind in the weeks up to leaving for the trip was that as a fully distributed team, one of the areas of the world where we have the least people is Asia. As a result, I think it can be a little more lonely for team members in that timezone, and also means as a company we’re less open minded to some of the cultural differences both on a team dynamics and a market level. I decided to take the opportunity to try to spread word of Buffer, and ended up with quite a solid schedule of speaking over the few months:

Ad-hoc Buffer meetup in Tokyo
Fireside chat in Singapore
Fireside chat at StartupLokal event in Jakarta
Speaking at SaaSBusinessAsia conference in Singapore
Buffer Sydney meetup fireside chat event with Leo
Speaking on Open Pay panel at SXSW in Austin

It was a lot of fun to speak at all these events and meet hundreds of people through them.

As an introvert, I have to be quite mindful of my own energy levels when I’m speaking a lot, and also aware of how much time it takes me to feel well prepared for speaking events. I generally try to do fireside chats if it’s a more ad-hoc event, since I find those a lot easier to do on the fly and still feel they’re providing a lot of value for people. I loved doing all these events, however I think in the future I might not pack as much into a short space of time, since I think it was somewhat overwhelming at times and I think it impacted how productive I could be with all the other tasks I had going on at Buffer during that time.

The biggest challenges of being in 11 cities in 3 months, and the digital nomad lifestyle

A key reason I wanted to write this post and document the experiences I had while they’re fresh in my mind, is that despite having the incredible privilege to travel across 3 continents in 3 months and have some massive highs, there were in fact some real challenges and low points. I feel it’s important to share that side of the story, and hopefully it can be interesting and useful for somebody.

1. At times my productivity suffered and I felt I wasn’t as present as I should have been for Buffer

I mentioned earlier that I traveled and relocated to new accommodation on the weekends, and I worked regular weeks for the full 3 month period. This went quite far in helping me to stay relatively productive during these travels.

At the same time, being in a new place means adjusting to many new things, even as simple as finding grocery shopping and food places. Everything takes a little longer than what you’ve become used to in a place you’ve had months or years to become familiar and comfortable with, and that can be a little frustrating if you don’t anticipate it. As a remote worker who enjoys the coffee shop environment to get things done, I also found that I could often get to a coffee shop which wasn’t an ideal setup or where the wifi was not quite fast enough, and so it could take a couple of attempts before I found a great one. That took away yet more time.

All in all, I do see the travels as somewhat of a failure with regards to my productivity and my contribution to Buffer. I’m not a student taking a year off to travel the world once before settling into work, this is instead something I’m working towards finding balance so it can be much more long-term. I don’t have a throwaway traveling job just to get by, I’m the CEO of a company with venture financing and I have a lot of personal ambition to take Buffer much further than where it is right now. Therefore, daily routine and overall focus is crucial to having fulfillment, and with so much travel in a short space of time, I couldn’t quite hit the flow that I feel I need.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to take these learnings and bounce to a new situation fairly quickly. Since choosing to adjust to ‘slow travel’ (more on that below) and stay in Hawaii for 4-5 months, I’ve hit possibly my best flow in years, both in terms of my work on Buffer and my fitness goals. I will always be someone who likes to challenge myself and push towards limits in order to learn. In some ways I see this compressed travel as similar to my experiment of working 7 days a week, which also resulted in some great learnings.

2. One or two weeks in a place is not long enough to build lasting friendships or understand the culture beyond the surface

I’ve learned as a result of experimenting with 1-2 week visits compared to 3-6 month slow travel, that whenever I have the choice from now on, I will always take the option to stay in a single place for a few months.

Beyond the productivity struggles that come with being somewhere only for 1-2 weeks, it is also not long enough to create true new friendships or relationships. It’s almost impossible to sustain this for a long period of time and also have any sense of community. It was a lot of fun, however as the travels went on I found myself craving that sense of community, being able to hang out with people that know me well. As an introvert, I find that I naturally get drained when I spend a lot of time with other people, and even more so when I’m constantly meeting new people.

In addition to the challenge of having friends and that sense of community, I believe that part of the joy of travel is to experience, understand, and be changed by different cultures. For myself, I’ve found that I really can’t start to understand the culture of a new place unless I “live” there, and I think it takes at least 3 months, maybe 6, for things to start clicking. I like to feel like I’ve truly lived somewhere, been a part of it, and hopefully even had some tiny impact on it for the better.

3. I was hit with loneliness and had several times I felt down

It seems almost crazy that I could be literally traversing 3 continents and visiting many places in the world that people dream of experiencing, and feel down. I felt almost guilty for feeling it at times, that it was a lack of gratitude.

For most of the 3 months I felt absolutely incredible, and had an awesome time. During my time traveling Asia during January, I didn’t feel lonely at all, because I was traveling with Brian. For the first half of February while I was in Sydney, I was with the rest of the Buffer team on our 5th team retreat and several people stayed in Sydney afterwards, so I felt great then too. It was the last few weeks in Sydney when I was there by myself, and then during my two weeks in Santa Monica that the loneliness hit me a few times.

It was a little scary to feel myself affected by this. Some days I lost several hours where I was just feeling down and procrastinating. I’ve had a couple of other experiences of feeling down for one reason or another in the past, but it had been over 5 years since I had any feelings like this, so it came as quite a shock.

I’ve realized that a key challenge as a digital nomad is loneliness, and in many ways my traveling lifestyle of the last few years has left me without many strong friendships or relationships. This being my first time solo traveling also brought this out even more for me, I think.

I’m generally quite a pragmatic person. I reflect a lot, which can sometimes make me dwell on something and feel even worse about it. However, this reflection often helps me pinpoint the cause and act on it. In this case, I instantly started making a big effort to meet new people, and I also chose to stay in Hawaii for several months in order to build some longer term friendships. The result is that I’ve been able to completely turn this feeling around within a month and a half, and haven’t felt down for weeks now. I also found that keeping up my exercise routine helped me immeasurably during the ‘downs’, by gaving me something to regularly get a win with (and the endorphins released). I never felt down when I was exercising, and it often triggered a high that lasted several hours afterwards.

3 key learnings I’m taking forward for future travel and being a digital nomad

To finish up, I want to share a few observations and learnings I want to take forward for myself:

1. Travel is incredible

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” - Mark Twain

I truly believe that the travel in the last few years has changed me for the better. If you have a chance to travel, I strongly urge you to take it. All the better if you can do it long-term in a sustainable way while working. Even short term travel is great, but if you can make it a lifestyle for even just a year or two, I think that’s when it becomes most powerful and fulfilling.

One of the best things about travel, and especially solo travel, which I’ve discovered in the last few months is how much you learn about yourself. I especially learned how to recharge and maintain energy and happiness, which came through experiencing both extremes of spending too much time with people as well as a few moments of real loneliness. I now feel much better equipped to strike that balance.

2. It’s important to know your purpose for travel, and your other chosen commitments

Whenever you choose to go traveling, you’re in a very unique position that applies only to you. We’re all different, and I think any sweeping advice is not wise.

I think it makes sense to think about what your own situation is. Are you young and focused purely on the travel, happy to do whatever job to just get by? Or do you already have your dream job and are striking the balance between the work you love and the destinations you want to see?

For me, I love working on Buffer, I couldn’t imagine a better job in the world. I also feel a big calling to see where we can take Buffer in the coming years. As a result, I plan to be very disciplined in the future about choosing my travel schedule. It’s important for me that I can spend the time I desire on Buffer, alongside seeing a new place.

3. For me, ‘slow travel’ is my preferred way to travel and be a digital nomad

Probably the most clear learning and conclusion for me of the 3 months of travel is that ‘slow travel’ is the perfect setup for me. By ‘slow travel’, I mean staying somewhere for at least 3 months, and generally 5-6 months or more. I’ve learned this for myself before in some casual ways, I even wrote about it a year ago. I feel like I’ve now truly pushed limits and experienced all options.

Most of these 3 months were short-term travel. Since then, I’ve been living in Hawaii for the last month and a half. I’ve found my flow and had some of my most productive weeks both on Buffer and with my exercise routine. I’ve met people who I’ve hung out with several times and hope some may become lifelong friends. This, for me, is what traveling is all about. This is my new plan.

Top photo credit: Andym5855. Rest are my own.

The dream forms over time

2015-01-27T05:00:44Z

The dream forms over time

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 seems to come up many times is that people will ask me “what triggered you to become passionate about company culture and transparency” or “how did you know you wanted to build Buffer to what it is today”. One of the most memorable moments for me was when a super smart lady who is having a lot of success at a large company, who longs to work on something more meaningful, told me about her friend. She said to me:

“My friend has her own fashion startup and is doing well. She is so passionate about what she is doing. I want to do a company in fashion too, but I don’t feel like I have the same level of passion as my friend. What should I do?”

I think there is a lot of advice out there that says “you must be super excited about what you’re working on, otherwise you won’t stick with it”. I think there is a lot of truth in that.

At the same time, if I look back on my own journey, I don’t think that’s how it worked. It would be easy (and incorrect) for me to say that I always imagined creating a company with full transparency and no managers from day 1. Or for me to say that I had a vision to build a SaaS startup that helps companies solve all their social media struggles and reach 30,000 customers and $5m in annual revenue.

The thing is, 4 years ago when I started the company, I didn’t even start a company. I just had a side project. I had to work full-time for clients to pay the bills. It was almost incomprehensible that I could dream about those things, I had much more immediate needs.

But I did have a little dream. My goal in the earliest days was simply to build something that truly solved a problem for people and make money online with a product. My earnings had always been tied to my time, doing contract and freelance work. I was passionate about moving from that to creating a product which someone would pay for.

Back when I started, having someone pay $5 for my product was as big as the dream got. It didn’t involve having a team, creating a movement around transparency, raising funding or building a unique workplace.

What happened was that once I achieved that first dream, my horizon became much clearer. It’s like the fog lifted and I could see ahead and the next dream came into my head. After the first customer paid $5 for Buffer (in the first month we had total revenue of $20), my next goal was to make $1,000 per month so that I could drop my freelance work and focus completely on Buffer. This was the dream I pursued for the next few months.

The dream forms over time. It’s okay if you don’t have a world-changing vision from the beginning. The key, in my mind, is to follow that tiny dream. That little spark, the idea in the very back of your mind. Once you pursue that, you are on the path to your most meaningful and fulfilling work.

Photo credit: Aristocrats-hat

The top reason we haven’t sold our startup

2015-01-13T23:04:14Z

The top reason we haven’t sold our startup

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 often comes up is “how did you decide not to sell?”.

The earliest offer we had for Buffer was not long after we had started, and it felt fairly easy for us to say no, simply because we felt we wanted to see where further our current path leads. In many ways, the reason we haven’t accepted an acquisition offer is in order to continue on our path.

How much more learning could you have if you keep going?

However, after we said no the first time, we noticed something quite incredible happen. In the months that followed, we had several brand new learnings and experiences about growing a company. For example, after our first offer we soon established the values of the Buffer culture, chose to commit to being a distributed team, and I found myself in a position where I needed to learn how to let people go. These were all priceless business and life experiences. Learning to fire people was not easy, but I feel very thankful to now have this experience.

This is one of the most important considerations for us now. If you sell your company, you will sacrifice upcoming learnings. Of course, you will learn many valuable things as part of a new company. A framework I have created in my head for this, however, is to think about when I will have the same opportunity again.

When can you get back to that same level of learning again?

If you are 2 years into your startup and have found traction, and then you sell your company, when will you next be 2 years into a startup? When will you be able to experience the learning that happens in the 3rd year of a startup? I think that doing a full cycle and selling a company will be valuable, and I like to think that with that experience I could perhaps grow a company faster in the future. However, it will still take some time. In addition, you will likely work at the acquirer for a couple of years. For me, in this scenario, I would expect to work at the acquirer a couple of years, then it might take a year to find a good idea which can gain product/market fit, and then you have the 2 years to reach the same stage.

So, all in all, if I sell my 2 year old company, it could be 5 years before I am able to next experience the learnings that come in the 3rd year of a startup. We don’t have many 5 year periods in our lives to wait to have another chance for incredible experiences.

The second time we turned down an acquisition offer, we grew to around 15 people and started to feel like we went beyond a product towards an actual company. Many new learnings came with this, like thinking about how to structure a company with more people, and the true importance of culture. And interestingly, the most recent time we chose not to sell, we have found ourselves on a magical journey of removing hierarchy and managers, embracing self-management and striving to create a truly fulfilling workplace where a foundation of trust and freedom means that everyone can work on what they are passionate about.

Focusing on learning and experiences rather than money

Money will come and go, but experiences and learning is what I define as true wealth. This is why we try to frame a decision of whether to sell around the opportunities for learning and experience in each path.

Our advisor Hiten asked us perhaps the most simple and useful question when we discussed the topic of selling with him:

“Are you done? No? Then don’t sell.” - Hiten Shah

Sometimes founders may be tired, lacking the motivation they once had. Maybe then it can make sense to sell. We’re not done yet, and I’m excited to see where this path leads.

Photo credit: Cindee Snider Re

Why I don't shield my team from bad news

2014-12-11T05:47:32Z

Why I don't shield my team from bad news

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 of a company, you need to shield your team from bad news, the risks of a startup, and other negative aspects that are inevitable on the startup journey.

One of our core values at Buffer is to Default to Transparency. This means absolutely everything in the company is shared knowledge. It was scary at first, not least because the idea goes very much against the grain. I found myself hesitating, not because I genuinely could think of reasons not to share, but simply because no one else shares some of the things we've shared.

What it means when you shield your team

I think one of the most fascinating things about witholding information of any kind is the message it unknowingly sends to the team.

I believe that if you hold back information, you are silently telling your team that you don't trust them. Frédéric Laloux put it well in Reinventing Organizations:

"In most workplaces, valuable information goes to important people first and then trickles down to the less important. Sensitive information is best kept within the confined circle of top management. The underlying assumption is that employees cannot be trusted; their reactions could be unpredictable and unproductive, and they might seek to extract advantages if they receive too much information."

The reason starting a trend of secrecy is so dangerous is that it's self-reinforcing:

"Because the practice is based on distrust, it in turn breeds distrust"

That is, the policies you set up based on these assumptions might trigger people to try to cheat the system, because they start to dispise it. Once you find people are doing this, the natural thing is to introduce yet more controls and restrictions.

How shielding your team could hurt you as a founder

Beyond affecting the culture and spirit of your team, I believe that withholding information puts unnecessary strain on yourself as a founder. A startup journey is a series of many ups and downs, and the lows can really be difficult. There are many sad examples of things becoming too much for a founder, and more often than not they've kept the stress to themselves.

The traditional structure of a company in a hierarchy naturally leads to a pyramid, with a single person at the top. The law of pressure in physics can illustrate the outcome here:

pressure = force/area

That is, the smaller the area, the higher the pressure. In the following example, the pressure from an under an elephant's feet is far less than that from a woman's stiletto heels:

Therefore, if bad news comes up and you take the whole burden on yourself, the pressure is much higher than if that news was shared across many people.

The ego at play

Another reflection for me is that whenever I have felt that I should hold something back from people in the team, I believe it is often my ego at play. I am essentially saying that I can handle the situation better or take more than others in the team.

It's as if I'm saying that I am more responsible than the rest of the team. It's like I'm treating my team like children, which is ironic because many people in the team have children and I don't yet! I am convinced that if we can let go of our ego as leaders and share information and responsibility, we will be pleasantly surprised.

Holding onto information or key decisions is in a lot of ways a fear of giving up control, at the expense of trust and moving faster thanks to shared decision making. I think often as leaders we feel a need for control and privileges, and this comes almost entirely from ego. One of the reasons I try to practice daily meditation is to more easily act without ego.

Photo credit: mararie

Diagram credit: Leeds Vineyard

50 books that transformed my business and my life

2014-12-02T17:33:01Z

50 books that transformed my business and my life

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 all. After I graduated and started to be interested in business and startups, I realized the immense power and knowledge contained within books, and I started reading more and more. Today, I can't imagine even a couple of days passing by without some time spent reading.

As an introvert, I'm a reflective person. Sometimes that can be a challenge, since in a startup you really need to get shit done. At the same time, I see it as one of my strengths. I will sometimes go on a walk just to ponder what's currently going on in the company and the things we could improve. Sometimes it's my reflectiveness that I find helps us to untangle some of the most complex challenges we find ourseles confronted with.

I've found that due to this natural desire to reflect, I love to read books and think about what we could try to apply at Buffer. On top of this, at Buffer we give all new team members (and family members) a Kindle and have an unlimited Kindle books program (no limits and no questions asked).

Here are some of the books which have had the biggest impact on Buffer and me personally:

1. How to Win Friends & Influence People* by Dale Carnegie*

"In such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering – to personality and the ability to lead people." - Dale Carnegie

I first read How to Win Friends and Influence People perhaps a year before I started Buffer, around 5 years ago. It instantly had an impact for me, both on how I wanted to improve my character and how I wanted to run a company.

A lot of what Carnegie proposes doesn't seem all that profound, and can even seem like common sense. Simple things like "Don't criticize, condemn or complain.", "Smile", "Become genuinely interested in other people." and "Ask questions instead of giving direct orders." What I've found is that it is incredibly difficult to put into practice. On top of that, this is not about a few tricks to get ahead, as Carnegie puts it, this is "a new way of life".

For myself personally, I have become so convinced that the How to Win Friends way of life is the one I want to live, that I now try to read this book every few months, both on Kindle and via audiobook, in order that I can completely engrain the principles and they can become who I am. I'm up to around 12 reads of it so far, and I don't imagine ever stopping re-reading.

When I introduced my co-founder Leo to the book in the earliest few months of Buffer, he too was hooked and we had endless conversations and discussions around the stories and principles. He helped me grow as a person much more than I could alone, due to his excitement and interest of the How to Win Friends way. The result of this has been that we have based a large number of the values within the Buffer culture directly on the principles Carnegie proposes.

2. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't* by Jim Collins*

"You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end— which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." - Jim Collins

Good to Great is one of the first transformative books I read as Buffer started to grow beyond a product, and into a company. This happened when we were around 7 people and I started to feel like we needed to think about "culture", a concept that I previously had no real way to understand apart from conceptually.

As the team grew beyond 7, I noticed that team dynamics came much more into play, and we couldn't assume that everyone knows everything anymore. In addition, I realized that the people we work with affect us immensely.

Good to Great helped me to understand how important culture is for building a great, lasting company that has an impact on the world. It started to become clear that we already had a culture, and it was evolving. The book helped me to understand that culture can be crafted by choice rather than rather than simply observed:

"Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice." - Jim Collins

Perhaps one of the most difficult yet crucial learnings for me from Good to Great was that there will be people whose values don't align with the culture we create, and who will do better and thrive in a different company rather than staying on as part of Buffer. Asking these people to leave is one of the hardest things I've had to learn how to do, and something that has made Buffer what it is today.

3. The Alchemistby Paulo Coelho

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” - Paulo Coelho

Reading The Alchemist the first time was a very liberating experience for me. It helped me to dream big and keep following my gut, and not settle - which is what the story, about a shepherd boy named Santiago, is all about. It's a simple and short book and has stook in my mind ever since I read it.

The Alchemist conveys a powerful idea: that the world will help you if you just choose to follow your dream, that often times our upbringing and environment lead us to believe dreams are impossible to realize, and that it won't be a smooth journey and that is fine.

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting" - Paulo Coelho

If you ever happen to find yourself becoming skeptical or feeling that you're not enjoying what you do, I can recommend reading The Alchemist.

4. Joy At Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Jobby Dennis Bakke

"Leaders who want to increase joy and success in the workplace must learn to take most of their personal satisfaction from the achievements of the people they lead, not from the power they exercise." - Dennis Bakke

Joy At Work provides great insight into the journey of Dennis Bakke and AES, the company he co-founded. Bakke and his partner Roger Sant started the company and strived to live to a core value of Fun. It is a fascinating read in terms of their definition of fun (making important decisions and being given trust, not ping pong tables and snacks), and also in how difficult they found it to run the company unconventionally in order to be true to their values.

AES reached over 40,000 employees all across the world and they created a significantly different corporate structure than many organizations of today. At Buffer, AES and Bakke have been a big inspiration for us in staying true to our own values.

A large part of the process of staying true to the value of fun for Bakke was for him to be a sevant leader and to help individuals in the company make as many important decisions as possible. They devised the Decision Maker method of making decisions as a team, where the person closest to the problem (rather than a manger) makes key decisions. He also wrote a fable called The Decesion Maker around this concept, which I have also included in this list.

5. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewalby Tony Schwartz & Jim Loehr

“Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.” - Tony Schwartz & Jim Loehr

The Power of Full Engagement was one of the first books that helped me to start to understand myself, and to work to embrace how I feel and be intuitive. The key concept in the book is that you should be either fully engaged in a task, or fully disegaged and finding renewal. For example, finding the natural dips within your day and thinking about rituals and changes you could make. Maybe you go for a 20 minute walk at 3pm when you naturally find yourself less productive.

The other thing this book revealed to me was the idea of having 4 key types of energy: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. We should work on each of these separately, and with each we can expand our capacity by stretching ourselves and then renewing. It uses the analogy of muscle growth to describe this a lot, and argues that the same approach can be used for our other types of energy.

For me, reading this book triggered many changes over time to my routine. I started exercising almost every day, and I tried a ritual of an evening walk to wind down before sleeping. All these experiments have helped me to feel happier and more productive, and many of them I have kept for several years now, with compounding benefits as a result.

6. The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Worksby Ricardo Semler

“For a company to excel, employees must be reassured that self-interest, not the company’s, is their foremost priority. We believe an employee who puts himself first will be motivated to perform.” - Ricardo Semler

Ricardo Semler took over his father's business, Semco, in 1980 under the condition that he could change it completely. On his first day as CEO, he fired 60% of all top managers. Since then he has introduced a wide range of unconventional practices, such as having no official working hours, employees choosing their own salaries, and having no vision (instead wanting employees to find the way using their instinct).

For me, The Seven-Day Weekend opened my eyes and helped me to question every business practice that exists today. Semler aimed to operate as a 'sevant leader' and made a conscious effort to make zero decisions himself.

7. The Five Dysfunctions of a Teamby Patrick Lencioni

“Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.” - Patrick Lencioni

A leadership fable about a failing Silicion Valley tech company who brings in a new CEO. Kathryn attempts to unite a highly dysfunctional team and through his narrative Lencioni explains the five key ways that teams struggle, and how to overcome the hurdles.

I read this book at a key point in time where we were just discovering that we needed to put our values into words and shape the culture of Buffer. The book helped to clarify that through culture, provided we lived it, we could solve problems of trust and enable much better teamwork within the company.

8. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purposeby Tony Hsieh

“Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.” - Tony Hsieh

Zappos has always been a huge inspiration for us at Buffer. I clearly remember watching a video interview Tony Hsieh had where he was asked what one thing he would do sooner if he could start Zappos again. He replied "put values in place on day 1". We had already started Buffer, but we established our values shortly after that when we were 7 people.

On top of their focus on culture and values, Zappos has also provided us with inspiration for making half of our vision "to set the bar for great customer support". We have always had a large happiness team compared to the ratios other companies have, and we find great joy in aiming to surprise and wow customers with how quickly and caringly we respond to Tweets and emails.

9. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Daysby Jessica Livingston

“Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.” - Jessica Livingston

I read Founders at Work in the earliest few months of Buffer, before I had managed to drop my freelance work which I was doing on the side to pay the bills before our revenues grew. It was inspirational and practical at the same time, and laid out very clearly the paths that many of the biggest tech successes took to reach their prominence.

10. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startupby Brad Feld & David Cohen

“Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you've created until it's out there. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public arena, it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.” - Brad Feld & David Cohen

There is so much great content packed into this book across all aspects of a start: ideas, execution, culture, hiring, firing, fundraising, product, metrics, incorporation, work-life balance. It is a book I can highly recommend if you're interested in or are getting started with a startup. Brad Feld and David Cohen are super smart and have a lot of experience, and it shows.

I especially loved the chapter titled "If you want money, ask for advice". It's something I've tried to apply ever since reading the book. I've found that genuinely seeking advice is often more productive and leads to more opportunities than asking for money or a partnership or a sale.

11. The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Livingby Randy Komisar

“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” - Randy Komisar

I first heard the term 'deferred life plan' in this fantastic book by Randy Komisar. It has been especially relevant for me, since it is a story about a silicon valley entrepreneur and teaches the idea that there are many things more important than money. The book poses the question "what would you be willing to do for the rest of your life?" and persuasively argues that if you will do that, the money will follow.

12. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplaceby Ricardo Semler

“To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow.” - Ricardo Semler

Maverick is Semler's earlier book, which goes into the full details of how he took over Semco from his father, fired over half of the executive team, diversified the business and revolutionized the way an organization could be run.

I especially enjoy how Semler challenges some deeply ingrained assumptions and beliefs about how business needs to be run. Things like whether growth is even a good thing, and how rules and policies can quickly snowball and grind companies to a halt. It has helped us to reach one of our most powerful phrases we use at Buffer, as an often used alternative to policies: "use your best judgement".

13. Peace is every step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Lifeby Thich Nhat Hahn

“Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. Every breath we take, every step we take, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.” - Thich Nhat Hahn

Around two and a half years ago I found myself on a very organic path from business, success and self-improvement books to those that spanned both personal success and spirituality. Books like The Monk and the Riddle mentioned above address this topic. After reading some of these books, I naturally found myself interested in meditation and Zen Buddhism. One of the most fascinating Zen Buddhists and authors for me has been Thich Nhat Hahn who has written many books.

I was even lucky enough to attend a Day of Mindfulness with him and many other like-minded people in San Diego around a year ago. Today, I find that meditating almost daily is a key part of maintaining a clear mind, balancing my energy, feeling healthy and being present.

14. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businessesby Eric Ries

“The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.” - Eric Ries

In many ways, Eric Ries and The Lean Startup deserve a lot of the credit for where I am today and for Buffer existing. I first discovered Eric and his Lean Startup concepts via his blog about 5 years ago. He really helped me to understand the idea of validating an idea before spending lots of effort, and the notion of measuring progress in terms of learning rather than lines of code.

The Lean Startup is an incredible handbook for anyone who wants to get their startup off to the very best start possible. It helped me to take Buffer from idea to paying customers in 7 weeks.

15. The 4-hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Richby Tim Ferriss

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.” - Tim Ferriss

This is one of the most practical books I've ever read. It is packed with so much information and actual resources to get you on your journey with creating passive income and if you desire, traveling. It really opened my mind to a lot of productivity improvements I could make.

I would also say that The 4-hour Work Week helped me to dream about the idea of traveling while working. I read it 4 years ago, and in that time I have traveled the world and lived in 4 different continents. It's been one of the best experiences of my life so far, especially when I've spent months rather than weeks or days in a place.

16. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talkingby Susan Cain

“Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration . They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.” - Susan Cain

I read Quiet recently and it gave me an instant feeling of comfort in myself, how I'm wired and my personality. It made me feel confident about aspects of how I approach things which I previously saw as a weakness. It helped me discover some of my true strengths. I'm an introvert. This book helped me realize that the core difference between introverts and extroverts is the way that they recharge. It helped me to make sure that I get my solitude so that I feel sharp and alert, and so that I have the time to reflect.

It also helped me discover an important difference in how myself and my co-founder Leo approach things. Often when we have a discussion, I am purely interested in contemplating or reflecting on something and Leo is often more interested in the definite next step and deciding that right away. There's value in both of these approaches, and a middle ground where we reflect a little and then take action seems to create great outcomes. Previously, this difference in style used to sometimes cause some tension. Quiet surfaced exactly what is going on:

introverts are “geared to inspect” and extroverts “geared to respond.”

I shared this with Leo, and ever since we both realized this we now have much more empathy for each other. It also became clear that the combination of these differing approaches and other ways Leo and I are different is what makes us a great co-founder combination.

17. The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedomby Ruiz Don Miguel

“Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.” - Ruiz Don Miguel

The Four Agreements introduce the idea of "don't take anything personally" to me in a whole new light. This is a book based on ancient Toltec wisdom and refers to this concept in terms of removing ego. I was recommended this book by one of our awesome investors Robert Fanini who told us that he previously based his company culture and values around the 4 primary ideas in this book:

Be Impeccable with Your Word
Don't Take Anything Personally
Don't Make Assumptions
Always Do Your Best

These are great life values and I've tried to live to them since I read The Four Agreements.

18. The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Timeby Dennis Bakke

“When leaders put control into the hands of their people, at all levels, they unlock incalculable potential.” - Dennis Bakke

Within Buffer, we have a concept where anyone is able to make any decision, provided they get advice from people who will be affected by the decision. It is the way we've found to envision a company without managers or bosses. We're still at the beginning of this journey, it's an exciting one to be on and I think we're creating an incredible company to be part of.

This decision making concept originates from a company called AES. I already mentioned Joy At Work, AES co-founder Dennis Bakke's first book and this is a fable he wrote to describe a company changing how they work and adopting the Advice Process.

19. Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customersby Gabriel Weinberg

“Poor distribution— not product— is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.” - Gabriel Weinberg

Traction has been a somewhat recent read for me. The key take-away I had from the book was to try to spend as much time on traction as on product development. The other realization the book triggered for me was that in the early days of Buffer, we focused our content marketing efforts around traction, and we found that guest blogging helped us a lot with spreading the word and triggering new signups for Buffer.

We now try to strike this balance a little better. As a team we don't necessarily believe that all marketing activity should be tied to creating traction, but we do think it is worth exploring new traction channels and measuring our impact on traction from marketing. I can recommend this book to any new startup trying to get traction, or existing startups trying to reach new levels of traction. The book helped to give us a nudge to try some new traction channels again.

20. Confucius Analectstranslated by Edward Slingerland

“This is wisdom: to recognize what you know as what you know, and recognize what you do not know as what you do not know.” - Confucius

This translation of Confucius' ancient teachings is a book I keep coming back to time and time again. It's another of the books I feel like I just want to take in and let it become who I am. There are many great themes which Confucius discusses such as self-cultivation (the idea that in ancient times learning meant to make ourselves better people and not just to memorize or recite texts) or virtue, goodness and focus on action rather than words:

"A person’s character is not properly judged by his words or his public reputation, but is rather revealed to one who carefully observes his actual behavior, comes to know something about his motivations, and discovers what he is like in private. It is in the details of one’s daily behavior that true virtue is manifested."

21. Tao Te Chingby Stephen Mitchell

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Laozi

Tao Te Ching is one of the most famous texts that exists for philosophical Taoism (along with Zhuangzi which I have also included below). This book follows a different format to other philosophical texts and is very easy to read. It is split up into 81 very brief chapters (some just a few words). It's one of the philosophy books which for me had a lot of impact in very few words. There are many thought-proviking ideas shared, the most clear of which is the idea of 'Wu wei' or non-action:

"Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone."

This was a fascinating paradox for me to try to understand, and author Stephen Mitchell explains it very well:

"This “nothing” is, in fact, everything. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body."

If you enjoy challenging norms and yourself and strive to improve your character, I can highly recommend Tao Te Ching.

22. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Businessby Charles Duhigg

“Habits are powerful, but delicate . They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize— they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.” - Charles Duhigg

This book introduced me to the idea of 'keystone habits', which are ones where if you focus on them then they can transform your whole state and can trigger further healthy changes. For me and for many people, exercise is a keystone habit:

"Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change."

This is one of the reasons that exercise, alongside early mornings, helping people and other habits are rituals which I now try to live by, and which I believe make me happy. The book is a great guide for understanding and creating habits, stopping bad habits and reframing your life around habits in order to achieve your dreams.

23. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleby Stephen R. Covey

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” - Stephen R. Covey

The Buffer value of 'Listen first, then listen more' comes almost directly from the quote above and Habit 5 from this bestselling classic. Each of the 7 habits are all worth studying and reflecting upon:

Be Proactive
Begin with the End in Mind
Put First Things First
Think Win/Win
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Syngergize
Sharpen the Saw

The 7 Habits is another of those books which I consider worth going back to time and time again. Even now typing this list of the 7 habits, I feel that I am quite far from being as good as I can be at each of them, and I think I need to re-read the book to take in the advice and try to focus on applying it again.

24. Reinventing Organizationsby Frédéric Laloux

“When trust replaces fear, will a hierarchical pyramid still provide the best structure? Will we need all the rules and policies, detailed budgets, targets, and roadmaps that give leaders today a sense of control? Perhaps there are much simpler ways to run organizations when the fears of the ego are out of the way.” - Frédéric Laloux

Reinventing Organizations is currently being read by almost all 27 people within the Buffer team, and it is likely that it will drastically transform how the company operates. If the changes succeed, it is also likely that my role which look very different. Why is that? Let me try to explain.

In this fascinating book, Laloux reminds us that there have been several different management paradigms and organizational structures in the last several centuries. He then proposes that a brand new paradigm is currently underway, and illustrates it with a dozen example organizations which run very differently to what most of us know. There are 3 key concepts to what Laloux describes as a "Teal Organization":

Self-management: There are no bosses. People in the company choose to work on what they are passionate about, and hold multiple roles. They are not constrained by a job title. New teams form and disband fluidly as needed.
Wholeness: The company is set up such that everyone feels comfortable bringing their whole self to work. Everyone is appreciated and is heard. The idea of work-life separation slides away, because you can be yourself at home and at work.
Evolutionary purpose: The company doesn't follow a set vision, because that would limit everyone. Instead, the company listens to individuals and teams and develops a natural purpose and direction. The organization goes where it naturally is meant to go and can achieve its full potential.

This is one of the most exciting books I've ever read, and I can't wait to see how it might impact Buffer.

25. Seneca: Letters from a Stoicby Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Richard Mott Gummere

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” - Seneca

For some time, I have been very fascinated by Stoicism. When I discovered the ideas, it felt like quite a natural fit for my personality. I enjoy the idea of controlling my excitement and as a result my sadness. For example, stopping myself working late into the evening, so that I can wake up fresh in the morning. In essence, I feel that Stoicism can help entrepreneurs a lot, since there are naturally a lot of highs and lows in a startup journey, and Stoicism can help us handle those.

I love the format of Letters from a Stoic, as each chapter is an 'essay in disguise' in the form of a letter of advice from Seneca to his friend Lucilius. It makes for enjoyable and easy reading.

26. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklinby Benjamin Franklin

“If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.” - Benjamin Franklin

I was drawn to read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography because it is mentioned several times in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Franklin achieved extraordinary things and he has a lot of wisdom to share in his autobiography, alongside a gripping account of the story of his life.

There are also some super humbling aspects of the book, since it was published in 1791. Here's an example:

My brother had, in 1720 or 1721, begun to print a newspaper. It was the second that appeared in America, and was called the New England Courant. The only one before it was the Boston News-Letter. I remember his being dissuaded by some of his friends from the undertaking, as not likely to succeed, one newspaper being, in their judgment, enough for America.

27. The Intelligent Investorby Benjamin Graham

“Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account, nor in any part of your thinking.” - Benjamin Graham

Graham's The Intelligent Investor must have been recommended to me at least 5 times from different people, and I've come to learn that it is probably the classic book on investing. I love how many of the concepts can translate to wise living even if you're not in a position to invest.

For example, the concept of "dollar-cost averaging" is something that has especially stuck with me. The idea is that you invest a fixed amount of money at regular intervals (say weekly, monthly, or quarterly) regardless of the state of the market (up, down or sideways). For me, this felt like a great philosophy for productivity and life. For example, you would do well to set down a blogging schedule and aim to publish a post every week or every month regardless of circumstances.

28. The Teaching of Buddha

“People naturally fear misfortune and long for good fortune; but if the distinction is carefully studied , misfortune often turns out to be good fortune and good fortune to be misfortune. The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure.”

My co-founder Leo and I discovered this book, essentially the Bible of Buddhism, when we were on vacation together in Hawaii. We found it in the hotel rooms and we ended up taking it around the resort with us and discussing the wisdom and stories over lunch. It was fascinating.

There are some religious teachings in the Teaching of Buddha. At the same time, there are just as many philosophical teachings and stories that would be enjoyable for anyone to read.

29. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travelby Rolf Potts

“there is still an overwhelming social compulsion—an insanity of consensus, if you will—to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.” - Rolf Potts

One of our core values at Buffer is Live Smarter, Not Harder, and includes the following subpoint:

You choose to be at the single place on Earth where you are the happiest and most productive, and you are not afaid to find out where that is.

Travel is something we've found to crave and seek out within the team, and the fact we're set up as a distributed team gives us all a lot of freedom to explore the world.

Vagabonding is one of the best books out there to think about travel in a whole new way. Rather than going to places for just a few days and cramming in seeing all the sights, it suggests that if we can we should spend weeks or months rather than days in a place. That way we can get to know the culture and people or even become part of it.

I've been lucky to do this several times (I'm originally British and I lived in Hong Kong for 6 months, San Francisco for 2 years, Tel Aviv for 3 months and Cape Town for 2 months, all within the last few years). I feel like it has opened my mind and made me a much better person. Mark Twain put this better than I can:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”

30. Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skillby Matthieu Ricard

“we find that the optimists have an undeniable advantage over the pessimists. Many studies show that they do better on exams, in their chosen profession, and in their relationships, live longer and in better health, enjoy a better chance of surviving postoperative shock, and are less prone to depression and suicide.” - Matthieu Ricard

The author of this book has sometimes been called the "happiest man in the world". He is a French Biochemist turned Buddhist monk and has been in a unique position to merge science with mindfulness and meditation.

The underlying theme of the book is that happiness is indeed within our control, and is much more a skill than something that simply happens to us.

One of the biggest revelations for me in this book was the way that it linked happiness with altruism, asserting that there is an undeniable correlation and that helping others can provide a much more lasting satisfaction and happiness than pleasure activities such as watching a movie or enjoying a banana split. This was something I had intuitively when I got into helping early stage founders, and reading it in this book made me recommit to helping others as a way of life, which in turn makes me very happy.

Another twenty powerful books

I originally intended this list to be 30 books. Here are some of the ones I struggled exclude from the main list, which made me choose to make this a list of 50:

The Best Service is No Service by Bill Price and David Jaffe
The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh
Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Will Buy by Cindy Alvarez
The Saint, the Surfer, and the CEO: A Remarkable Story about Living Your Heart's Desires by Robin Sharma
Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body by Michael Matthews
The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun
Zhuangzi: Basic Writings by Burton Watson
The Obstacle Is The Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
Complete Calisthenics: The Ultimate Guide to Bodyweight Exercise by Ashley Kalym
Leadership Is An Art by Max Depree
Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno
The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship by Don Miguel Ruiz
You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment by Thich Nhat Hahn
Turning the Mind Into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Photo credit: Ginny

Why we have a core value of transparency at our startup, and why the reasons don't matter

2014-09-21T19:19:06Z

Why we have a core value of transparency at our startup, and why the reasons don't matter

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 as part of the values of the company.

Since we defined our value of transparency within the culture as "Default to Transparency", we found many things within the company that we weren't being completely open about, and we put them out there for the world to see.

We've generally found that we are sharing a lot of things which are somewhat taboo or at least unusual to be shared publicly. As an example, here are some of the current numbers and things we share:

1.7m users have registered for Buffer.
165k users are active on a monthly basis (shared at least one post).
We have 28k paying customers on the Awesome or Business plans.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is currently $4.35m. We're generating around $360k a month.
The team is 24 people, spread all across the world.
We have a strong focus on culture-fit and sometimes it means firing great people who have different values.
That means Revenue Per Employee is around $181k.
All our SaaS metrics (LTV, churn, etc.) can be seen at our Baremetrics dashboard.
We share the salaries of the whole team in this spreadsheet. My salary is $175k.
We've raised $450k in funding and investors own around 14% of the company.

Why be so transparent?

For us, transparency came quite naturally. Myself and Leo always felt very comfortable and excited to share our learnings. It helped us get more feedback about decisions and it was a way to help others who are getting started.

We weren't always as transparent as we are today, our openness grew as the company expanded. We had a vision to continue becoming more open and we've been lucky to find people to join the team who encourage more openness rather than warning and being hesitant about potential downsides.

In the recent months, I've been asked many times why we would choose to be so transparent. If I'm completely honest, it's not something I had given all that much thought. I think being transparent is a little like creating a startup: if you focus on the downsides, you'll probably just never do it. At the same time, I wanted to have good answers and it felt responsible to give it real thought.

Here are 4 benefits I've seen for transparency:

1. Transparency breeds trust

One of the business books that's had a large impact on me as I've started to grow a team is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It's a leadership fable which explains five dysfunctions that often exist in teams, and how to solve them in order to become a more effective team.

The first of the five dysfunctions is "Absense of Trust":

In the book, the author describes it as follows:

"Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another. And if that sounds touchy-feely, let me explain, because there is nothing soft about it. It is an absolutely critical part of building a team. In fact, it’s probably the most critical." - Patrick Lencioni

Lencioni goes on to explain that being vulnerable amongst teammates and being comfortable having debate and conflict is critical to building trust.

For us, we've found that transparency is another great way to build trust in a team. If all the information about everything that's going on is freely available, that helps everyone to feel completely on board with decisions.

Based on my learnings from the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I believe the following to be true about transparency in relation to trust:

Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork.

This trust extends to customers, readers of our blog and anyone who interacts with us on any level. We believe that being open helps us to build trust and share our reasoning for the features we have, our pricing, what we blog about, and many other choices.

2. Transparency helps with innovation as a company grows

One of the interesting (and exciting) consequences of growing from a few founders to a 20+ person team and beyond, is that the innovation and decision making has to become distributed. It is both a challenge and a joy for me that I will most likely not be the one who figures out our next biggest product improvements and innovations.

That's where transparency comes in. As you grow and you expect your team to make the same decisions you would, they need to have all the details that you have. Keith Rabois put this really well in an article on First Round Capital:

"if you want people to make the same decisions that you would make, but in a more scalable way, you have to give them the same information you have" - Keith Rabois

3. Transparency leads to greater justice

Another key benefit we've seen, which wasn't necessarily our reason for transparency, is one which Whole Foods cares deeply about: eliminating unfairness and inequality.

We have a formula which determines the salaries of everyone in the team. It has a number of factors such as your role, experience and location. As an example, one factor the formula doesn't have, is gender. When you determine salaries in a more ad-hoc way or through negotation, I think a lot of inequality could creep in.

John Mackey, co-founder and CEO at Whole Foods said that with transparency "any kind of favoritism or nepotism is seen".

4. You open yourself up to more feedback

By practicing transparency, we've found that we get much more feedback on our decisions. For us, we try to take in all that feedback and make adjustments based on it. For example, when we shared our salary formula, we had a lot of comments from people mentioning to us that we weren't paying high enough salaries for people in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we made an adjustment to the formula. Now we're in a much better position to attract new team members in the Bay Area.

It's great to get this feedback. It can be a challenge: we've tried to work on ourselves and grow a team which enjoys and embraces the feedback we receive. As we grow, the feedback has increased too, which will become an interesting aspect to handle. It's one of the reasons we have a large customer happiness team and strive to provide great customer support.

In truth, we don't have a reason for our transparency, it's just one of our principles

One of the most interesting business books I've recently read is Joy at Work by Dennis Bakke. Bakke was the co-founder and CEO of a large US energy company called AES, which reached $8 billion in revenues and 50,000 employees. They operated in a highly unusual, decentralized business model and they had a core value of Fun. In his book, he argued that it is dangerous to tie benefits and reasons to your core values.

"I kept saying that our values were not responsible for the run-up in our share price and should not be blamed for any down-turns in the future." - Dennis Bakke

Bakke explained that as soon as you tie your values to performance, it means that you will question them when you hit a tough patch of your journey.

For us, we believe that transparency at its core is honesty, and it's a value that we want to live by no matter what.

It seems that it is very important that you determine good values if you choose to take this approach. For example, your methods should change a lot. Your principles or values should rarely need to be altered.

All that to say, despite all the benefits we see, those are not reasons that we are transparent. They are nice side effects, and there are downsides too, and we are happy with both aspects.

Photo credit: Farrukh

How we're trying to stay innovative as a 3.5 year old startup

2014-05-03T11:23:00Z

How we're trying to stay innovative as a 3.5 year old startup

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 for a while now”. It’s about 3.5 years since I started Buffer as a very simple Minimum Viable Product, and we’re now 23 people and doing over $3m in annual revenue. We still have a lot to do and in many ways it feels like just the beginning, but we’ve been at it for some time now.

We have some fairly consistent growth now in new customers, revenue and in people joining the team. In many ways, I think that up until now, everything we have been doing has been innovation. When I first had the idea for Buffer, I didn’t realize at the time but looking back it’s clear that was innovation in social media. The idea of a rolling schedule of posts was not something that existed in all the products. I wasn’t the only one to come up with that idea, but it’s now a feature of most products out there.

These days, with a little more stability, I’ve started to think about innovation again. There are a lot of interesting things happening in the social media tools and marketing space, and I think we need to keep moving and try out new ideas.

The challenge of innovating as you start to grow

One of the interesting things we’ve witnessed at Buffer is that as we’ve started to grow, it is increasingly difficult to do risky experiments.

I think the key reason it’s hard is that we’re in this situation where we’re still struggling to grow the team as fast as we want to. We still have more roles than people, and we’re all wearing many hats. We have an endless list of product enhancements, bug fixes and a/b tests, without even thinking about the crazier ideas we want to try. Also, everything we have on our list is somewhat validated, whereas the innovative ideas will most likely fail (but could have huge rewards if they succeed).

As a result of this situation and challenge, I think we’ve only done somewhat innovative things in the last year. At one point I concluded that we should have a “year of execution” and then eventually be at a point where we can focus on innovation. I think that’s risky, because we will never have completed everything we want to do for the core of the product and may never get to innovating.

A framework from LinkedIn to stay innovative

I was recently watching a fascinating conversation between Reid Hoffman and Matt Mullenweg. I can highly recommend it, they talk about many interesting topics. One of the things that caught my attention was something Reid mentioned in the middle of the conversation which Matt asked him to expand upon. It’s the framework they use at LinkedIn to stay innovative.

Core, Expand, Venture Projects

That’s the wording that LinkedIn use to describe the 3 key areas of activity which they try to balance. Here’s how we’ve tried to take this idea and translate it into what makes sense for us at Buffer:

Core: For us, core means to work on what Buffer already is. It’s to improve our onboarding flow, to fix bugs and figure out where we can make the experience smoother for people who use the product. This also includes lots of ongoing a/b tests to improve the landing page, pricing pages or increase activation rate of new users.

Expand: This is the term for any projects worked on which are logical expansions of what the product already is. For example, adding analytics broken down by team members for the social posts you share, or a calendar view, or better reporting on the business plans. These are all things we want to get to soon, and they’re fairly validated.

Venture Projects: We’re calling this Labs, we’ll probably create “Buffer Labs” in the same way that HubSpot and MailChimp have Labs. This is the area we’ve been neglecting for some time (or maybe just the time wasn’t right until now), and we want to make room for now on an ongoing basis. This is for crazy ideas that we want to just try and see what happens. We’ll always approach these super lean to avoid waste, but we have to take the leap somewhat too. If successful, these projects could move to “Expands”.

I think the idea here is to try and shoot for a good balance between these 3 areas, and to always be working on all 3. It feels like a useful framework to follow. For us, it is probably going to be a 50:30:20 ratio right now. We’ll be sure to share our progress on Core, Expands and Labs through the Open Blog and on Dribbble. It’ll be fun to see how this works. Want to be part of working on any of these areas? We’re always looking for people to join the ride.

Photo credit: M Glasgow

The different ways of traveling

2014-04-27T10:12:48Z

The different ways of traveling

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 different cultures.

On top of spending a week and a half with the rest of the Buffer team on retreats, in the last two occasions I have made a decision to stay or continue traveling in the same area beyond the end of the retreat.

For our latest retreat at the start of the month, 16 of us were together in Cape Town and I have stayed here 2 weeks so far beyond the retreat. I’m not sure yet whether I will continue to stay longer, or whether I will return to San Francisco. This uncertainty in itself is an example of a new way of traveling which I’ve been experimenting with.

How I’ve adjusted my traveling in the last few years

I’ve been very lucky to be born in a time where there is such a thing as work that doesn’t depend on where you are. We’ve set up Buffer as a completely distributed team (now 20 people across 18 cities in 5 continents), and I’ve had the opportunity to travel a lot already during the Buffer journey.

Leo and I started Buffer in the UK, and after 8 months we moved to San Francisco. We spent 6 months in San Francisco, then 6 months in Hong Kong, and then 3 months in Tel Aviv. After that I lived in San Francisco again for the last year and a half, with a little traveling at time.

The result, for me, of traveling to so many different places is that I started to carry much less with me to each subsequent place. I realized that you really don’t need much to travel, or even to live. In fact, you don’t need much in life at all. I’ve become a big fan of one bag living.

In addition, these experiences were the first time I’d experienced “living” in a place rather than “visiting” a place. Being able to stay 3 months or 6 months meant that I could make new friends, discover the culture in a deeper way and experience working and living there. It relieved a lot of the pressure of “seeing all the sights” in a short space of time, and even on shorter trips now I don’t try to cram too much in.

Traveling around Asia

Our second Buffer retreat was in Thailand in December last year. 10 of us stayed in Bangkok for a few days and then in 2 villas in Pattaya for a week where we worked together and went on a boat trip to a nearby island.

After the retreat, I decided to experiment with traveling by myself, something which I hadn’t properly done before. It was an incredible experience, so freeing for everything to be in your control. Even just the fact that it’s down to only you to get around is interesting, you have to be the one to ask directions or make the effort to meet others, rather than relying on a friend (which I sometimes do).

When we do a retreat, it’s quite a busy time and we fit a lot into the week, not to mention the natural excitement and pressure of meeting people, sometimes for the first time. After Thailand, I decided to travel to Singapore for 6 days, then Taipei for 4 days and then make my way to Japan for Christmas to see my brother, his wife and my little nephew.

It was a great experience to see all these different places in the space of a few weeks. At the same time, I didn’t manage to feel a part of any of these places, I didn’t get past experiencing things on the surface.

Staying in Cape Town

My recent experience in Cape Town is in contrast somewhat to that of traveling around Asia. Rather than visiting other countries in Africa (which would be a lot of fun) I decided to simply stay in the retreat location of Cape Town for a few extra weeks. After the week of retreat, I found an AirBnB place and I could start to build my early morning routine go to the gym again. I found a few coffee shops and a co-working space, and I got to know some people. I did a speaking event and met the startup community here.

With each day that passed, I felt like I got some extra insights into how things work here. I met locals and learned some of the Afrikaans words and some of the differences in how they speak English, too. I quickly stopped feeling like a tourist, although I have been on Safari, hiked to the Lion’s Head and had a kitesurfing lesson. During the week I’ve worked just like I would anywhere else.

I’ve become much more spontaneous with my plans and let things flow based on who I meet and how I feel. I have accommodation for only a couple more days here in Cape Town, so this afternoon I’ll start looking on AirBnB again for the next part of the city to experience.

In the future, I think I’ll take every opportunity to stay a few weeks or even a few months in a place, rather than trying to visit as many places as possible. I’ve found it much more fulfilling to become part of a place rather than simply seeing a place, even if it I’m only temporarily part of it.

Photo credit: Dimitry B

The choices we make when we build startups

2014-04-20T09:18:00Z

The choices we make when we build startups

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 decisions to make. I’ve been taking time to reflect and luckily I also have an awesome co-founder I regularly bounce these decisions off and an incredible team whom I sometimes get together with and have discussions about our direction.

Regardless of all the support I’m lucky to have, these decisions can sometimes be overwhelming to make. It’s easy to feel a lot of pressure due to the potential impact and consequences of the choices. One decision will literally take you down a completely different path than another.

The choices to make when building a startup

It’s interesting for me to look back at some of the key choices which have made a huge difference to how Buffer looks today. Here are some that come to mind:

being a distributed team (spread across 16 cities in 5 continents) rather than having everybody in the same city and office
not raising a Series A (and having no investors on our board) when the usual cycle came around after our $450k Seed
doing retreats 3 times a year (the last two were Pattaya, Thailand and Cape Town, South Africa)
choosing to not have a sales team and instead focus on self-serve and word of mouth marketing
serving small businesses rather than large enterprise customers
establishing cultural values early and being disciplined about living to them

The questionable impact of each choice we make

The interesting thing about all of the choices I’ve shared above that relate specifically to Buffer is that there are examples of companies succeeding by making the opposite choices in each case. It’s incredibly difficult to say that each choice specifically played any role in any success we have had.

That isn’t to say that the choices haven’t changed the type of company we are. I think they have absolutely shaped what Buffer is today. However, if you were to try and attribute these choices purely to success (maybe take revenue as the metric), then I think we could probably be just as successful with different choices.

Ev Williams has a great example of this around the famous Google 20% time and whether we can say that this contributed to their success:

Google is one of the most successful companies ever. Google gives its employees the ability to spend 20% of their time on whatever they want. Therefore, 20% time is a great idea. Is it? Or was Google successful because theyre brilliant engineers who solved the right problem at the right timekilling it despite the lack of focus 20% time causes? I dont know, and neither does anyone else.

Let’s not always try to tie choices to success

One of the best books I’ve recently read around company culture is Joy at Work by Dennis Bakke. Bakke was the founder and CEO of AES which earned $8 billion in revenues and employed 50,000 people. A fascinating detail is that they achieved this with a highly unusual business philosophy and company culture.

One of the core values that Bakke set in place at AES was Fun. His quest was to create the most “fun” workplace ever. In his journey to fulfill this vision, he found that some supported him and others didn’t. Most notably, he mentioned that several board members had been very skeptical of his approaches but supported him a year later when AES had some of it’s fastest growth. Bakke argued that the value of Fun should not be tied to success nor failure:

I kept saying that our values were not responsible for the run-up in our share price and should not be blamed for any downturns in the future.

This was a point that took me a long time to understand. If we don’t attribute our choices to success or failure, how can we assess if we are on the right track? I think in this case, the point is that our values should hold true in either case, and we should stand by them.

This is the approach we have started to take at Buffer with our cultural values such as Happiness and Positivity or Defaulting to Transparency. I can’t say that creating a company where everyone is happy is something that will make us more successful, and I can’t say that being fully transparent about revenues, user numbers, salaries and other details helps us grow faster than other companies. These are simply values we have chosen to live by.

Even choices like serving small businesses rather than enterprise customers, or being distributed rather than having a single office are decisions which will be difficult to assess at any time. If we fail eventually, I don’t think we could easily tie it to a single one of these choices, and if we succeed we would be wrong to say it was because of these decisions. I think, therefore, the key is to use our intuition and make the changes we feel are right - both in order to succeed, and also to create the place we want to work.

Photo credit: DennisM2

How my co-founder and I structure ourselves as CEO and COO

2014-03-30T20:46:07Z

How my co-founder and I structure ourselves as CEO and COO

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, and soon after Leo became CMO. We had grown up a little and were not just a bunch of people hacking on a product. There was a little more structure and it was helpful on the inside and from the outside to reflect that.

For half a year Leo used the CMO title, but it never felt quite right. The CMO role felt quite narrow and specialized, and Leo had much more to contribute than that. He had always helped me to think through other areas. In addition, Leo has a real growth mindset which made sense for marketing, but also for much more than that. The company was growing fast and it made sense for Leo to have more responsibilities than purely marketing.

How we initially structured the COO role

I asked Leo to become COO in November last year. I wasn’t really sure how that would work and what it would change, but I knew it would definitely be different. It felt right, and exciting.

Leo and I spoke and reflected on the key strengths he had and how we wanted to have him involved in all areas to push us further. The title felt perfect since I would describe Leo as someone who really thrives with operations. He will always get everything done in his list, no matter what. And he’ll always choose to have more in his list than anyone else. This is something I’m incredibly inspired by.

We structured ourselves with the analogy of a train. I would be thinking about laying the track ahead in the right direction, and Leo would help the train to run on time and move fast. In practice, this translated to Leo being in sync with every aspect of the company and helping us to improve (product, customer happiness, marketing, growth). He’d sync up regularly with everyone and be someone who could help with setting goals and brainstorming how to keep to them.

Some struggles and learnings with the CEO/COO balance

One of the things that spurred the role adjustment for Leo was that we were right in the middle of going through our quiet pivot. We had realized that growth had slowed with the vision we were currently on, and we made adjustments. In some ways we were moving at our slowest pace for some time and we knew we needed to make some changes. We adjusted the vision and it felt appropriate to rethink our roles too.

We spent about 3 weeks with the “Leo kicks Buffer into a higher gear across all areas” setup. I think it was a welcome change from everyone in the team, however right away something didn’t feel quite right for me.

Leo and I were both excited about his role being to help us move faster. I was happy to try and stay focused on figuring out where we need to go in various areas and with the company as a whole. The problem we found, was that it was almost impossible to clearly separate these two processes. If Leo was working with someone to try and set goals and keep to them, he inevitably had to make decisions which affected our direction.

It felt like with the new structure we were suddenly both involved in every decision. The goal of the new role for Leo was to speed things up, but with both of us discussing every decision, things were sometimes grinding to a halt, especially in cases where we didn’t immediately agree.

This put a lot of strain on our relationship as co-founders, and it’s probably the only time I can think of in the whole lifetime of Buffer so far where I’ve had some really tough conversations with Leo. It was exacerbated by the fact we were hitting some of our slowest growth months ever and both felt pressure to pick things back up. I was confused and needed to quickly figure out why it wasn’t working.

How we came to the current CEO/COO structure

In the first week of December we were in Thailand for our second company retreat. It was during our time there that Leo and I had a lot of lengthy walking meetings around Pattaya about the structure of our roles. We talked a lot. I couldn’t think of a more perfect setting for us to figure these things out. We’re both optimistic people and despite the tough conversations we knew we’d come to a conclusion about how things should work. We had gratitude for how lucky we were to be in Thailand and had built a company to a stage where this problem had arisen.

I’m the kind of person who likes to solve problems. I guess that’s why I naturally enjoyed programming (though I rarely code anymore). Therefore, I always like to try and talk things out until we can agree. As an introvert, however, I often do some of my best thinking and have inspiration when I spend time alone to contemplate. So, after several days of discussions with Leo, one evening I took to my room and started reading up everything I could find about the COO role.

I was surprised by how many different definitions of the COO role there were out there. This really confused me at first. For example, one person may say it’s the CEO’s job to motivate and manage the team as a whole and ensure execution of day-to-day tasks, whereas another person may say it’s the COO’s job to manage day-to-day running of a company and help the CEO have room to think on a higher level.

Everything became clear to me when I found this key insight:

"There is commonality across different businesses between the roles of CMO, CFO and most other executive functions, but not so with the COO, where the roles are hugely varied. Maybe the best way to think about it is that the COO does the things that the CEO doesn’t." - Nic Brisbourne

If you look at the job descriptions of various COOs, you’ll find that they could be completely different from each other, sometimes even opposing. The reason is that it all depends on the strengths of the CEO. It was starting to make sense to me that the best CEO/COO relationships are when the two are very complementary to each other. This got me excited since Leo and I have always found we excel in different areas.

"A COO’s value is designed to be complimentary to the CEO. The truth is that no CEO, no matter how experienced, can possibly cover the complex aspects of managing all the functions of a technology company. Its better to divide and conquer. By recruiting a COO, the CEO can focus on the aspects of the role that he/she truly excels at and enjoys the most." - Firas Raouf

So I got to work brainstorming all the areas of the company and which I felt confident about running myself. Once I did that, it became clear how Leo and I should work together. I hopped onto a call with Leo to explain my discovery.

What Leo and I do as COO and CEO

When I shared my learnings around the COO role and how we could work together, Leo was receptive to the adjustments and we were both really excited for the new structure. We’ve used this structure for the last three and a half months and it is working incredibly well.

The key thing we have done is to determine our key areas of focus and embrace the idea that we should not be the key person running anything. It was a key learning that if we’re running something ourselves, we’re not doing it as well as it could be done and we’re also neglecting other areas. So we aim to fire ourselves repeatedly and move to a position where we’re helping with higher level vision, coaching and we’re “being reported to”. This has started to work very well, and it feels like we’re moving faster than ever.

Here’s how Leo and I work together now:

For a while, and especially after the previous experience of stepping on each others’ toes, we tried to make these areas completely separated. Over time, we found there is a lot of natural overlap. Our advisor Hiten shared an analogy which helped us a lot (I’m paraphrasing here):

"Think of it like Batman and Robin. So if Product leads a project, it’s Batman and Growth supports with the right numbers and is Robin."

This is how we approach everything now. The Batman and Robin method helps us have one person who makes that final call, but we can both support each other too.

Photo credit: Hans Splinter

The quiet pivot

2014-03-23T18:54:19Z

The quiet pivot

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 vision. It’s interesting to reflect on how we came to realize that a change was needed, and how we went about finding our new path.

The original vision

The earliest idea of where we wanted to take Buffer was that we aimed to be a sharing standard:

Our vision is to become a new sharing standard across the web and apps, and to set the bar for great customer support.

For us, the idea with this was to be a very widespread consumer product with a low price point. We had been inspired by Evernote and casually used the phrase “The Evernote of Social Media” to describe Buffer. Evernote at the time had tens of millions of users and its business model was super simple: an optional pro version at $5/mo.

In the beginning, we had a $5/mo plan and a $20/mo plan, in line with this philosophy. Over time we adjusted our price to $10/mo and dropped the higher priced plan. Interestingly, for some time we had a $100/mo plan and people very readily paid that to manage additional social media accounts and team members. At the time, however, we were entirely focused on becoming a widespread tool and decided we must stay simple. We ditched the higher priced plan and attempted to scale as a platform rather than adding more power to the product itself. If we wanted to be a button across the web and apps, it had to be a simple idea.

What we learned attempting our original vision

In some ways I wish we had perhaps realized sooner that our vision to be a sharing standard was not going to work. At the same time, we gained many benefits by pushing ourselves to be a widespread product used by many individuals and small businesses.

Growth slowed, conversion rates dropped

We made a lot of progress in becoming a sharing standard. We made partnerships with Feedly, Pocket, Echofon, Reeder, TweetCaster and many other apps and services. I believe these integrations are still incredibly useful for our users (I personally am using the Feedly and Pocket integrations daily).

One of the key learnings we had in fulfilling a large part of our original vision was that partnerships and integrations rarely give you distribution. A key part of this vision working for us was tied to the integrations leading to many new Buffer users. We certainly got a good number, however we always had much more success with signups direct from our own web and mobile apps.

Not only did we not get a significant number of new users from the integrations, we also observed a drastic drop in conversion rates (to active users and eventually paying customers) for people who came from 3rd party apps. In hindsight this is not too surprising, since these users are not in that app primarily to use Buffer.

The benefits of freemium

While we found many flaws in our original vision and eventually decided that we needed to make an adjustment, I couldn’t be happier with the result of that journey.

Luckily for us, generating revenue was always a key focus (we charged from day 1). Therefore, even though we focused on having a wide reach, we always looked at our conversion rates and cared about revenue. In the journey of growing to 1 million users, we grew to significant revenues, to the extent we could be profitable and not have pressure to raise further funding.

In addition to building a profitable business, we have a true freemium / SaaS scenario and scale to be able to grow by understanding user patterns and running a/b tests and other experiments. We have 2,500 new users every day and consistent conversion rates to our $10/mo awesome plan as well as $50+/mo business plans.

I’ve observed that as startups grow, they tend to move up market. They introduce more powerful offerings and charge more. They start doing enterprise sales. We’re even on this journey now. At the same time, it’s incredibly powerful to have a free or lower priced product and have a large top of the funnel. We’re lucky to have both, and it’s much harder to try to fill that room at the bottom later.

The valley of death

Something that’s become increasingly clear to me as I’ve traveled this path is that I think there is a dangerous middle ground between trying to be super widespread and mainstream (and monetizing via ads) and focusing much more on value and power (and monetizing via subscription payments).

The way I see it, is that if you want to monetize through ads you probably need 100M+ users. If you want to build a solid freemium offering you only need a few million users, if that. Pure SaaS and it’s even less. But if you build something that people won’t pay for directly and end up with only 10 or 20 million users, you might be in a tough spot.

We’re now completely focused on building a world-class freemium and SaaS product to solve problems around social media.

The new vision for Buffer

As a result of our learnings and reflection on the slowing growth, Leo and I had a series of conversations towards the end of last year and decided on our new vision:

The vision for Buffer is to be the simplest and most powerful social media tool, and to set the bar for great customer support.

When we decided to make the change, we chose to approach it in a lean way. We didn’t talk too much about it until it really started working. To begin with, we simply brought back higher priced plans and reached out to some key customers hitting the limits of existing plans.

Fast forward to today, we have over 1,000 business customers and it already contributes 15% of our revenue. I’m excited about our new path. We’ve found it is incredibly fun to work with larger customers who have real problems and a need for a powerful social media solution.

Photo credit: takasuii

The Yin and Yang of a great co-founder relationship

2014-03-16T20:01:23Z

The Yin and Yang of a great co-founder relationship

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 then more recently working with Leo for the last 3 years has been an absolute joy. It’s fascinating to me how co-founders need to be different in many ways and at the same time have shared values they are aligned on. It’s a real art to find someone who you work well with and trust.

I recently watched a video of an interview with DHH from Basecamp and found the audience question on co-founders interesting and very in-line with my own experiences on what makes a good match.

Complementing each other in skill-set

"When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary." - William Wrigley Jr

I think it’s super valuable to have different strengths as founders. I often see fantastic products from great engineers and product people, where I believe the product should be used by far more people. It’s probably because the founders are not naturally inclined to do marketing, and so keep working on the product.

"I see a number of startups where the founders are too alike. Either they agree on everything or even worse they do the same thing. Like starting a company with two programmers - I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think you need skills, and you need mentality, to complement each other." - DHH

In the early days of Buffer, I reached a point with the product where it had a couple hundred users and some paying customers, and I knew in my head that I needed to switch to marketing. There was validation that the product in the exact form it was in, was already useful to people. There was clearly more people out there who would find it valuable as well. However as a developer it was a real challenge to be effective at switching to marketing instead of fixing bugs or building out new features. Luckily for me, that’s when Leo came on board as my co-founder and had a massive impact since he was a great marketer.

It’s also useful to have different mindsets on the business aspects too:

"For me and Jason on skills, Jason was all about design and I was all about programming. So that was just a natural fit right there. On running the business, Jason is more of a risk-taker and I’m more conservative. I’m more about running the numbers and making sure everything’s alright, and Jason’s more like let’s just rip away everything and try something new and take a leap. I think you need both of those things to pull the business in the right way." - DHH

For me and Leo, we’re both scrappy and take the lean mindset. At the same time, Leo is probably more inclined to push something out of the door extremely early, whereas I like to be a little more calculated and logical and get the best balance of learning and not wasting time by building something out without validation, but still shipping something quite polished.

One of the most interesting ways Leo and I complement each other is on “doing” vs “reflecting”. I often joke that if Leo and I each have a daily todo list with 5 items on it, there is absolutely no question that Leo will get through his 5 tasks. For me, I struggle at times to get through everything. I work hard to be productive, however I also like to take time to reflect on the direction we’re going and ponder changes. We both aspire to be more like each other in this regard: I’d love to just crank through more, and Leo says to me he’d like to reflect more and sometimes realize not to do some tasks. We talk very regularly and help each other, and we end up at a nice equilibrium.

Aligned with each other on values and vision

"At the same time, you have to have some overlap too. Jason and I obviously share a lot of opinions about how to run a business and what is important and our values are incredibly alike, in terms of creating a sustainable long-term business that does well for both its customers and its employees. So you can’t just be polar opposites and expect that everything’s going to be daisy. There’s got to be overlap on important cultural values in the company, but outside of that seek as much diversity as you can." - DHH

The hard part of finding a great co-founder is that you want to sufficiently complement each other, but at the same time it’s vital to agree on fundamental values and what you want to do with the company. If one of you wants to flip the company within a couple of years and the other wants to make it their life’s work, it’s going to be difficult to agree on key decisions.

From an early stage it became clear that Leo and I were very aligned on many of the values which became the Buffer culture. I introduced Leo to How to Win Friends and Influence People and we spent countless hours discussing the principles and examples. Leo has always had tremendous gratitude for the opportunities he has had and is one of the most positive and happy people I know, and that was something I aspired to focus on more. I always enjoyed being very open and transparent about my learnings and progress and this came completely naturally to Leo too and he enjoyed pushing us further in that direction.

P.S. We need help with many areas of Buffer right now, to complement the existing great team. Check out our openings

Why we go on international retreats 3 times a year with our startup

2014-03-09T21:02:00Z

Why we go on international retreats 3 times a year with our startup

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 not shared that much about and can be misunderstood, so I wanted to write a little about why we choose to do retreats.

Three times a year we gather the whole company together. The last one was in Thailand (10 people), and our next is coming up in a month’s time in Cape Town (15 people). Buffer covers the expenses (flights, accommodation, most of the meals, fun activities).

Truly getting to know each other

There are an incredible number of benefits which come from us being a distributed team. At the same time, it means that if we don’t arrange retreats we would never meet each other.

It still blows my mind that we can have someone join the team and work together (very effectively) for several months without meeting in person. With chatting all day via HipChat and video calling frequently using Sqwiggle, we even get to know each other very well. However, there’s something magical that happens when you meet in person. In a retreat setting it’s even more powerful. We have casual meals together and do activities on off days. We can learn about what makes each other tick and what our true passions are.

Once you return to your own location (Buffer team members are spread across 12 cities on 5 continents), the conversations you have with team members are enhanced. You know the tone of somebody’s voice and the way they approach problems and discussions. You read their emails differently. This changes things, and is why we’ve found retreats to be not only a fun part of our culture, but an absolute necessity.

Live and work smarter, not harder

As a company, one of our values is to “live smarter, not harder”. This means to think about what affects how well we work and try to optimize to be more productive. It means that almost always, working more is not the answer. We’ve had a number of occasions where we’ve been at full capacity and feeling overwhelmed, and after a brainstorm figured out how to do more without spending more time or working through lunch.

In our “live smarter, not harder” value in the culture deck, we have the following point:

You choose to be at the single place on Earth where you are the happiest and most productive, and you are not afraid to find out where that is.

It’s our belief that environment can fundamentally affect how happy and productive we are. As an example, I think the people you surround yourself with can change who you are and what you achieve.

We do retreats so that everyone has the chance to experience new cultures and grow more open minded. Often team members will travel for some weeks around the retreat or stay in the location beyond the 10 days we spend together. I think this is great for people and helps Buffer as a whole.

Choosing not to live the deferred life plan

"And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later." - Randy Komisar

One of my favorite things about doing retreats is that we’re choosing to travel right now. Often travel or moving can be something that you delay for many years. It’s easy to convince yourself that the only way to travel or explore is to work for 5 years and then take 6 months off between jobs. At Buffer, anyone can travel or move anytime. It’s hardly even noticeable.

This is important because as a startup we want to move fast and make decisions as soon as we see that they are necessary. Whether it’s killing a feature which is not getting much engagement or introducing a new support channel, it can be easy to put these things off. Especially big changes like adjusting our pricing or making salaries completely transparent, it’s easy to stay where we are and avoid change.

We try to weave this notion of doing what you love and what you’re passionate about and believe in, right into the culture of the company. Retreats stretch us and remind us that we can do whatever we want, even travel 25 hours across the other side of the world. Once you’re there, you realize it wasn’t that big of a deal, and you can push yourself in so many other ways too.

The concept of the deferred life plan is something I discovered from Randy Komisar:

We get an insane amount done during the week together

When we go on retreat, it’s not a vacation (it’s as fun as one). We work together for a week and then we enjoy some awesome activities at the weekend (like jet skiing, visiting a tropical island by boat or going on safari).

We’re still figuring out the exact right setup and schedule for retreats. So far, hacking together has worked very well and become a key part of retreat week. We’re inspired by how Automattic do this and have scaled it:

"From our very first meetup of 8 people all the way through to last week’s at 122 people, we’ve always spent a good portion of the week co-working on projects and launching them at the end of the week."

Retreats are some of our most productive weeks of the year. In fact, at our last retreat in Pattaya, Thailand, we built most of Buffer for Business and launched it just a week later. Three months later, Buffer for Business generates over 15% of our total revenue, $60,000 last month.

Want to be part of a Buffer retreat? We’re looking for people to help us provide support and build awesome features for customers. Check out our openings

Photo credit: Robert Schrader

4 short stories of our attempts to be lean at our startup

2014-03-02T22:20:00Z

4 short stories of our attempts to be lean at our startup

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 without his writings and videos opening my mind to a different way of approaching a startup.

For me, lean is completely about building and approaching things in a way which minimizes the amount of wasted time and effort. A startup is a scary adventure to embark upon because there are so many unknowns. It’s different to a service business in that you have no idea whether your product will actually be adopted. As a result, it’s easy to accidentally build products or features which, in the end, don’t resonate as you had hoped.

Being disciplined about approaching things in a lean way is incredibly difficult. In theory it seems straight-forward. In practice it’s super challenging, and we’ve had some hits and some big misses too.

1. The founding of Buffer: going from an idea to paying customers in 7 weeks

When I finished studying, I was completely set on creating a startup. So I did just that, and I made it completely official. I told everyone I was doing a startup, I incorporated the business and we got a small government grant. I built a product and kept adding more to it. In the end, I hadn’t validated that it was enough of a pain point for people, and it grew very slowly.

With Buffer, I took a different approach. It was just a side project, and I was in no rush to call it more than that. I stopped myself as soon as I realized I’d spent a couple of days coding without validating the need. Then I sat down and thought about how I could see whether people need this product, without building it.

I created a landing page which looked just like it would if the product had existed. That’s the beauty of landing pages, they have almost the same flow through them whether the product exists or not. So I could see whether people would sign up for the product, and then ask them for their email at the end of the process.

I had email conversations and a couple of Skype calls with people who gave me their email. I talked about the problem I was solving and learned a huge amount from these interactions. This is known as customer development and I can’t recommend doing it highly enough.

This process proved to be a success. Through the conversations I learned that others had the same problem and were receptive to a solution. That gave me the confidence to build it, and 7 weeks later I had the first version of the product. 3 days after launch, someone started paying for Buffer. We’ve steadily grown recurring revenue since then. February just came to a close and revenue came in at $333,000.

2. Creating a brand new Buffer browser extension experience

One of Buffer’s key features right from the beginning has been that we have a browser extension which allows you to very easily share a web page or blog post you’re reading. You can share it right away or schedule it to be posted later to all the key social networks.

Throughout 2012 we saw a huge rise in sharing of pictures to Facebook, and we started sharing more pictures ourselves. We found they did very well and received a lot of engagement. That’s when we had the idea to transform our extension to allow sharing of different types of media: links, text or picture. We wanted to make it super easy to share a picture from the page you’re looking at.

So (and here comes our big mistake) we got to work building a brand new version of our browser extension to allow you to pick images off the page to share to Facebook or Twitter. It looked a little like this:

We spent several months working on this alongside other product tasks, and spent some time polishing the experience. We loved the experience ourselves, we were enjoying using it to much more easily share pictures from the page. Then, we were starting to think about when we would launch it to everyone, we though “maybe we can let a few people try it out first”. We almost launched it to everyone at once, which would have been a very bad idea.

We pondered when we could get some people to test it, we thought maybe we could send an email in the next week. Then we thought, why not do that tomorrow? Or how about we send a Tweet right now and ask people if they want to try it. So that’s what we did, and we got on Skype with people and asked them to share their screen and reaction as we switched on the new extension experience.

The feedback from those screen-sharing Skype calls was shocking. 6 out of 7 people were completely confused about the new UI. They thought the picture tab would let them choose the thumbnail for the link they were sharing to Facebook (you could already choose that in the link tab). The biggest mistake we made was that we knew exactly what we wanted to use the feature for ourselves, so the UI made complete sense to us. It wasn’t clear at all for someone seeing it fresh. The worst part is we could have known this months earlier if we’d just done a few mockups and shown those to these same users.

3. Brand New Buffer: a completely redesigned web experience and new iPhone app

In the Summer of 2012 we started to think about some key improvements we should make to the web dashboard for Buffer. We had accounts listed horizontally and this meant there was a natural limit by the width of the page. We wanted to create an interface that would be more flexible. What started as a simple adjustment from a horizontal menu to a vertical menu became a half year project including a complete redesign, new features and unified web and mobile app experiences and design.

One of the core tenets of lean startup is to have small batch sizes. Somehow that went completely out of the window and we decided that we needed to group all of these changes together. We got hungry for a big splash launch and decided that’s what we’d aim for. We envisaged being on all the tech sites and having a surge of new users.

As with everything, this project took longer than we expected. In the end, we managed to wrap it up before the end of the year, which was a relief.

We were successful in getting that big splash we had dreamed of. We emailed our several hundred thousand users and wrote two blog posts. We were covered by Lifehacker, TechCrunch, Forbes, VentureBeat, TheNextWeb and more. I remember the excitement as I took this screenshot of our Google Analytics real-time where we had 766 people on Buffer at the same time:

It was several months later when we started to truly focus on metrics and growth that we saw the mistake this big launch was. The problem with grouping all your changes together is that it’s difficult to see how each of the individual changes has impacted everything.

From one day to the next, we had reduced our overall activation by 25%. We count a user as “activated” if they connect a social network and post at least once using Buffer. Activation dropped from 51% to 39% as a result of this launch. In the cloud of buzz and signups, we had no idea and no reason to suspect there was a problem. Upon closer inspection, it was even worse. Taking activation for web by itself, it had actually dropped by 50%. The new design and signup flow caused activation the web contribution to go from 24% to 12%:

The only positive finding was that our new iPhone app was certainly a success, almost doubling activation for people signing up from the iPhone app:

The combination of activation decreasing so much on web and iPhone activation increasing made it hard to see there was a problem. It took us several months to adjust our signup flow to bring the activation back up to previous levels. If we had a/b tested and looked at the metrics of the new web experience with a small percentage of our users before going live with it, we could have identified the drop in activation and fixed it before our big launch. We could have had months of higher activation.

The lesson from this for us is to always launch things in small batches, and to measure the impact of everything we do.

4. How Buffer for Business came into existence, and how it became 25% of our revenue in just a few months

Half way through 2013, Leo and I started to think about our vision for Buffer and whether it was playing out in a way we were happy with. Our vision was to be a sharing platform across the web and apps, and we’d made a lot of progress with our Buffer button across websites and blogs, and our iOS SDK inside Feedly, Pocket, Instapaper, Echofon and others. Our growth was still good, but it was slowing.

We had the amazing chance to meet with Jason Lemkin, who is incredibly experienced and sharp about what it takes to succeed as a SaaS company. We had thought for some time about expanding Buffer and having a product focused on business customers. So far, we’d talked ourselves out of it with the common argument that we should stay focused. Jason gave us some of the best and most controversial advice I’ve had, which was to “do everything, just try it”.

We left that meeting excited and decided we might as well move ahead and see what happens. My co-founder Leo took the lead on investigating the social media problems and needs of businesses.

We had two key product ideas which could be attractive to businesses. The first one we were super excited about: a way to allow the whole organization to connect their personal social media accounts and help spread the news of product launches and press releases. We thought it could be huge for marketing departments. Our second idea was an extension of Buffer, to make it work for businesses and agencies with large numbers of social media accounts and team members.

Leo reached out to several existing customers hitting the limits of our $10/mo plan and jumped on dozens of video calls. He asked them about their problems and shared our ideas to see if they resonated. We were so excited about the idea of supercharging marketing by making use of the whole company’s employees, and were surprised by how few people wanted that product. The best feedback Leo had was from a head of marketing who said:

"I can’t rely on employees to do our marketing. It’s a nice to have, but we wouldn’t pay for that alone."

The idea to make Buffer more powerful was a huge hit. People at the limit of the $10/mo plan were desperate to use Buffer with more than 12 social accounts, which was our current limit. We had a lot of pent-up demand.

So we moved ahead on allowing people to use Buffer for more than the current $10/mo plan. We reflected on how to do this in a lean way and came to the conclusion we could do it without any new features or work on billing. We charged them through the feature to create and change a billing plan in Stripe, and put them onto a plan in our admin area that removed the 12 accounts limit. With no new product or marketing, we suddenly had 50 customers and Buffer for Business generated $10,000 in new revenue, 6% of our total.

We then kept talking to these customers and discovered a handful of additional problems we could solve for them and include in a new product, which we launched as Buffer for Business a couple of months later. It’s been a big hit and is already 25% of our monthly revenue.

P.S. Like using the lean startup approach to build products? I’d love your help - we’re growing the team at Buffer.

Photo credit: Betsy Weber

What it's really like to grow a team when you're focused on culture-fit

2014-02-23T20:48:00Z

What it's really like to grow a team when you're focused on culture-fit

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 understanding at all. Company culture is one of those areas. Sure, I had come across the term and I even took an organizational behavior course while studying, but it only really became real for me when I was running a team and it started to grow.

How we became focused on culture-fit

In the first two and a half years of Buffer we slowly grew to 11 people. In December 2012 (2 years in) we were 7 people and I had started to think about company culture. I envisaged we would start to add more definition around what our culture was, and in early 2013 we did so, collaboratively creating our culture deck.

It was right around this time and the few months following where we had quite a lot of turbulence. We realized that as we started to put together the culture deck, a number of our friends we were working with were not completely aligned in living the values. We had to make a number of difficult team changes. Letting people go was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, especially in the cases where they were good friends.

Since then, we have hired (and fired) in a very focused way based on our culture. We also introduced Buffer Bootcamp, a 45 day period for us as well as the new team member to decide whether it feels like a great fit. Everyone goes through the Bootcamp (there are no exceptions) and usually people receive several pieces of feedback. The ratio that’s emerged is that around 70% of people move on from Bootcamp to become fully on board team members.

How the team has grown at Buffer over 3 years

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at the growth of the team in the last few years. We’ve been running just over 3 years, and we’re now 17 people.

The path hasn’t been completely smooth. For the first year and a half we didn’t fire anybody. In a lot of ways, we thought we had it all figured out and prided ourselves in having never let anyone go. Here’s the reality of startup life, at least in terms of how we’ve experienced it:

The chart above reflects one of my most difficult and important learnings so far with Buffer: that if you want to have a great team and a great company, you’re inevitably going to fire people at times. And I think ‘fire’ is often a strong term (but a correct one) since for us it has usually been a culture-fit decision rather than productivity or a case of someone doing something that would be cause for immediate dismissal (this has not happened in our journey so far).

I’ve since become comfortable that our team growth is much healthier if it looks like the second half of the graph. It’s worth noting that although it looks like a smooth upward trend in the last few months, this is simply because we’re hiring faster. We’ve brought people on and let others go in the same month a number of times. I believe that there will always be people who don’t gel with the team and where it makes sense to part ways. We’ve decided that at Buffer this will be part of the process of creating a team which is super aligned and fun. As Carolyn has put it to me before, at Buffer we’re “birds of a feather”. It’s a place where if you’re a good fit, you’ll feel like you’ve found home.

Photo credit: Antoine Gady

Firing myself, again

2014-01-26T00:43:30Z

Firing myself, again

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 thinking about the role in this way, and it has been an incredibly powerful mindset as Buffer has grown.

It's been fascinating to see how this idea of firing yourself has been reflected not only in the evolution of my role, but also our co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Leo, and our Chief Technical Officer Sunil. I'd say it is probably happening right now for Carolyn, our Chief Happiness Officer, too.

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back on the journey so far and share the times where myself or others have fired ourselves.

When to first think about firing yourself

It seems quite clear to me now that we're 15 people and I've replaced myself a few times, that this notion of firing yourself is one which is very useful to embrace as a founder. As a founder you're always thinking about the whole business, and so by hiring people for your key skill tasks, they can focus fully and do a better job.

I have the opportunity to regularly meet with founders and recently my meetings have caused me to think about when the right time might be to start thinking about firing yourself from the first key skill-based activity you are working on.

First you need to achieve product/market fit

Before any kind of scaling, I think its essential to hit product/market fit. This is the point when it's clear your product works. People are sticking around, they’d be super disappointed if you went away, and youre growing fast. You can feel the potential when you've hit this stage.

To put it another way: until you hit it, your only job as a startup founder is to work on reaching product/market fit.

Keep working on a skill long enough to hire well

Even once you've hit product/market fit, you probably want to keep doing your skill tasks long enough to truly see how useful it will be to have someone else in that role full-time. For your first skill-role, perhaps coding or marketing depending on whether youre a technical or non-technical founder, you will probably not have the challenge of wanting to let go of the role too soon. Most people hold on too long, and sacrifice slow down growth of the company. I certainly have done this myself. However, once you've fired yourself from that first task, for subsequent ones which youre learning from scratch you might want to do them long enough to see the full opportunity and understand the area well enough to ask the right questions when hiring.

Start doing many things at once (it will become chaotic)

As a founder, especially as a CEO, you're probably going to be doing many things at once. You'll at least be thinking about many things at once. My role has shifted from actually doing many things to helping to run many things. As you grow you might find you have a larger impact by becoming an editor and thinking about how the team can move faster, as well as helping to refine some of the details and keep everything moving in the right direction.

As you gain more traction, you will find increasingly many areas of the product and company to stay focused on. New useful roles will emerge which you didn't have to begin with. What's worked well for me is to embrace this expansion and try to handle many of these areas. When everything feels somewhat chaotic, its a great time to think about firing yourself from one or more of the areas. And that chaos is healthy I think. It can be hard, I've had many times where I felt I was letting people down by being stretched in many directions.

You'll start leaving money on the table, so become aggressive about firing yourself

Once you've grown to a stage where youre juggling many different areas and key metrics are growing healthily month to month, you'll start to leave money on the table by holding onto tasks. You'll be doing a less adequate job in many areas than someone else could who is more experienced in that speciality and has an opportunity to focus on the task full-time. It's key to start being reflective about areas of the company for which this is happening. It's then great to start hiring to remove yourself from the day-to-day of some of the roles.

The times my co-workers and I have fired ourselves

I first fired myself in a small way when Leo and I were fundraising after AngelPad demo day in the last 2 months of 2011. We needed to keep our traction going, so Tom had come on board as our first developer other than myself, and we also hired a contract marketer so that Leo could step back a little from the content marketing. It worked well: we continued to grow at a great pace and managed to secure $450,000 in funding from great investors.

A couple of months later, our support volume had grown quite high and Leo had been the one who decided to take it on so that Tom and I could continue building out the product. We soon realized that it was quite hard to manage, and that we wanted to do more than just manage customer support. Its now a core part of the vision of Buffer which is to be the simplest and most powerful social media tool, and to set the bar for great customer support. Thats when we started to grow our Happiness team and Leo gradually let go of support completely, to stay focused on Marketing, PR and Partnerships/BD.

Half way through 2012 while in Tel Aviv, we realized that Android was a huge potential area of growth and so I spent a couple of months learning Android and preparing a new version of our very minimal app which had thus far been developed by someone on a freelance basis. It was a real struggle to fit in learning Android as well as making progress on the actual app, alongside all my other tasks which were less maker and more manager. This is when I wrote my article about transitioning from a maker to a manager. Shortly afterwards Sunil joined the team as an Android hacker. He eventually fired himself from this role, too, and became our CTO.

In late 2012 and early 2013 we started to grow the engineering team further, and I began to code less and less. My key focuses were hiring, culture, investor relations and overall product and growth coordination. About 3 months into 2013 I decided to drop coding and become more focused on product. Stopping thinking so much about technical details helped me stay focused on the needs of the user.

Sunils role evolved a lot in the first half of 2013. Tom finished at Buffer early in the year (now doing great things with Sqwiggle which we use on a daily basis) and Sunil quickly switched over to Web and helped us grow a lot there. We then started looking for someone to take over Android so that he could focus on Web and eventually get into a position of overseeing all of technology at Buffer. In April we made him CTO and Carolyn became our CHO.

The most recent example of firing myself has been to step away from the day-to-day operations on the product side of things. Im still very much involved with setting the direction and being an editor of the product. I try to be one of the most active users of Buffer (I originally built it to solve a pain-point I experienced so this isnt hard) and I often spot things we need to adjust.

Stepping away from product has probably been the hardest example of this concept yet for me. I always viewed coding as a means to create something, but product itself is that creation itself. In December 2013 it hit me hard that by keeping hold of the role I was neglecting to think about the business as a whole, and I knew I needed to find someone to run it within the next few months.

I originally thought we might look for someone outside Buffer to help run product, then I chatted with our advisor Hiten and he planted the idea in my mind that I could ask people in the team to take over different parts of the role. I bounced the idea off Brian, our designer, and he immediately took to it. It only took him a week to be doing a better job of product than I ever was. Oh, and it probably comes as no surprise that were now looking for our 2nd designer.

When you do something yourself, youre not doing it well

Having thought about the concept of firing yourself further in the last few weeks, Ive come to a key realization: if youre doing something yourself as a founder of a post-product/market fit startup, youre probably not doing it well.

The way I see it is that if you are doing a task yourself alongside juggling all the other duties you naturally have as a founder, you have to make compromises. To put things into perspective, the areas weve identified as key tasks at Buffer currently are: Product (web and mobile), Engineering, Marketing, PR, Customer Support, Partnerships/BD, Admin, Growth, HR, Recruiting and Investor Relations. There are probably more, too. As CEO I have to have all these things in my head, and oversee half of them directly. As COO Leo oversees the other half.

With this much to think about, anything Leo and I are doing directly ourselves right now has to be done only partially. We both look for the 20% of the work which will get us 80% of the benefits, and cant do much more than that for everything were working on.

Therefore, as a founder, I think its important to approach firing yourself as a cycle, embrace it and enjoy letting go. You have to be happy to be an expert of nothing.

As an interesting final point, there might be another way to do this. Ive found it fascinating to read Rand Fishkin talk over the last year about the idea of a high-level Individual Contributor. A key piece on this was his article titled If Management is the Only Way Up, Were All Fd. I also found it fascinating that Rand recently stepped down as CEO of Moz and his role is now simply Individual Contributor. I love Rands idea of multiple ways to progress in a company.

Photo credit: Xavier

How we handle team emails at our startup: Defaulting to transparency

2013-12-05T11:06:00Z

How we handle team emails at our startup- Defaulting to transparency

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 with so far. Within just a few days we can all feel his impact.

In the first few days, Toby has been fantastic with asking questions and learning about the Buffer culture. One thing he asked me is how we think about email at Buffer. I thought that writing a blog post as the answer could help lots of other founders too.

Buffer Value 2: Default to transparency

One of our highest values at Buffer is to default to transparency, and we aim to live to this value in many dimensions. We stick to this through good times and bad, and we had a chance to demonstrate this recently with our unfortunate hacking incident. It was amazing to see the support we received by staying transparent and trusting our customers with the full details of everything happening.

Within the Buffer team we have complete compensation transparency and every team member knows each others’ salary and equity stake through stock options. We go all the way - we share whether we’re fundraising, we share when we have acquisition interest, and we share the bank balance. In fact, we share the bank balance and revenue numbers publicly.

Transparency builds trust and triggers better decisions

"lots of traditional, widely accepted, and perfectly legal business practices just can’t be trusted by customers, and will soon become extinct, driven to dust by rising levels of transparency, increasing consumer demand for fair treatment, and competitive pressure" - Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage

There are many reasons we default to transparency at Buffer, and perhaps the most important is that I genuinely believe it is the most effective way to build trust. This means trust amongst our team but also trust from users, customers, potential future customers and the wider public who encounter us in any way. For example, we have a whole blog dedicated to sharing everything about how we run the company.

By sharing all our decisions, numbers, successes and failures, we are showing our customers and supporters that we are responsible and strive to do the right thing.

Keith Rabois, COO of Square, put better than I ever could the second reason we place such a priority on transparency in an interview with Rob Hayes of First Round Capital:

Ultimately, if you want people to make smart decisions, they need context and all available information. And certainly if you want people to make the same decisions that you would make, but in a more scalable way, you have to give them the same information you have.

Defaulting to transparency with email communication

Narrowing down to the aspect of team emails, this is an area where we also strive for complete openness and transparency. Stripe do something similar and provided great inspiration for us.

When you start working at Buffer, it can come as a little bit of a shock. Instantly you’re receiving every email exchange between team members, in every single team. If you’re in our Happiness team you still see all the emails going on in the engineering and product team. You see design iterations and progress on our mobile apps. You see emails about our content marketing and work towards getting press.

This might sound a little crazy, and probably certainly seems totally overwhelming. But that’s the price we’ve decided it’s worth to have complete transparency. Nothing is more important to us. We have chosen to be open, and we find ways to handle the volume.

You also see emails of external communications happening. Interview requests, getting press and discussions with partners.

When you experience it, there is a magical aspect to it. You learn how Leo goes about getting us in all the top tech news sites when we launch a new feature. It all contributes to a faster pace of learning for the whole team, and means that everyone naturally knows a lot of what is going on.

How email transparency works in practice

We have several internal email lists, which only Buffer team members can send to:

team@ - this goes to the entire team
engineers@ - includes all our engineering team
heroes@ - for our happiness hero (customer support) team
crafters@ - related to content marketing
design@ - for design discussions
product@ - for product feedback and signals
metrics@ - anything to do with company metrics
biz@ - related to buffer for business
bizdev@ - for BD activities (partnerships, integrations)
marketing@ - related to press activities

Whenever you email something to do with Buffer, you almost always cc or bcc one of these lists. For example:

email a specific team member and cc a list
email an external person and bcc a list
email to a list to notify a whole team

The general rules are as follows:

if it’s “to” you, you’re expected to reply
if you’re specifically cc’d, you’re expected to read it
if it’s your own team that’s cc’d, you should read that
you should strive to always cc or bcc a list

Handling the risk of email overload

Admittedly with a growing team the overall email volume has gone up a lot in the past couple of months. We’re so bullish about transparency that this isn’t a huge concern for us. That said there are a few things we’re doing to ease that volume:

we’re starting to encourage filtering out some emails between other team members so they’re not in your inbox but they’re easily accessible and browsable
transparency often simply means that you can access that information when you want to, not that it’s pushed in front of your face
we’ve set up a private Facebook group to share links and emails that don’t need a reply. The concept of a “like” is proving to be very powerful for messages where you want to show appreciation but might not need to reply

Times when we might keep email private

There are a few times where email transparency doesn’t feel quite right. Usually this revolves around specific personal circumstances or a potential upcoming team change (e.g. a promotion or thinking about a firing). With this said, we truly strive for transparency and want to improve here too. Currently we try to always ask each other whether we can accelerate some of these discussions and bring in transparency.

Photo credit: Juin Hoo

Two simple changes that helped increase my happiness and improve my sleep

2013-10-10T21:06:00Z

Two simple changes that helped increase my happiness and improve my sleep

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 a result of these particular values, in the last few months I have tried to be quite deliberate about living as fully to the values as I can. Specifically, it has meant finding ways to work on improving my happiness and the quality of my sleep. I wanted to share a couple of neat small techniques which have helped me.

Forcing a smile and feeling the flow of gratitude and happiness

"It is not joy that makes us grateful. It is gratitude that makes us joyful." - David Rast

Åsa, one of our awesome Happiness Heroes at Buffer, Tweeted the above quote, and I have found it to be very true. I think there’s a clear link between gratitude and happiness, and this is an interesting correlation to take advantage of.

This morning I was walking to a meeting, and for some reason I didn’t feel as upbeat as I like to be. I was walking along, perhaps a little more sluggish than usual. I think my head was tilted down towards the ground, rather than feeling calm and confident and looking straight ahead.

As soon as I noticed how I felt, I decided to experiment with something. I’d discussed with Leo and others in the team the fact that smiling can actually be the trigger to feel happier, rather than needing to feel happy in order to smile. Leo had written on the Buffer blog about what happens to the brain when you smile.

So, I simply opened my mouth slightly, and started to force a smile. Even the smallest hint towards a smile changed my mood right away. I then adjusted my posture, looked up to the amazing clear San Francisco sky, and smiled wider. I then felt gratitude that I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in this place, and be able to live here in this magical city. These few minutes completely transformed my mood.

I’ve noticed that for myself, I have a habit of walking around with my mouth closed, and this makes it a little less natural for me to easily break into a smile. I’ve started to open my mouth more, and somehow this has helped me smile more (and make me happier). This seems to help me a lot.

Reflecting on why I woke up many times during the night

Back in March we introduced a perk at Buffer where everyone in the team gets a Jawbone UP. Since then I’ve become quite interested in my sleep and how I can improve it. I have always struggled with sleep, and sometimes convinced myself that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t need that much sleep. When studying I would often get by on 5 or 6 hours sleep. The fact is, however, that when I get 7 hours sleep compared to 6, I can feel a big difference in my focus and productivity during the day.

So in the last few months I started to experiment with all kinds of different things to improve my sleep. I tried wearing earplugs, going for evening walks to wind down, opening a window to cool down my room, etc. A key thing I found out by having the Jawbone UP and seeing the statistics of my sleep, was that I frequently wake up in the night. I then realized that I often wake up to go to the bathroom. Once I discovered this, I tried to stop the waking by drinking less before sleeping. This didn’t seem to stop me waking up, however.

I then began to start thinking about what happens when I wake up and go to the bathroom. When going to the bathroom of course I turn the light on, and this immediately starts to wake me up further. It also naturally led to me washing my hands, and in that process I found myself looking in the mirror and noticing sleep in my eyes. I’d therefore wash my face. By the end of this, I was almost completely awake.

Since I had conceded that I might not stop the waking, I decided to try something else. When I awoke, I simply stayed lying in bed and didn’t get up to go to the bathroom. I didn’t really need to go to the bathroom that bad. Interestingly, this small adjustment has improved my sleep massively, and has led to the difference you can see below:

With the same amount of time in bed, I can get around an extra hour of sleep, just by avoiding getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. It blew my mind how that small change could have this impact. And of course I sleep every single night, and so this leads to better focus and productivity every single day. Wow.

Photo credit: Diogo A. Figueira

What no one talks about when building a team: Letting people go

2013-09-17T02:08:00Z

What no one talks about when building a team- Letting people go

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 of. A large part of this is creating a set of values and trying to gather people who feel at home amongst each other.

As part of this focus on culture, we have done quite a few things rather early at Buffer. We started to think seriously about culture when we were just 7 people and put our values into words shortly afterwards.

A realization my co-founder Leo and I had shortly after this was that if we truly want to focus on creating a great culture, it is inevitable that some people won’t work out and we would have to ask them to leave the company.

There is very little written on the subject of firing people, and it’s a hard thing to talk about, especially when you are still small. However, one of our highest cultural values is transparency, and for some time I have felt we were not being true to our values by not talking about this.

The journey to the current Buffer team

To put things in perspective here: Buffer is now a team of 13, and in the journey so far we’ve actually let 6 people go. For us, we’ve luckily never had financial struggles, all of these decisions were based around culture-fit. It’s hard work to hire people and even harder to fire people, so a team of 13 feels rather small for the efforts we’ve been through so far. At the same time, this team of 13 is a real privilege to be part of.

Hiring for skills vs hiring for culture

When I started Buffer, I had no real idea what culture is. We grew quite fast, and my intuition was to fill the gaps we had with the most skilled people I could find.

Once we reached 7 people, I started to see the importance of building a cohesive team that works well together and is a lot of fun to be part of. A large part of this is defining the culture and finding people who are a great fit for that culture. That’s when we put our culture into words and created our cultural values.

Once we had put our culture into words, that’s when we started to much more rigorously hire based on the values. In fact, it’s really hard to hire for culture-fit until you have your values in words:

“‘Cultural Fit’ is only a valid hiring criteria if you can accurately define your culture” - Chris Yeh

With our culture in place, we’ve evolved our hiring process and we focus a lot on the culture we have. This means finding people who are positive and happy, with a focus on self-improvement, who have gratitude, are humble and are comfortable with our extreme transparency. We have what we call a ‘Buffer Bootcamp’, essentially a 45 day contract period with 1:1 meetings for feedback at 2 weeks, 1 month and 45 days. A lot of this is to see whether Buffer is a good fit for the person joining the team.

With this more rigorous process, we found that some people didn’t fit the culture and letting people go was inevitable. Surprisingly, the very act of letting people go has shaped our culture more than anything:

"I think some of the core decisions that impact culture are who you let on the bus and who you make sure gets off the bus. The values that determine these decisions really shape your culture. Similarly, who gets rewarded and promoted within your company really shapes your culture. So, it’s the actual every day operating decisions that most shape your culture." - Dave Kashen

Culture is not about right or wrong

Although we’ve let 6 people go, these were all great people and they all did fantastic work. We just realized that they were not a perfect fit for our culture, so it made sense to part ways.

I would even go a step further and say that keeping people around who are not a great culture-fit is one of the worst things that could happen to someone. It has almost always been a mutual feeling when I had the conversation to let someone go: they felt some relief. I even have this quote on my wall to remind myself to think in this way:

"Waiting too long before acting is equally unfair to the people who need to get off the bus. For every minute you allow a person to continue holding a seat when you know that person will not make it in the end, youre stealing a portion of his life, time that he could spend finding a better place where he could flourish." - Jim Collins

Why letting people go is part of the process

I think firing someone is perhaps one of the hardest things you have to learn as a founder. Another key realization for me has been that letting people go is a continual part of growing a great team.

No matter how awesome our hiring process is, it’s inevitable that sometimes the person is not a great fit. Now that we have grown to 13 people and had to make tough team changes along the way, we’ve started to see a ratio emerge. We now know not to be surprised if about 1 in 4 people we hire doesn’t work out. It helps to know this possibility in advance.

"If you are super-scrupulous about your hiring process, you’ll still have maybe a 70% success rate of a new person really working out — if you’re lucky." - Marc Andreessen

This is probably one of the hardest areas of learning I’ve experienced as a CEO. I’ve spent a lot of the last 10 months thinking this through, reading as much as I could about it and getting lots of advice. We’re still at the very beginning, but it is comforting to have got to a point where this is a bit less scary.

A special thanks to Leo, Carolyn, Belle and Sunil for reading drafts of this.

Photo credit: Katie Tegtmeyer

The joys and benefits of working as a distributed team

2013-08-27T21:22:00Z

The joys and benefits of working as a distributed team

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 to report that I am in love with the choice we made to be distributed all across the world.

How Buffer is set up

When I say we’re a distributed team, I mean that we’re literally spread across the whole planet. Buffer is a team of 12 right now, and here are the locations of everyone in the team:

4 people in San Francisco, California: Leo, Carolyn, Sunil and myself
1 person in Texas: Brian
1 person in Massachusetts: BMR
2 people in the UK: Andy and Colin
1 person in Sweden: sa
1 person in Hong Kong: Michelle
1 person in Taipei, Taiwan: Niel
1 person in Melbourne, Australia: Belle

In addition, Michelle was in San Francisco until just a week ago, Andy regularly travels and sa just took a few months trip back to Sweden (she normally resides in Sydney, Australia).

6 reasons being distributed is so exciting

I think the distributed team discussion is often focused around the challenges. I wanted to share from our experience the fun side of being distributed, which I think far outweighs the challenges:

1. Our team is super productive

The thing about hiring people for a distributed team is that they need to be self-motivated and productive working at home, coffee shops or a co-working space. We have a 45-day contract period to see how this goes and we look especially for people who have worked as freelancers or on startups. Everyone on board is incredibly smart and it’s humbling to work with them.

2. Team members have incredible amounts of freedom

Have a family event coming up and need to travel on Friday? No problem. Want to take off to Bali or Gran Canaria for a few weeks and work from there? Awesome - please share photos :) These things have all happened and are regular occurrences within our distributed team. It’s the little things too, like being able to avoid a commute and spend more time with family. We don’t have working hours and we don’t measure hours at all. We’re all excited about our vision and we focus on results, balance, and sustained productivity.

3. It feels like the future

Even being able to share the locations of all my co-workers when I meet others and chat about Buffer is so much fun and exciting. I think it provides a great story rather than all of us being in the same office each day. People ask how we manage it and I share our workflows and tools. We call HipChat our office, and a number of Google Hangouts are our conference rooms. I genuinely believe that how we’re set up will be very normal in a few years. There are certainly challenges and we’re still figuring a lot of it out. It’s fun and a huge privilege to be able to be part of this innovation and experiment and share our learnings.

4. I’m learning so much about the world

People within the team speak lots of different languages and talking with each other we learn about what it’s like to grow up elsewhere in the world. We think carefully about shaping our culture further and how our choices might affect the various cultures within the team. Carolyn recently has kindly been educating us about Nashville:

I enjoy having internat’l coworkers for many reasons, but explaining the concepts of “honky tonks” and “line dancing” is high on the list!

Carolyn Kopprasch (@CaroKopp) August 26, 2013

5. We travel the world to work together 3 times a year

Part of the DNA of Buffer is that we traveled all over the world for much of the first two years. This is something that has been sustained and is part of our values (and many in the team have lived up to this value by traveling as part of the team).

In order to have deliberate face-to-face time together to bond and have fun, we have 3 Buffer Retreats per year, where we gather the whole team in a single location. We spend a week working together and also do activities like sightseeing, boating and jet-skiing. We had our first in San Francisco (and Lake Tahoe) and next time we’ll be heading to a beach in Thailand!

6. Timezones make you awesome

Finally, you can look at timezones as an inconvenience, or you can embrace them and discover the magic of the time difference.

A key part of our vision is to set the bar for customer support. We obsessively track happiness of our customers and our speed to respond to them. We have almost a million users and we reply to 50% of emails within 1 hour and 75% within 6 hours. We do this with a Happiness Hero team of just 3, and we couldn’t achieve this level of service without being spread across multiple timezones.

Timezones are a huge help for our development cycle too - with engineers in the US, UK and Asia, we literally never stop coding.

Photo credit: Colleen Lane

6 suggestions for an aspiring founder

2013-07-22T02:41:00Z

6 suggestions for an aspiring founder

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 jump on board the path of building a startup. Having hit upon a product that solved a key pain for many people, Buffer has grown rather fast. We now have over 850,000 users and the team is 12 people.

When I reflect on how quickly things happened and what it has required of me, the first thing that comes to mind is Paul Graham's essay entitled How to Make Wealth. In particular, this part resonates with me:

You can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years.

There’s a lot to learn if you aspire to build a startup. I have thoroughly enjoyed the journey, and I can only recommend it to others. I can’t think of a better way to lead a fulfilling life. Here are 6 suggestions I have if you happen to be getting started along this road:

1. Experiment. Lots.

"If you’re not already doing a side project, I’d recommend starting one. Although they can complicate your schedule and make life busier, they are one of the few consistent keys I’ve observed in almost anyone who has impressive accomplishments." - Scott Young

I’ve mentioned previously that the Internet is littered with my past attempts to create a successful startup. Even before I knew I truly wanted to build a startup, I played around with countless side projects and they are spread across the web, too.

I think there is often a misconception that to be successful you need to focus and put all your eggs in one basket. That’s not how it happened for me. I tried a ton of different things, and I started Buffer on the side while working full-time as a freelance developer. The key is to focus once you have something that works, that gains traction and people love. Until then, I say experiment away.

2. Stay inspired.

"People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily." - Zig Ziglar

Looking back to the early days of my first startup attempt, I think something that kept me going was that I continually read books about startups and entrepreneurs and watched as many interviews of founders as I could find. In fact, I was especially humbled to be invited to share my story on Mixergy precisely because I have watched tens of interviews by Andrew Warner and they always inspired me to keep pushing forward.

It’s true that at some point you have to stop soaking up the motivation and actually get to work. However, I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful it can be to be take in the learnings of others. Especially in the early days when you might not necessarily be surrounded by others trying to do startups, I think staying inspired in this way can plant that spark inside to help you make it happen.

3. Travel the world and move.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Mark Twain

Travel is something that I always thought would be fun, and I never imagined the impact it could have for me. From simply moving a hundred miles from my hometown of Sheffield to Birmingham in the UK, to then traveling several continents and living in San Francisco, Hong Kong and Tel Aviv, I’ve been extremely lucky to have experienced completely different cultures and meet great people.

I truly believe that if you choose to travel you’re immediately much more likely to succeed with whatever you are trying to do. Leaving what you know and stepping into uncertainty, you naturally become more open-minded and create new opportunities for yourself.

Interestingly, many have an attachment to their hometown and want to be there in order to help their town and others who live there. My belief is that you can do a lot more to help your hometown if you make the decision to leave. I’ve never once heard someone regretting their decision to travel.

4. Choose your friends wisely.

"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." - Jim Rohn

One of the most interesting side-effects of moving and traveling a lot has been that in every new place I have settled in, I have had the chance to rethink every part of my life. I reflect on what kind of place I want to live, how close I want to be to all amenities, what routine I want to adopt and even who I want to hang out around.

The clear example of the power of adjusting your group of friends is that your school friends probably aren’t all entrepreneurs. The thing with doing a startup is that it’s an unusual path and one where there are far more reasons it can go wrong than can go right. If you truly want to succeed, surrounding yourself with other optimists is one sure way to have much better odds. The cool thing is, these are really fun people to be around.

I strive every day to meet (and hire) more people I can learn from.

5. Stay laser focused on building something people want.

"In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn’t want the product." - Paul Graham

It’s easy to get distracted when you begin your startup endeavors. You might take a look around and assume you need to incorporate, or raise funding, or countless other things that everyone seems to do.

In my experience, all that really matters is to try and find a real problem to solve. What it comes down to is whether you have hit product/market fit. If you have, you’ll know it, and you’ll start to get traction.

If what you’ve built isn’t working, keep experimenting with new ideas.

6. Be open and vocal

"If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we swap, we each still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we swap, we each have two ideas." - George Bernard Shaw

Before Buffer, I had a few previous startup ideas that weren’t too successful. One of the things that is easier to reflect on in hindsight is that luckily during that time I was Tweeting, blogging, going along to events and generally getting to know a lot of people.

When people ask me what my initial marketing was to get Buffer started, the truth I have to share is that my marketing consisted of sharing the idea with the 1,700 Twitter followers I had at the time. I attribute my previous openness to the fact that I had these followers to help me get Buffer started. As a result, I completely agree with Leah Bursque’s advice:

"Talk to every single person you meet about your idea. Talk until they tell you to shut up. Discover new questions and patterns so you can test and refine your idea. Then find more people to talk to."

Read more on this topic from an awesome group of entrepreneurs at Startup Edition.

Photo credit: Robert Scoble

Coaching and feedback within startups

2013-07-14T19:38:00Z

Coaching and feedback within startups

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 is that everyone has a 1:1 session with either myself or their team lead at least every 2 weeks. On top of that, I personally have a 1:1 session with Leo, Carolyn and Sunil (the c-suite) every single week.

It’s been pretty powerful to put in place, and it’s something I would very much encourage startups to experiment with early on. I don’t often hear about coaching and feedback processes being in place at startups, and it took us some time to figure out how to structure it, so I hope this might be useful.

How the 1:1 sessions work

We’ve had many different iterations of the structure of our 1:1 sessions, which originated from the ‘mastermind’ format I’ve previously written about. Currently they last around 70 minutes and have quite a rigid structure as follows:

10 minutes to share and celebrate your Achievements
40 minutes to discuss your current top challenges
10 minutes for the team lead (or me) to share some feedback
10 minutes to give feedback to the team lead (or me)

Each of these sections serve a slightly different purpose and combine to create a very productive session. In addition, once sessions like this are done consistently over a period of a couple of months, a momentum builds and we’ve found the whole team has really started to move into a whole new gear.

The 1:1 is for the team member, not the CEO or team lead

You might notice that in the structure breakdown above, it translates to 60 minutes dictated by the team member, and only 10 minutes led by myself or the team lead. This is very deliberate, and in the early days the balance was the other way around. One of the key realizations for me that it should work this way was a great article Ben Horowitz wrote entitled One on One where he said the following:

Generally, people who think one-on-one meetings are a bad idea have been victims of poorly designed one-on-one meetings. The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employees meeting rather than the managers meeting.

When you share the structure in advance and 85% of the time is dedicated to the team member, and it is up to them to set the agenda, it suddenly becomes very empowering.

Listening and suggesting, rather than commanding

During the 1:1 session, the team lead will try her best to simply ask questions and maybe share some of her thoughts or similar experiences. The aim really is to help the team member to think about the challenge and come up with their own solution or steps forward that they can be completely happy and excited about.

This can be one of the hardest things to do - to hold back when an idea comes into your head about what the team member could do next to solve their challenge. However, this is really important. If instead of just instructing the team member as to how to solve their challenge, you ask questions to try and guide them to that answer, then you might find your own idea was in fact the wrong solution entirely. This has happened quite a number of times, and has been fascinating to see.

Even if the solution is what you have in your mind, it is a hundred times more motivating for the team member to come away knowing that they came up with a solution themselves, that this solution is theirs and they were not commanded. Galileo explained perfectly why we try to approach it in this way:

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.

The power of scheduled time for reflection, celebration and feedback

I think a reason that the weekly or biweekly 1:1s can serve to accelerate progress at a startup, is that it is a deliberate and scheduled session to spend 10 minutes purely for celebrating achievements (something we often forget to be happy about and grateful for), and a lot of time to reflect and make adjustments. Tim Ferriss put this better than I can myself in one Random Show episode:

It is important that you pay as much attention to appreciation as you do to achievement. Achievement without reflection on what you have and the gratitude for that is worthless.

In addition, having 10 minutes for each person to give feedback to the other is very freeing. The time is set up specifically for feedback, and if this time did not exist it may be hard for someone to share their concerns or suggestions for change within the company. Especially for a CEO, it can be uncomfortable for people to share feedback, so this setup is a way to receive incredibly useful information.

Embracing our cultural value of self-improvement

One of the unique values in the culture at Buffer is to “Have a focus on self-improvement”, and this can be related to your work at Buffer or (often) personal improvements.

In the challenges section of the 1:1s, the discussion may be for challenges within Buffer, or it could be working on your self: for example improving your sleep, pushing yourself to keep learning a new language, trying new forms of exercise such as swimming, or how to blog more frequently.

Photo credit: Jerome Carpenter

Questions I ask myself about working as distributed team

2013-06-30T19:51:00Z

Questions I ask myself about working as distributed team

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, there have been a number of amazing advantages this has brought as well as it making a fun team to be part of due to the many different cultures and locations of team members. Recently I’ve seen quite a number of articles about remote working, and I’m excited so many are sharing their insights. I particularly enjoyed Wade Foster's article on how they manage a remote team at Zapier and wanted to share some insights into how we do things at Buffer.

The decision to be a distributed team

During the few months I spent focused on the decision of whether to commit to Buffer being a distributed team, I sought advice from many people. Some of the best advice I received was from David Cancel, who I had the chance to sit down with and chat over coffee. His key insight was that in his experience founding a number of companies so far, he has found that two scenarios work well, while one doesn’t work too well. He advised that we either be fully distributed, or have everyone in the same office. David said that the time he had a main office with the majority of people there and only one or two people working remotely, that didn’t work so well.

With this insight and further thinking I made the decision and we became a fully distributed team. We immediately hired a number of people working remotely to quickly balance out the team and ensure we were fully distributed rather than a team in one location with just one or two remote workers. This was an immediate benefit to us especially as a team focused on outstanding customer support, since we quickly covered all timezones.

The delicate nature of a distributed team

The interesting thing I’ve found with a distributed team is that I believe it is a very delicate balance to ensure that everyone who is away from the main base location feels just as much a part of the team. What you don’t want is to end up with a scenario with people feeling like “second class citizens” if they are not in the base where the office is. Jason Zimdars from 37signals put this in the best way I’ve heard:

There are no advantages for people who come into the office, no disadvantages to staying home to get your work done.

I think this a super important quality of a great distributed team, and it is one we consistently keep in mind and something which causes many of the questions and choices around our distributed team.

Questions often in my mind while we grow as a distributed team

As a result of these difficult and important choices to ensure a distributed team works well, I often have some interesting thoughts and questions in my mind which to some could seem petty, but which I believe are essential to get right in order to thrive as a distributed team. Some of these questions we now have a confident stance on, others are things which still linger in my mind. I believe being a distributed team and figuring out the best path is a journey which will last the lifetime of the company.

Is it appropriate to have a base location?

This is a question I spent quite a number of months pondering. During the time, we were traveling the world having been unable to get visas to stay in the U.S. (we have visas now).

In the end, we realized that there are advantages to having a base location, depending on what your startup does. For us, we are in the social media space and we are regularly doing integrations with other startups. It just so happened these startups and the big social networks were all mostly based in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Proximity to them was a huge advantage in order to secure partnerships.

Is it right to have an office in the base location?

For some time, we avoided having an office at all. By early 2013 we had a team of 9 with 4 in San Francisco. Some felt less productive working from home and coffee shops than they would in an office. We spent a number of months sharing an office with the awesome Storify guys and the team grew a little more, too.

We also started to focus even more on culture, and the whole team started to love the fact that the Buffer way was rather different to the norm. Being part of Buffer felt unique and we wanted to embrace this further by having an office we could call our own. I think most distributed startups have an office: GitHub and 37signals come to mind as good examples.

Another key reason we got our own office is that while a large portion of the team are not in San Francisco, we are planning regular retreats to get the whole team in the same place. The first will be in a month’s time and will be in San Francisco so we needed a sizable office to work together for the 10 day retreat.

In person meetings or everything via HipChat, Hangouts and Email?

With an office, if team members are in San Francisco it can be easy to delay meetings until all team members are in the office. I thought a long time about this and bounced the dilemma off Leo too. The conclusion we came to is that we should always do the thing we can do immediately. If we need to quickly have a meeting and we’re not in the same place, we should jump onto a hangout, even if we are in the same city.

In a similar fashion, we try our best to have a real bias towards chatting on HipChat and sending each other emails even if we are sat across from each other in the same office. By doing this we are really embracing the goal of there being no advantage to being in the office, and it also allows other team members to jump in and share their ideas in discussions.

Should we celebrate getting an office, or keep quiet?

This has been one of the most interesting recent questions I’ve had in my mind. Clearly getting our own office is a big milestone and feels very appropriate now that we are beyond 10 people and we are on a revenue run rate of over $1.5m a year.

We don’t want to shout too much about the office when many team members are not in San Francisco, that didn’t feel too good. At the same time, it is an exciting point to reach with the company. We’ve tried our best to find the right balance with this, however I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have.

What perks are appropriate when you have a distributed team?

At Buffer we’ve had a lot of fun coming up with some perks which are individual to us. We believe that perks are not something you can take and apply to any company. Rather, they need to be an extension and enhancement to an already ingrained culture. With our culture of self improvement, one of our most interesting perks is that everyone in the team is gifted with a Jawbone UP and this triggers discussion around getting good sleep and being active.

Most technology companies pride themselves with perks such as free meals and snacks at the office, as well as ping pong tables and other ways to take a little time out and refresh. The most interesting thing I’ve noticed is that the perks are almost entirely focused around what is provided within an office. A nice exception that comes to mind is Evernote who provide all employees with house cleaning twice a month and also pay employees to take vacation.

At Buffer, our answer to this dilemma is that we try to focus on “everyone included” perks which are not tied to a physical office. We give everyone a Jawbone UP and a Kindle Paperwhite, and team members can get any Kindle book free of charge with no limits or questions asked. In the future I can imagine other “everyone included” perks such as free gym membership and house cleaning.

What if people want to move to San Francisco?

The final question I want to share is a very interesting one: how do you manage having the right balance of people away from your base location of San Francisco if everyone who joins finds that they want to relocate to San Francisco? This is something we’ve started to encounter which I never imagined could happen. So far Leo and I have moved to San Francisco, Carolyn is moving next month and Michelle has obtained a visa to move towards the end of the year. We’re working on a visa for Andy too, who has already visited many times.

Unless we figure out this issue, we will end up with an imbalance and too many people in San Francisco. Other team members will be more likely to feel “out of the loop” and “second class” to those in SF.

I don’t feel like I can force people to stay where they are. As the CEO of a company where we have chosen not to delay happiness, and with a journey so far where we have found a way to travel the world while growing the company 300% year over year, I think it is my duty to help people move wherever they will be happy, whether that is SF or elsewhere in the world. It just so happens that San Francisco seems to be one of the most attractive places to be in the world.

My answer to this one right now is to keep hiring outside the Bay Area. This seems to work well since it is very hard to find people in the Bay Area anyway!

This is a portion of the questions I’ve recently had on my mind and currently are topics I’m thinking about. I feel it is a huge privilege to be able to shape the company and grow a distributed team.

Photo credit: Steve Cadman

Experimenting with a 7 day work week

2013-06-10T12:27:00Z

Experimenting with a 7 day work week

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 simple: I would work 7 days a week, rest 7 days a week, go to the gym 7 days a week, reflect 7 days a week. This was less about working lots, much more about feeling fulfilled every day, feeling stretched during the day but also rested. I aimed to work less each day, and replace two hours of work with a long break in the middle of the day.

The biggest thing I wanted to do was to satisfy my craving of “why not?” and to challenge the status quo of working 5 days a week and then taking 2 days off. Many of us know that working 9-5 is not the most effective way to work, and I had found this to be true for quite some time. I had a curiosity about whether the 5 day work week might also not be the most effective routine.

Some of the hypotheses I had about a new 7 day work week:

I would be much more successful in building solid habits that became ingrained, since I wouldn’t have two days off and then the struggle to get back into broken habits.
I would be in much better sync with my team who are distributed around the world, and I would have a better handle on my emails and work by having time in the weekends too.
I could work less than 40 hours a week and be more productive, since I would have long breaks between super focused work periods.

The 7 day work week routine

I’ve been an early riser for a couple of years now, and during this experiment I was rising at 4:30am. I aimed to do 5.5 hours of work each day, which is around 38.5 hours a week.

4:30: Rise.
5-6:30: 90 minutes of focused work.
6:30-9: Gym, breakfast, shower, etc.
9-11:30: 2.5hrs of focused work.
11:30-3pm: Lunch, then extended rest period.
3-4:30: 90 minutes of focused work.

Results from 2 weeks of the 7 day work week routine

In the end, I have decided that I won’t continue with the 7 day work week routine. That said, it has been a very interesting experiment and I have kept some aspects of the new routine.

Here are two of the things that didn’t work out:

How the world works does affect you

This is one of the things I wanted to avoid believing for the longest time. I don’t think it’s ever healthy to believe things “are the way they are”, and in many cases I think this can be forgotten. After all, as entrepreneurs we are in the business of changing reality by making something out of nothing.

I found that Saturdays and Sundays could never be the same as other days, as much as I wanted them to be and I tried to create a routine that could be exactly the same, every day. There are more people wandering the streets, more noise outside. There is no one in the office. You can’t send certain emails, because they need to hit someone’s inbox in work hours. It’s not the best day to push a new feature or blog post.

You can certainly take advantage of the fact that Saturday and Sunday are different, by doing specific tasks. However, the point of my experiment was to have identical days, and in this respect it was a failure.

I burned out, even with lots of breaks

I wanted every day to be exactly the same. So I worked each day, and rested each day. I also went to the gym every day, I adjusted my work out so that this would be sustainable.

I found that even with a gym routine of just a few exercises and different muscle groups, I felt I couldn’t get adequate overall renewal just in a single day period. I worked out for 15 days straight and in the end strained a muscle and had to take almost a week off.

Similarly, I found it interesting to observe how my passion towards the work I was doing adjusted. To begin with, I was excited during the first week and even at the weekend I enjoyed working. The hardest aspect I found was to stop myself working so much during the week, so that I could be fully rested and keep working at the weekend.

Overall, I feel like the 7 day work week fell apart because of lack of an extended period of renewal. My hypothesis that a couple of extra hours during the day and less overall daily hours working would be enough was invalidated in my experience.

The wisdom of the day of rest

After trying a 7 day work week, I became quite fascinated by the concept of a “day of rest”. It occurred to me that this is a tradition that has been around for a very long time, and of separate origins. Almost all of the world observes some form of a weekly “day of rest”.

I’m no expert of the bible, however with a little research I found that the origin of the “seventh day” or Sabbath is Genesis 2:2-3:

And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.

Similarly, in Buddhism there is the concept of Uposatha which is the Buddhist day of observance. I find it interesting how Buddhism teaches the purpose of this day:

the cleansing of the defiled mind

I feel a sense of calm and confidence in the knowledge that many thousands of years of wisdom all converges towards the idea of a weekly day of rest. Certainly from my naive experiment I feel that this is a very good practice.

6 days of work, 1 day of rest

Both from my own experiment and the wisdom of the day of rest, I have become very interested in the idea of a single day of rest. However, I have not once come across anything advocating two days of rest. This is one of my biggest takeaways from this experiment, and I plan to continue to work on the basis of 6 days of work and a single day of rest.

Jim Rohn, who I have been very inspired by, also said it well:

Work was so important, here was the original formula for labor. If you have forgotten it, remind yourself. Six days of labor, and one day of rest. Now, it’s important not to get those numbers mixed up. Why not five/two? Maybe one of the reasons for six/one: if you rest too long the weeds take the garden. Not to think so is naive. As soon as you’ve planted, the busy bugs and the noxious weeds are out to take it. So you can’t linger too long in the rest mode, you’ve got to go back to work. Six days of work, then rest.

I think one of my biggest takeaways from trying a 7 day work week is: despite the conclusion that rest is important, a single day is the perfect amount, no more. I am working to consistently live by this method for as many of the weeks as I can during the year. I believe that this will be a key to success.

Photo credit: David Joyce

Ratio thinking

2013-04-29T13:25:00Z

Ratio thinking

Something I’ve found difficult to completely embrace, but which understanding has been super important, is the idea that there is a ratio for everything. I’ve started to call this Ratio Thinking, and I’ve found myself describing this to quite a number of people recently.

The law of averages

I think we all understand that we might not get a 100% success rate on everything we do. In fact, in most cases it is far lower. For myself, I think I have struggled to fully comprehend this.

I’ve heard the idea of a ratio for success many times. I think perhaps the best description I’ve come across what Jim Rohn describes as the “law of averages”:

If you do something often enough, you’ll get a ratio of results. Anyone can create this ratio.

Once I fully understood this, it made everything much easier. As soon as I accepted that the whole world works in ratios, that’s when it became easier. Knowing that success happens in ratios allowed me to go ahead and send that email, without worrying about not getting a response, about ‘failing’.

Here are a few examples where I think ratio thinking can help you as a startup founder:

Ratio thinking in marketing

Arguably some of our biggest success with Buffer has been the content marketing we did in the early days and are once again pushing hard recently. In fact, we are currently hiring our first content writer beyond my co-founder Leo, and plan to grow out a full team for our blogging efforts.

I can remember very well many of the conversations I had with Leo. What he did so well was to quickly realize the law of averages and know that to get a single reply, a large number of emails must be sent to bloggers for a potential guest post. This knowledge meant he rarely felt bad if he didn’t get a response. Instead he knew it’s just the way it works.

What is perhaps even more powerful than just knowing about ratio thinking, is that Leo used this knowledge to his advantage. If he wanted to get a single guest article published, he would sit down and send 5 emails. We had around a 20% success rate based on the emails Leo sent.

Once you’ve established the success rate, for example 20%, you can keep working and eventually the ratio will improve. Maybe you’ll eventually get 3/10 instead of 2. Once that happened, Leo was smart and moved on to bigger blogs and pulled that ratio back down to 20%. This technique led us to our first 100,000 users.

Ratio thinking in fundraising

When we finished AngelPad, we started trying to get meetings with and pitching investors. The law of averages really comes into play with raising investment, too.

Overall, we probably attempted to get in contact with somewhere around 200 investors. Of those, we perhaps had meetings with about 50. In the end, we closed a $450k seed round from 18 investors.

Perhaps the most important part of our success in closing that round was that Leo and I would sit down in coffee shops together and encourage each other to keep pushing forward, to send that next email asking for an intro or a meeting. In many ways, the law of averages is the perfect argument that persistence is a crucial trait of a founder.

Ratio thinking in hiring

The most recent area where I’ve found ratio thinking to be useful is hiring. It can take a large number of applicants to find the right person, someone who has the right skills and is also a great culture-fit.

There are so many factors at play here - so of course there won’t be a 100% success rate. Once you accept that, it can make your life a whole lot easier. That was the case for me - I conceded to the fact that I will need to work hard to publicize our positions, and then only a small fraction of the applications would make sense to follow up for interview.

And the ratio thinking applies in the same way for the hiring process as well as once somebody is on board. This stuff is hard, but once again it is simply how it works - the sooner you accept it, the sooner you can thrive.

Photo credit: Peter Renshaw

Dreams come true

2013-04-18T12:20:00Z

Dreams come true

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 December in 2010, and for much of January 2011, I did a lot of dreaming.

Back then, as I do now, I had a daily ritual of going for an evening walk before sleeping so that I could disengage from the day. I had discovered this helped me sleep better. By leaving my phone at home and setting off for my twenty minute walk, I had only my mind to keep myself entertained during the walk.

When I go on my walk, for the first five or ten minutes, my mind is usually occupied by thoughts about my current issues, challenges and tasks, or the highlights or low points of the day. After ten minutes, interesting things happen.

I would guess that for many of us, we rarely go for ten minutes without a task to do, a friend to talk to or a social network to check. I can tell you that in my experience, ten minutes of solitude leads to some powerful thoughts. It is fascinating to observe where your own mind wanders.

In December 2010, I had just launched Buffer and my mind often wandered to the thoughts about where this new side project might lead. Two weeks into the month, I had got two paying customers for Buffer, paying me $5 a month. This was a huge milestone for me, and the thought that kept occupying my mind was: could this ever make enough money that I could quit my day job? Another two weeks passed, and another two people started paying $5 per month. Now I was up to $20 of monthly revenue.

On my walks I day dreamed about the day when Buffer would make enough for me to quit my day job. Since these walks were just before bed, I also often had real dreams about this too. The number I had in my mind for this milestone was around $1,000 per month. On my walks, I remember calculating in my mind how long it might take at the current pace of paying customers joining Buffer. With 4 new customers per month, it was going to take a long time.

Then January rolled around, and things started to pick up. I became more focused and the product was improving fast. Leo had joined me and we were getting customers faster. I kept going on my walks and I kept having the same dream. In the first two weeks of January, we got another 4 customers: as many as the whole of December! We were now making $40 per month. But it was still going to take a long time to make $1,000 a month.

In February, things really started to change. The dreams I was having were starting to feel real, to feel possible. I kept going on the walks, and letting my mind wander back to the dream. By the end of March, I had dropped two of my five days of freelance work, I was just working three days a week and could spend the rest of my time on Buffer.

I felt like I was now working on making my dream a reality. By the end of May 2011 I had dropped my freelance work completely, and in June we hit our $1,000 per month milestone. We were growing rather fast.

I remember that I continued to go on my walks, and at times I would be amazed that this dream had now come true. I could remember exactly the feeling of going on a walk just a few months prior and imagining how amazing it would be to be able to work only on Buffer. On my own project, my own startup. Nothing else. And it was amazing. It felt fantastic.

What struck me, is that it might have been the fact that I let my mind wander, the fact I had these dreams, that made me push ahead during the early mornings and evenings and actually achieve those things. The dreams made me want it, even if I didn’t fully realize. The dreams meant that I had allowed my mind to be taken over by this objective.

These days, things are even crazier. When I stop to take a moment and truly appreciate where I am, I realize that I now have more than I could have ever dreamed of. That $1,000 a month goal is easy to forget. We now make $1,000 in less than half a day and if we don’t then something is wrong. And in a month, we now make a hundred times that original dream.

Now I have new dreams, and they can come true too.

Photo credit: Michael

The undervalued advantages of being a small startup

2013-04-15T13:03:00Z

The undervalued advantages of being a small startup

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 ground, it can be easy to wish ourselves ahead to having a big team, a fully-fledged product and millions of users.

The thing is, there are a lot of cool things to experience, enjoy and be happy about when you are 12, before you become 13, 14, 15. The same applies when you’re a 2 person or 3 person startup. There are plenty of reasons to be happy.

You can move fast when you are small

I think one of the interesting things I’ve learned while growing Buffer to 11 people is that you can move fast when you’re 11 people, however you can also move rather fast when you’re just 2 people.

This is not to say that we moved faster overall when we were 2 people. We now have a larger footprint: we have a super useful web product, mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, browser extensions for Chrome, Safari and Firefox as well as countless integrations with awesome partner apps and startups. There is no way we could move fast in all of these various areas if we were just 2 people.

However, the key thing is that you can move just as fast in terms of percentage growth when you are 2 people as when you are 11. In fact, in our early days we sustained 40% MoM growth for almost the whole of the first year.

Just focus on the right things and crank away at code and marketing and you can make a lot happen as just a couple of founders. That brings me to my next point:

You don’t need structure when you’re small

A couple of months ago I had a very interesting week where I spoke separately with both Jonathan Abrams and our advisor Maneesh Arora and found that they both had similar advice, and shared that they were staying small for as long as they could with their startups. These are two very experienced founders, and they were sharing that they had no hurry to grow big. I even remember Maneesh advising us to pay ourselves more instead of spending the cash on new hires. It now makes a lot of sense to me.

I’ve found that there is are a series of tipping points in a startup where prior to that point, structure would slow you down, and after the fact structure will speed you up.

For example:

When you’re just 2 founders you can make all the decisions collaboratively, with no real structure.
When you become 3 people, it probably still works.
When you’re 5, 6 or 7 then it starts to break down and slow you down.

Put differently:

"Adding just two more people to a team of 3 means that there will be 10 possible combinations of 1:1 conversations. Make it 10 people and you have a whopping 45 possible sets of conversation partners." - Duane Jackson

That’s when you need to introduce structure and select one person to make the final call and lead the process. We’ve found this repeatedly, with product and with our customer support team and our engineering team too. We recently added more structure by promoting Sunil to CTO, leading engineering, and Carolyn to CHO, leading customer support.

My lesson learned here is that it is important to get the timing right with staying unstructured, or introducing structure. If you have departments and titles when you’re just a couple of people, that will probably slow you down. If you have a team of 30 people and no one in charge, that’s probably going to be slow too.

You can learn more easily from your users when you are small

When you are just getting started, it is vital to be in touch with the user and to do good customer development in order to understand whether your assumptions are correct.

The beauty is that when you are small it is actually very easy to have a conversation with your users, because there aren’t many of them! The harder part is actually taking the plunge and asking for that Skype call or coffee meeting with someone who signed up for your product.

I think Eric Ries put it very well in one of his presentations:

Most of the techniques that big companies use to do customer research (surveys, in depth analysis, data mining) they do because they have too many users to keep track of, and therefore they have to do that stuff to try to make sense of all the information they have. When you’re small you have the advantage that you only have a small group of people to get to know.

Indeed, we found that when we tried to do A/B testing and build out detailed metrics in our first few months, we were much better off to simply reach out and talk with the people who were signing up to Buffer.

Now that we have over 600,000 users posting more than a million times a week, what Eric Ries said resonates even more. We now have a small team working just on metrics and understanding what our users are doing. You can avoid this when you’re small, it is a lot of fun to be able to glean so much from just a few conversations.

Photo credit: Christian

5 things that seem essential that we launched Buffer without

2013-04-01T23:30:00Z

5 things that seem essential that we launched Buffer without

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 was something I kept very clear in my mind.

When I came across Eric Ries and his work on the Lean Startup while working on my previous startup, I tried to read almost everything he had created and watch every presentation he had done. I found his presentation on the Minimum Viable Product and remember this answer to one of the questions from the audience:

Most entrepreneurs’ instincts for what is the minimum viable product are like 10 times off. So, maybe you’re one of those rare entrepreneurs who has that gut instinct for creating an MVP, but just in case, just check out whether it’s possible that you could accomplish your strategy and learn something interesting with half the features, and maybe if you want to be really bold with half again, and just imagine: what would that look like for customers?

As a result, I had in my mind the whole time when I was putting together the first version of Buffer: how can I go even more minimal here? In fact, as we have grown, we have also incorporated this into the culture with a key point of our “Be a ‘no ego’ doer” value to often asking ourselves the question “what can we do right now?”

I’ll even admit that with all of this knowledge and even while I kept asking myself “do I really need this?” I was headed clearly along a path of launching with far too many features. In the end, I luckily had committed to a “November Startup Sprint” concept on Hacker News where a group of people had all committed to build and launch something within November. Oh, and I still launched the Buffer MVP on November 30th, 2010 (with no remaining days of the November Startup Sprint).

However, all these things combined helped me to launch a very minimal version of Buffer and gain early validation for the idea and feedback to guide our direction and for which bugs and features to prioritize moving forward. So, here are the 5 things we launched Buffer without, which could be seen as essential:

1. A paid feature mentioned on the pricing page: your own bit.ly details for analytics

This one was interesting. I think it was perhaps laziness in the end, but with my own deadline approaching it took some discipline to decide “I can launch without this feature”. bit.ly was an advertised feature for the paid plan, yet without launching I had no idea if anyone would pay for Buffer, so it made a lot of sense not to build the feature: I had little validation for it! I was lucky that the first paying customer was after 3 days, but they didn’t ask me about the bit.ly feature, so I still didn’t build it.

When the second customer started paying for Buffer, I remember them emailing me and asking me about a text box for his bit.ly details that “did nothing” when he filled it out. So, I quickly fixed that and emailed him back to say “try now”. In hindsight this was a great way to validate before building.

2. Automatic upgrade and immediate access to paid plan features after paying

An auto-upgrade process is one of those things that would be easy to think is essential when you’re charing for a product. What an awful experience it would be if they had to wait until I upgraded them manually myself. However, that is exactly what happened with the first handful of Buffer customers.

I was using PayPal and as many will know their Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system is not the easiest to code in order to have auto-upgrade for customers who pay. I had no idea whether it would be 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 years before the first paying customer, so why spend time on a smooth process for people who upgrade? I instead chose to spend time on work that might help me get that first paying customer.

When someone upgraded, I got a standard “someone sent you money” email from PayPal and then rushed to the database to manually upgrade them. Sometimes I got there fast enough, often though people noticed. Here’s an email I received which is typical of the first few paying Buffer customers:

Hi Joel,

I upgraded, but I’ve still got a free account. How do I get the account to upgrade?

This could be seen as an awful experience and very damaging. The crazy thing? The result was quite the opposite. This “issue” actually triggered an interaction between me and these users, and made them super loyal. People loved to chat with the founder.

3. Change email, forgotten password, delete account

Perhaps these kinds of features are much easier to build and have in place from day one with the kinds of frameworks available now. However, I think these are features that do very little to help you learn and validate whether people have a need for your product. If they might add any delay at all to your launch, do without them!

4. Editing tweets which you’ve added to your queue to be posted

In the first MVP of Buffer, if you added a Tweet to your queue, you couldn’t edit it. If you wanted to edit it, you’d need to delete and add it again. Tiny typo and want to correct it? Tough luck. This is one of those features that seems small, but I can assure you they all add up. I truly recommend you are ruthless about avoiding these kinds of features, so that you can ship your product and learn from what happens after you’ve launched.

5. Static pages: about page, terms of use, privacy policy

You know when you need to get on with some work and you tidy your room instead? These are those kinds of tasks when working on your not-yet-launched startup. It is so tempting to have everything looking nice and tidy for the launch, but these pages are so standard and won’t help you validate whether anyone will use your product. Showing that there is a human behind the product can be a benefit, but I’d just advise that you add a link to your Twitter profile in the footer instead of building fancy pages.

The goal here? To learn.

That’s the key thing to keep in mind, and it’s so easy to forget. You can build something pretty or make the code super clean if you want to, but that will just be an exercise for yourself at this point. What will help you to validate the idea and see whether you should continue along this same path is to get the product in front of users and talk with them and observe what they do. Do they understand it? If they understand it, is it useful for them? Stay laser focused on these questions.

One of the key lessons I’ve learned along my journey is that lean startup seems obvious, almost common sense, but it is much harder to do in practice. These tips are what I would try to stick to in order to really follow the lean startup concepts in the earliest stages.

Photo credit: Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia

Want to help your hometown? Pack up and leave

2013-03-20T12:47:00Z

Want to help your hometown- Pack up and leave

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 San Francisco where I’ve now settled for the longer term.

When I was in my hometown of Sheffield in the UK, I became quite involved in the (then tiny) startup scene, and even ran a meetup for startups. The choice to move to a different city was quite a big one, and later the choice to leave the UK completely was a step even further.

I often hear the argument that people should stay in their hometown to help the startup ecosystem. I believe that paradoxically, the best way to grow the ecosystem in your hometown might be to leave it.

I think there’s this myth that the best way to help your hometown is to stick around. I also think there is a misconception that the way to help is to focus on the community, more than on yourself.

Focusing inwards, in order to be able to help others

One of the key things I’ve learned is that you can help a community far more by focusing inwards, on yourself, than you can by spending a lot of time working on the community itself.

"The greatest gift you can give to somebody is your own personal development. I used to say ‘If you take care of me, I will take care of you.’ Now I say, ‘I will take care of me for you if you will take care of you for me.’" - Jim Rohn

Indeed, in a recent post on the gender bias in the tech and startup world, Melissa Miranda concluded:

"The best way to have more women at the top is to climb up there myself."

Kate Kendall, a great friend and a founder I am inspired by and respect a lot similarly mentioned in a recent post:

"I cannot continue to provide for others if I don’t get my own company’s foundation firmly planted. I look forward to giving more again soon. Once I first learn how to ask."

These are some very wise words. The message is clear. Many who have taken considerable steps along their journey are realizing that their best way to help is to focus inwards on themselves, in order to become more and have more to offer. This is certainly the approach I am aiming for, too.

Refreshing your environment and your circle

One of the toughest things to accept as an ambitious entrepreneur is that you are affected by your environment and the circle of friends you have. We have far less willpower and self-control than we like to admit to ourselves.

Seneca wrote in a letter somewhere between 63 and 65 AD that even the most accomplished men are affected by the “crowd” they choose to be amongst:

"Even Socrates, Cato, and Laelius might have been shaken in their moral strength by a crowd that was unlike them; so true it is that none of us, no matter how much he cultivates his abilities, can withstand the shock of faults that approach, as it were, with so great a retinue."

If Socrates himself would be affected by a crowd who did not push him and encourage him, how can we hope to even achieve a sliver of the success he had unless we decide carefully who and what we choose as our environment? Seneca advised in this same letter:

"Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship"

I got lucky myself. Something drew me to Birmingham in the UK, from my hometown of Sheffield. Then, after Buffer reached ramen profitability Leo and I had a craving, a calling to visit San Francisco. After arriving and spending 6 months in Silicon Valley, lack of visas forced us to travel the world and live in places such as Hong Kong and Tel Aviv.

It was through this journey I learned the power of a fresh environment and starting new friendships. With each new place, I had a more specific criteria for who I would let into my true circle of friends. Today, I have much freedom and I am surrounded by people who never judge and always encourage. The difference this makes is something I can’t put into words. Leaving your hometown is the best way to deliberately sever those ties and step into the unknown and the chance of great possibilities.

Finding somewhere to thrive

With an inward focus and a desire to shape your environment in a very deliberate way, I think that if you choose to try and do these things in your hometown, you are very much at a disadvantage.

There is no way I would have been able to develop as much as a person if I had not jumped on a plane to a place where I knew nobody. I love my friends and I love my family, but the truth is that stepping away has helped me tremendously to become a better version of myself, and paradoxically to allow me to help them even more, too.

There’s probably a place in the world that is better for your business than where you are right now. For AirBnB, it was New York:

While at incubator Y Combinator, Paul Graham looked at their plans for Airbnb and asked them the simple question, “Where is your market?”

The founders said that New York seemed promising. To which Paul, gesturing wildly with his hands, said, “Your users are in New York and you’re here in Mountain View.”

The founders were dumbfounded, saying they were in Mountain View for Y Combinator.

Paul repeated himself. “Your users are in New York and you’re here in Mountain View.” After a pause, he added, “What are you still doing here?”

For us, it is San Francisco. We’re a distributed team, but many of the conversations we need to have with startups we partner with and the social networks we are providing a service on top of, happen much more easily when we’re in the same location as the majority of them and can grab coffee face-to-face. I’ve come to agree with what Brad Lindenberg said in a blog post recently:

"I am convinced now that in order to be a player, you need to have a presence where your target market is because if you do, things can happen really quickly."

A lot has happened in my hometown of Sheffield since I left. There is even a startup accelerator there now. If I hadn’t left, I’d not be on a level where I would comfortably and excitedly be a mentor for the accelerator. Would you be able to help more if you let go of your roots and focused on yourself?

Photo credit: Christine Vaufrey

Why I'm going to Hawaii with my co-founder

2013-03-02T06:49:00Z

Why I'm going to Hawaii with my co-founder

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 values of defaulting to transparency, it might be an interesting message to share:

Hey everyone,

I think I’ve mentioned to most of you by now that Leo and I are leaving tomorrow for a short 10 day trip to Hawaii.

We find ourselves in a very fortunate position with a thriving business and some solid relationships. At a time like this, Leo and I felt it would be wise to take a little time slightly “off the grid” and ask ourselves the questions “where do we want to take this now?”, “what do we all want to spend our precious time doing, and how can we ensure we’re happy and inspired?” and “how can we really move the needle as we continue on in 2013?”. It is a real pleasure that we can even be at a point to consider these questions.

I am extremely thankful to be able to work with such an amazing group of people, all so aligned with the culture and excited about the product. I crave and enjoy every day working with you all. A lot of what Leo and I will ponder will be just as much to do with culture as to do with product direction, and for me personally this is what makes me jump out of bed every day. I think we have an opportunity here to really push the boundaries in terms of what an outstanding, empowering and supportive culture can be. We can primarily help ourselves and Buffer move forward at an incredible pace, and as a side effect we might attract some interest in the way we do things and be able to impact and help other companies too.

Super excited to report back on what we come up with!

P.S. Leo and I will still be very much active in Hip Chat and I’ll be keeping Trello updated :)

Photo credit: MattW

When creating new habits, let yourself be sloppy

2013-02-27T14:01:00Z

When creating new habits, let yourself be sloppy

"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 great habits, I often expect that a new habit will also slot into the routine and immediately be just as solid. That’s a key mistake I’ve been making a lot, and I’ve recently adjusted my expectations.

Timing

It is often said that if you choose a specific time in advance for a new habit, then it can help you to be more likely to follow through. For example, if you tell a friend that you will go to the gym in the next week, compared with telling them that you will go to the gym at 7:30am on Tuesday, you are more likely to go to the gym when you are more specific:

"There are several key elements in building effective energy-management rituals but none so important as specificity of timing and the precision of behavior during the thirty-to sixty-day acquisition period." - Tony Schwartz

The flipside I’ve found, to this, is that if I choose a very specific time like 7:30am, then if that time comes by and goes, then I feel I have failed and the feeling of disappointment can stop me going at all, even though there is a lot of time left in the day. So, I try to combine this with a freedom to still go in the afternoon or evening and count that as success for my aim to create a habit, too. I let myself be sloppy with the timing of new habits, especially at the start.

Cheat

Another key reason I found I sometimes failed with new habits, was when I made them into big things and then fell short. Or even worse, they were so big in my mind that I didn’t even do it at all.

As an example, if I decide to step up my gym routine and I aim to do 7 exercises, spending a whole hour in the gym, then some days I find that to be quite daunting. The problem with this is that it even stops me going to the gym for just a few minutes. What I do now instead is tell myself that if I go for 10 minutes and do just a single exercise, that counts too.

"the 20-minute walk I take is better than the 3-mile run I never start. Having people over for take-out is better than never having people to an elegant dinner party." - Gretchen Ruben

The interesting thing about this is that for the purpose of building new habits, going to the gym for 10 minutes is better than not going for 1 hour.

This blog post? it’s not as long as most I write. Both Gretchen Ruben quotes are from the same article. Yet, it’s still better than not shipping something this week.

Photo credit: Newtown grafitti

The third option

2013-02-21T13:46:00Z

The third option

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. This, however, is mostly out of choice: I believe, in agreement with Seth Godin, that to be an outlier is an inefficient way to make progress:

The easiest way to thrive as an outlier is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers. Surround yourself with people in at least as much of a hurry, at least as inquisitive, at least as focused as you are.

With that said, there was a time when I felt out of place. I was studying Computer Science, and all of my friends were making their choices about what to do after graduation. All events and advice were centered around either getting a job, or continuing onto further education. Those were the two options. The only options you’d find. I had other things in my mind. I was considering building my own business, creating a startup. A third option.

I fundamentally believe that this elusive third option should be talked about much more. I think there needs to be higher awareness that creating a startup is a real, tangible option for increasing numbers of students. It’s one of the reasons I speak at college and university events as often as I speak at some of the bigger scale events with more marketing potential. I hope to inspire a few people to take the third option.

My story

During my time studying, I was always doing side projects and freelance work. By the time I was approaching graduation, I had worked as a freelancer on the side for several years. As a result of my side projects and practical assignments, I had decided that I’d like to create a product: (something much more scalable and with my income not tied to time) instead of continuing freelance work or getting a regular job.

So, after graduation, I took the plunge and tried to create my own startup. The third option. It’s certainly not a smooth path, it’s not the easy option. For some, it may never work out. For the next year and a half, I struggled to build a startup, and still worked as a freelancer to make ends meet. From the outside it may have seemed that I was not going anywhere. I made little progress with my startup, and I intentionally limited time I spent working as a freelancer. Yet, that’s how it works with startups: it’s the bamboo effect. You’re accumulating learning. Suddenly it all comes together and you have an impact.

After a year and a half of struggles with the first startup, I launched a little experiment called Buffer. Two years later, it’s an eleven person company generating over a million dollars a year. I would like to say I would always have got here, but I know in my mind I was close to being influenced by the fact there were only two obvious choices for me. I luckily found a way to choose that third option no one talks about.

The upside of doing a startup

Building a startup is not for everyone. If, however, you think this path might be for you, I want to share some of the amazing benefits to my life that I’ve found as a result of choosing the third option.

One of the things I like the most about building a startup is the immense freedom and responsibility which results. This is also true if you work for an early stage startup, and that could be a good first step too. The other side of the coin of this freedom and responsibility is that the choice of whether to get out of bed and keep going is only up to you. For me, this triggered a spiritual journey, where I have learned more about myself and what motivates me. It’s also why I’m always changing my routine and habits.

The more direct upside is through learning and the potential to have your income not be tied to your time, and build wealth in a very short period of time. Paul Graham explained this in the best way I’ve come across:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years."

What Paul Graham is talking about takes hard work, but is achievable. A regular job doesn’t require too many hard conversations, or making decisions without complete information. This is what makes a startup harder. Paul Graham once again has a great way to put this:

"if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain"

It’s a fun way to live. I’ve never learned as much in a couple of years as I have building Buffer. I can definitely recommend it.

The opportunity cost of working a normal job

I have come to believe that not only is there a massive upside to building a startup, there is also an opportunity cost of working a regular job. That is to say - if you have the goal to eventually build a startup, then every moment you spend working a regular job is making you less experienced as a startup founder.

Why would this be the case? Well, firstly, let’s look at the lifestyle implications of a regular job. A lot of smart folks will graduate and have good prospects of working at in investment banking or at a consultancy, and the salary potential is very high. So you get started and you have a nice apartment. Once you get a raise, you naturally upgrade your lifestyle. You soon reach a point where you have a lot to lose by cutting your salary in half or to nothing.

Not only is it very easy to get used to the lifestyle promoted by the salary and the people you are around, you also learn to speak in a way which helps you as an investment banker, but not necessarily when you’re building a product or service for the masses. Most importantly, you are becoming an expert of something, and thereby losing the beginner’s mind which is vital to have as a startup founder.

Let’s encourage the third option

As a result of my own experience and the interaction I’ve had with students who could have been great founders, I believe the most useful thing we can all do is to provide encouragement for anyone who shows the smallest sign of considering the path of being a startup founder. Sure, there are risks and there will be failure, but there is immense learning and satisfaction ahead for those who choose the third option. Anyone can point out the dangers, that’s the easy thing to do. Let us be positive about the good things that could happen. Will you join me?

Photo credit: jeco

Make progress faster by cooperating: 4 tips to try with your co-founder or co-worker

2013-02-13T14:38:00Z

Make progress faster by cooperating- 4 tips to try with your co-founder or co-worker

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 great friend Khuram, with whom I consistently had a weekly meeting for over a year. In the meeting, we discussed our achievements and challenges to help each other keep pushing forward.

In the world of weight training, it is well known that having a partner helps with motivation and will mean you can lift more and see gains more quickly. Taking this a step further to the area of personal trainers, research has shown that those who switch from training alone, to using a personal trainer see many improvements.

Similarly, pair programming has become relatively well established and has shown to improve the quality of code, as well as keep both developers in “flow” state for a more sustained period of time.

In the recent months I have been using these techniques in my day to day work on Buffer and my personal projects such as blogging. In essence, my co-founder Leo and I act as personal trainers for each other for our work and life goals. Here are a few examples:

Brainstorm blog posts together, in detail

When I started this blog, every post I wrote completely by myself. It can be done that way, but when Leo had come on board Buffer fully as a co-founder, I soon naturally started discussing future posts with him, and he was super encouraging and interested.

These days, I deliberately brainstorm many of my articles with Leo, right down to the individual sections. It makes my writing task much easier, and the posts are better as a result.

Write a list for the next day

One of the activities Leo and I are trying to build as a habit right now, is to sit down together for 20 minutes at the end of each day, and plan the key tasks we each want to do the next day.

We’ve found that whenever we plan the day ahead, we’re much more productive, procrastinate less, and feel happier as a result. This is something I can definitely recommend you do with your co-founders if you’re in the early stages, or if you’re part of a team you could try it with a co-worker.

Pull the other person in, even for your own tasks

Something I’ve just started doing, and encourage Leo to do as well, is whenever there’s something I need to work on myself, and I find myself struggling to get stuck into it, I will book a slot with Leo to ask him to work through it with me.

This is especially useful for analyzing and brainstorming, where you need to map out many things and come to some conclusions. Although I do it with Leo, I am mostly leading it and it is one of those cases where simply explaining something to someone can help me a lot.

Weekly mastermind sessions

Perhaps the most productive two hours of my week are Friday night, where Leo and I always go to Samovar, drink tea and have a systematic mastermind session which I have learned and cultivated over the last few years. We share our achievements and the other person helps celebrate them and point out interesting patterns. Then, we discuss our biggest challenges right now, and help the other person find solutions or adjustments to make to improve. It’s something I look forward to every week, and I make real changes for the week ahead during every session.

Photo credit: U.S. Pacific Fleet

Expert of nothing

2013-02-11T16:14:00Z

Expert of nothing

One of the most interesting and simultaneously challenging realizations I’ve had is that as a founder, especially the CEO, you essentially have chosen to never become an expert of anything. Oh, and if you don’t embrace that reality, it’s probably going to affect your likelihood of success.

Danielle Morrill wrote that there are a handful of roles that she became very good at, yet she no longer cares to play. As she continues her fascinating journey with Referly, I feel I can relate to a lot of what she’s going through, from my experience with Buffer.

Huh - I was a coder?

It’s crazy. I haven’t coded more than a day every two weeks for over six months now, and I haven’t coded at all for the last two. If I look back at the whole of the last year, I wasn’t coding, I was doing a bunch of other things. Important things.

Yet, looking back at my life and my identity, it’s largely been defined by programming. It was such a core part of who I was. I learned to code when I was 12, I was a freelance developer and I did Computer Science. So it feels odd that in just a year, I can be so distant from it. And that’s exactly how I need to feel. That’s what needs to happen for Buffer, and it’s what will help me grow the most, personally.

Repeatedly firing myself

If you’re a founding CEO, I believe that you are doing your company a disservice if you don’t fire yourself from your skill position.

Joe Kraus

For much of the first year, I was coding. I did whatever was needed to build the product, from design and front-end work to back-end and server admin. Then, we started looking for investment and everything changed. I had to learn how to pitch investors, how to describe our traction. Then I had to work with Leo to learn how to get press. We got into AngelPad and Tom immediately joined us. That was when I first fired myself. I was no longer the main coder, Tom took over and gradually all of my code was touched and improved in some way by Tom.

That was a shock for me, to let go of my main thing. I got over it, and found a joy in the immense personal learning and growth of Buffer which we found as a result of my doing all these other things.

A few months later, we realized the power of mobile for Buffer. I jumped in and learned to code Android, just enough to build a decent version of Buffer for Android. It was hard, I was stuck almost every day with a new challenge in Java. Then, just as I found my feet and gained confidence in the coding, I knew how truly fundamental mobile will be for us, so I knew I needed to hire someone to do it full-time. Sunil joined us and I gradually reduced my involvement in Android development. I never became an expert, then I fired myself and we found someone else.

Feeling lost, and getting used to it

Being an expert of nothing is draining, and something I never anticipated. There is a lot to do, and you don’t really know how to do any of it. On top of that, you’re supposed to be the leader, to know everything. You’re meant to be the expert that everyone can look to. They’re counting on you.

It’s pretty hard at times, if I’m totally frank. There are days when I wonder what it is I even do anymore. Everything used to be so tangible - I would write a line of code, and it would do something for me. These days, there are these fluffy things like culture (and it’s so important), and I have to direct product and hire new people. I have to manage much of the team, and talk with investors. I truly have no idea what I’m doing - I have zero previous experience of hiring, or managing people, or being a product manager.

Every day I’m an expert of nothing. And just when I finally start to feel like I know how this role works, and the activities I need to do? That’s exactly the point when I need to hire someone to replace myself, so I can move onto the next thing I have no idea how to do.

I’m starting to find a kind of peace and comfort in this place now. I quite like it. It is a real privilege to be able to experience it.

Photo credit: Daniel Novta

The evening walk

2013-02-03T19:39:00Z

The evening walk

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 how I recommend starting it if you find that you want to give it a try.

Disengagement from the busy day

One of the key reasons that the evening walk has become a crucial part of my daily routine is that it provides a powerful way to quickly become fully disengaged from the activities of the day and the plans, worries or excitement I have lingering.

I’ve written before that I believe the evening routine is just as important as the morning routine, when trying to create a lasting early waking habit.

In a recent interview with Leo Babauta, Mark Sissonrecommended a tech cut-off time in the evening:

Set a tech cut-off time before bed. Shoot for at least an hour before you go to sleep, but strive to extend that period to two hours.

For me, the evening walk provides the perfect tech cut-off time and is a key reason I am able to sustain habits through the whole week.

Deliberate reflection

I recently set a goal of becoming a more frequent content creator, rather than simply a consumer or curator. I share a daily 3 minute voice clip on SoundCloud, I blog here usually twice a week and I create and share a video once a week.

With this high frequency of sharing my thoughts through various forms of content, I need lots of ideas in order to be able to keep up that pace. Therefore, I started reflecting a lot around when exactly the breakthroughs of the ideas come - when the inspiration comes to me.

What I realized, is that I have most of my ideas for blog posts, sound clips or videos through the combination of two things:

Spending time discussing startup and life challenges and ideas with my team, or with other founders.
Time to reflect on the discussions I’ve had, to ponder the ideas by myself and let thoughts emerge with clarity.

After this discovery, I started deliberately working to do these two things even more. Firstly, I offer Help with your startup and generally have 30 minute office hours sessions with 6-8 people a week. Secondly, I scheduled time for the reflection to happen and the inspiration to hit me: by having a daily evening walk. Most people leave this to chance, their “inspiration” time being when they are in the shower. I try to be much more deliberate about it.

The walk helps me wind down for the day and sleep better when I return, and it also is a time when I find I have inspiration for blog posts and voice clips, as well as many product, vision and culture ideas for Buffer.

How to start an evening walk habit

If the evening walk sounds like something you want to try, I’d love to share some practical tips to start doing it. In the last two years I’ve lived in the UK, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Tel Aviv and during my time in each of these places I always quickly formed a specific and automatic evening walk habit.

1. Aim to walk for 20 minutes

I’ve tried shorter than 20 minutes and I’ve also done 30 or 40 minutes at times, and I’ve found that 20 minutes is, for me, the most ideal duration for the evening walk. It’s short enough that it’s easy to fit it in each day, especially when forming the habit to begin with. It’s long enough to gradually let go of the day to day excitement or worries, and let your mind wander and reflect on a higher level.

2. Plan a precise route, and stick to it

One of the most important aspects of the walk for me has been to quickly decide a route, and stick to it. The route should be very specific, down to almost each step. When creating a new evening walk habit, I plan each turn and visualize walking it in my mind. The power of this specificity is that it quickly becomes automatic and you forget about where you are going or what you are seeing, and can start to reflect inwards on what you are doing and whether you are happy. I usually walk much more slowly than my normal walking pace, and find I can start to ponder changes I want to make in my life.

3. Think backwards from when you want to sleep

To utilize the evening walk as a core part of your morning routine, the key is to think about when you want to awake, ensure that you will get 7-8 hours of sleep, and then work backwards from there to decide exactly when you should set off for your evening walk. Having a specific time to walk out of the door each day makes it much easier to create the habit. I leave at 7:30.

Photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

5 reasons as a CEO you should develop a habit of daily meditation

2013-01-31T13:15:00Z

5 reasons as a CEO you should develop a habit of daily meditation

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 duties and a fast growing team of 7 people, there have been a lot of challenges and I’ve had to learn new skills over and over.

If you can relate to this, whether you’re a CEO or you find that you have to wear many hats and your role changes a lot, you’ve probably discovered, like me, that the general mentality is that we should be working non-stop and sacrificing our sleep, health and everything else in order to ensure we are successful with our endeavors.

How, then, would we possibly have time to “meditate”? It’s this elusive thing, where tangible benefits are not often associated and even the practicalities of what the activity is, are often not discussed.

Despite all of this, I’ve recently started regularly meditating as soon as I awake in the morning, and just before I sleep in the evening. I’ve found this to have a profound effect on my life and my ability to succeed as a CEO, so I wanted to share the benefits you might get from forming a habit of meditation yourself:

1. You will easily handle the inevitable ups and downs

One thing you can be sure of if you run a startup, is that it’s not all going to be plain sailing. You’re going to have to change your mind, you’re going to run into unexpected events and there are going to be days where nothing works out.

I’ve found that my daily morning and evening meditation helps me to reduce how dramatically these highs and lows can effect my ability to keep moving forward and make progress. Through simply focusing on my breathing for at least 5 minutes each morning, I am brought back to the present moment and over time, I become more and more tolerant to the ups and downs that arise.

2. It will save you time, by reducing procrastination

I truly believe that the purpose of meditation is simply to meditate, but there are of course some amazing benefits that come as a result. I focus on “now” when I meditate, and if you’ve tried to do this you will know how hard it can be. As soon as you close your eyes to meditate, you think about what you’ll do today, whether your metrics will grow as they need to, even what you’ll eat for breakfast and how much time is left on the counter for your meditation session.

The result of having all these unhealthy thoughts come into your mind while you meditate, is that you are practicing letting these thoughts come in and then leave your mind, and you are therefore improving your ability to be unaffected by distractions. I’ve found this carries over to my workday and makes me much more productive.

3. You will have bursts of creative genius

Often after my meditation session I feel so renewed and my mind is so clear, that the activity afterwards is filled with much more creativity. Whether I sit down to work on a most important task, I go to the gym, or I take a shower, I seem to have breakthroughs when I’m doing an activity just after meditating.

Try it for a week. Meditate for just 3 minutes, or try 5 if you can. There are many ways to meditate. Personally, I simply sit cross-legged on a cushion, close my eyes, and focus on breathing in and out. If you try it, I truly believe you will find that you have many more useful thoughts on a consistent basis. In the evening I am doing guided meditation with Headspace, which is also great.

4. You will feel alive and healthy and have better sleep

After I started doing my daily evening meditation session, my sleep became much better. I usually struggle to sleep, and I often have all kinds of thoughts swirling around in my head. After 5 minutes of meditation, those thoughts are emptied from my mind and I’ve found it easier to fall asleep, and in addition the quality of my sleep has been higher.

Through meditation, I have learned to respect my body and be grateful for it. I’m much healthier and I find it easier to restrain myself with food, in a similar way that I have found I can avoid procrastinating. Overall, I feel much more alive.

5. It will make you happy and you’ll find meaning

A great result of feeling alive, healthy and spending more time in the present moment, is that you will naturally be happier. Being happy is being in the present moment. The most common times I’m unhappy are when I’m thinking about the past or the future, so meditation makes me happy. Through regular meditation, I’ve had deeper and deeper sessions where my mind has become even more clear and I’ve let go of my day-to-day worries. This has helped me to much more easily reflect on what I truly want to achieve through my role as the CEO of a startup, and in life itself.

Photo credit: Caleb Roenigk

The paradox of how bugs and downtime can be a good thing

2013-01-14T14:17:00Z

The paradox of how bugs and downtime can be a good thing

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 particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching.

One of the key learnings for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. Let me share some examples for why this is the case.

Downtime is an opportunity to make people love you more than they did before you went down

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it" - Charles R. Swindoll

As Buffer grew from a few hundred users to tens of thousands in the first six months, we hit some scaling issues, in particular as a result of my lack of experience in scaling MySQL (as an aside, we’ve since moved to MongoDB). I quickly learned how to optimize queries and which indexes to add. I often needed to resize the single Linode instance Buffer was hosted on. As a result, there were times of both unexpected as well as deliberate downtime in the early days of Buffer.

One of the most remarkable things we found during these periods of downtime, was that if we were super responsive on Twitter, we could actually gain some very loyal Buffer supporters. The scenario would be that I (or later, Tom and I) would be hard at work fixing the issues, and Leo would be 100% focused on responding to Tweets within seconds. What we found, which is very counterintuitive, was that in some ways by being down, we had emerged in a better position afterwards than we were beforehand. This insight helped us to be much calmer about downtime in the future.

With bugs in the wild, you’re forced to work harder and faster. Your product improves quickly.

I’ve found that some of the hardest stages of creating a new startup are those early weeks or months when you’re racing to get your product ready for initial launch. You’re trying to decide how polished the product should be, and how many features you need to include.

Through my own experience and speaking to other founders who have launched products, I’ve found that we almost always say we should have launched sooner. The thing is, when something is live, that’s where all the learning happens. Until you put it out there and get real usage, you’re sat in the dark coding and have no idea if it will work.

I would even go as far as to say that you should “push it live” when there are still a few bugs or it doesn’t look perfect. Once it’s out there, you’re going to fix them faster, and your users will find and tell you about problems you had no idea about. Doing this is a nice hack to increase your productivity: I’ve found that when I did this especially in the early days, I always had a great todo list and was compelled to work away at the items. Essentially, the product will improve much more quickly than if you work quietly in stealth mode.

Handling challenges and pressure is a key skill for startup teams

One of the things that is often said is that startups are inherently a process where there is a massive amount of uncertainty. Alyssa and Andy in the team certainly know that we can change our minds about even fundamental aspects of Buffer literally from one day to the next. It takes a certain type of person to be able to handle this kind of environment.

With this uncertainty, often those involved with a startup are faced with some fairly pressurised situations, whether it is downtime or figuring out and fixing some critical bug quickly. I think these times are really the ones where, more than anything, the team needs to remain optimistic and positive. Therefore, any bugs or downtime that comes up, is yet another opportunity to practice these traits and in some cases to find out who can see those situations through while remaining calm and productive.

The other thing that we’ve often found at Buffer, is that we look back on the downtime and those times where we are up all night figuring out how to get Buffer back up and realise that in those few hours we’ve learned a massive amount. In that light, we don’t wish that those scenarios wouldn’t happen.

Photo credit: Bearden

What is failure for you?

2013-01-11T14:46:00Z

What is failure for you-

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 particular, in the year of 2012 I built up my gym routine to the point where for the final 3 months, I went to the gym consistently 5 times per week. During the holidays, I “failed” with my 5 times per week routine, but this meant that I still went to the gym 2-3 times a week during that time.

Similarly with blogging, I’m now aiming to write 2-3 times per week, and so for me to “fail” with blogging means that I write once a week.

The role of failure and imperfection in building skills

Failure is part of success, an integral part. - Bill Walsh

I’ve written before that I believe imperfection is a key part of building habits and gaining skills. To sit down and decide a new goal or habit and expect to flawlessly go ahead and achieve it is unproductive. Instead, I think the best plan is to expect to miss the mark several times along the way.

The key to simultaneously expecting imperfection and not allowing it to get you down and cause you to bail on your idea, is perspective. For me, once I take a moment to realise just how far I’ve come, despite the fact I’ve failed at this moment, that’s when it’s easy to still be happy with that failure and then move forward towards being better the next week.

If you’ve been blogging once a month for 6 months, then you step it up to twice a month and achieve that for the first two months but fall short the third, don’t be too disappointed. Remember that eight months ago you weren’t even blogging at all, and this ‘failure’ probably just means you’ve blogged once a month. It’s always a process of gradual improvement.

Your failure is highly individual

We constantly compare our beginning to someone elses middle. Our middle to someone elses end. And when you do that youll find that youre never, ever satisfied. Youll never, ever be good enough. Youll always struggle to celebrate your accomplishments. - Matt Cheuvront

One of the hardest things I’ve found to grasp and be aware of, is that to each person, failure has a different definition. We are all at different stages, and our journeys are very different too. As Matt Cheuvront says, we’re always comparing ourselves to others when it makes zero sense to do that.

A most important thing with this, is that if you feel like you have failed with something, make sure that failure is your own and not someone else’s. If you’re hitting the gym twice a week and meet someone who is going to the gym every day, don’t let that make you feel like a failure. Our own goals and habits are completely individual to us. I think one of my biggest satisfactions comes from continually improving my personal bests, whether it’s running or lifting weights, blogging or speaking. Once you get into a habit of beating yourself continually, you can make some amazing progress.

Adjusting your definition of failure over time

The other fascinating thing I’ve found, is that in just one year you can dramatically change what failure means for you. You can go from your highest success scenario becoming your “failure” scenario. This is very encouraging for me. It means that for example, in a year from now I can gradually work towards daily blogging, and by that point my “failure” might be that I only blog 3 times per week, which is my current success scenario.

It was a reassuring thought for me over the holidays that despite the fact I felt like I was failing by not keeping up my routine of going to the gym 5 times per week, I was still going 2-3 times a week and this was a lot more than I was doing a year earlier. So, the key is to think about the line you are creating rather than the individual dots.

Photo credit: Behrooz Nobakht

Zero notifications

2013-01-07T13:41:00Z

Zero notifications

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 this suggestion especially interesting because it is one that goes against the normal phone setup. It’s so usual to stick to how things are, and with iPhone apps the easiest thing to do is to “allow” all those notifications. It seems almost odd to even consider doing things any other way.

I chose to go along with Leo’s suggestion, although I was admittedly quite skeptical that it would change much. I imagined that I had pretty good willpower, and that I am fairly productive already. Just because I got notifications, I didn’t think that affected my workflow all too much. In hindsight looking back though, one clear indication that it was already affecting my was that I was regularly turning my phone over to stop those notifications lighting up the screen and distracting me.

What it’s like to live without notifications

"Don’t Confuse the Urgent with the Important" - Preston Ni

For the first week that I turned off notifications, I checked Twitter, Facebook, Email and other places regularly. In fact, I still do, although maybe not so much as that first week. After a couple of weeks, I came to love the fact that nothing came onto my lock screen or lit up my phone. I even found that I frequently started to use the switch in Mac OSX to turn off desktop notifications until the next day.

With zero notifications, I feel like I can get my head stuck into a problem much more easily than I did before. I never realised when I had those notifications on that they truly could throw me off my current thought and cause me difficulty getting that focus back. More than anything, I feel a lot calmer. Notifications create a sense of urgency around something that’s not important at all. I don’t need to know right now that someone liked my status on Facebook.

It changes the balance, it’s now my choice

"There are two types of people: One strives to control his environment, the other strives not to let his environment control him. I like to control my environment" - George Carlin

The thing I like the most about turning off all notifications is that it is now completely up to me when I choose to check my email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I have no excuse that a notification came in. If I check it too frequently and find myself procrastinating, it is only my fault: I went out of my way to go and look. As Derek Sivers puts it, "everything is my fault":

But to decide its your fault feels amazing! Now you werent wronged. They were just playing their part in the situation you created. Theyre just delivering the punch-line to the joke you set up. What power! Now youre like a new super-hero, just discovering your strength. Now youre the powerful person that made things happen, made a mistake, and can learn from it. Now youre in control and theres nothing to complain about.

It was my fault that I received push notifications, too, but by controlling that part of my environment everything is so much more pronounced. And now that it’s my fault, I can work solely myself to be better, to check those notifications less.

I choose to avoid reliance on willpower

"we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it is depleted by any act of conscious self-regulationwhether thats resisting a cookie, solving a puzzle, or doing anything else that requires effort." - Tony Schwartz and Jean Gomes in The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working

The other reason I am happy that I’ve turned off all notifications, is that wherever possible I like to avoid relying on willpower or self-discipline. As Tony Schwartz and Jean Gomes put it, we all have a limited reservoir of willpower, and by turning off notifications it means I save some of that for other tasks rather than using it on resisting checking on each push notification that comes in. I’m certainly not suddenly a superhuman with complete focus at all times, but I feel much more in control.

Have you tried turning off notifications? I can highly recommend trying it, just for a week.

Photo credit: Christian Ostrosky

How to gain traction in two sided markets

2013-01-04T15:31:47Z

How to gain traction in two sided markets

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 of buyers for the sellers to be interested, and you need lots of sellers for the buyers to be interested. The same goes for the recruitment space, and many other verticals too.

I myself have failed in a two sided market, where I once tried to build a product which would kill the business card. It would only work if everyone used the product and exchanged their business cards using my platform. Or so I thought.

While I don’t have any direct personal experience of solving the two sided market problem, I have now been involved in startups for quite some time and have helped over 100 people through 1:1 Skype calls and coffee meetings, and gaining traction in a network effects startup is a challenge that comes frequently. Here are the two ways I would go about building traction for a product in a two sided market:

Go super niche

The first thing I would advise is to think about just how narrow you could go with the first iteration of your product. The more niche you go, the smaller the market becomes. The smaller the market, the easier it is to gain a critical mass within that market and become the defacto product for the audience.

In addition, the smaller and more focused you make the market, the more you can do specific things which will make your product the better option than any others. I think there is a reason Facebook did so well in the early days when it only supported Harvard and other colleges. Zuckerberg mentioned in an early interview that by staying more focused they could provide more value:

There was a level of service that we could provide when we were just at Harvard that we can’t provide for all the colleges, and there’s a level of service that we can provide when we’re a college network which we couldnt provide if we went to other types of things.

I would encourage you to think “what can I do to provide value for a much smaller niche market that might not necessarily scale?”. This means to provide value very specific to that niche market, that might not apply to other markets you later want to support. That’s an interesting thing I’ve learned: methods you use early to gain traction don’t need to be able to scale as you grow.

Usually a great plan is to go truly niche by picking a specific location as well as specific use case, then expand outwards. Chris Dixon has a great article on using this method, he calls it the bowling pin strategy. For example, Facebook focused on Harvard, and students. Yelp on San Francisco and dining out. Think about what’s the best focus for your idea.

Have a single player mode

The other great way to gain traction when getting started with an idea in a two sided market, is to essentially avoid the “two sides” aspect all together. While it is very powerful to have network effects at a later stage and can help trigger fast growth, in the beginning attracting both sides is a tough problem to solve.

In my experience, I’ve seen that most ideas have one side which has many problems and could actually benefit from a “tool” of some sort in addition to the benefits that are provided with the other side of the market. The idea is that the features which involve both sides of the market (for example, repinning, commenting and browsing others’ pins on Pinterest) are the "multiplayer mode" of the product. If you can also provide a “single player mode” (for example, creating your own personal pinboard of great pictures you find and want to save) then this can be very powerful for gaining the initial traction when the userbase is small.

I’ve observed that often founders have not considered that they could provide a tool for one side of the market and this could give them a way to get the product off the ground, while still retaining the multiplayer aspect for later benefit.

Are you building a startup which inherently has network effects and the challenge of the chicken and egg problem to gain traction? Have you thought about these two techniques?

Photo credit: Simply Boaz

Focus on the line, not the dot

2013-01-02T14:44:00Z

Focus on the line, not the dot

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 year ago, we’ve been actively hiring and so I’ve made it a task of mine to post to the thread when it appears on the first of the month.

As I sat down to write the listing for Buffer in the thread yesterday, the writing came very easily. At the same time, those words I wrote on that thread have had a huge impact. The listing itself gained 11 points and was placed 2nd out of all job listings. In the hours that followed, I have received over 30 emails from super interesting people interested in joining the team.

One thing I realized is that the blogging is the reason that this happened. I’ve now written over 70 articles on this blog, mostly around 700-800 words. That’s over 50,000 words I’ve written, and I would guess that by writing that much you are only going to get better. That’s why it came so naturally for me to write that job listing.

How focusing on the dot feels

You see, what I’ve found is that if I ever stop and try to focus too much on any single article, and try and have a massive impact with one specific article, it becomes very unfulfilling. Although there are one or two article which have had a tremendous impact for me, I had no idea at the time I was writing them.

The way I see it is that when you focus on the dot, you focus on your impact between one workout and the next. You focus on your writing between one blog post and the next. You focus on the quality of your code between one line and the next. This is mostly going to result in disappointment.

As Jess Lee theorised in Why Startup Founders are Always Unhappy, if we focus on a single point in time, we are likely to be less happy.

How focusing on the line feels

I find one of the most exciting things to be thinking about the line I’m creating with my gym routine. Since I started measuring my bench press performance, I have increased the weight by fifty pounds in six months.

With almost every exercise I do at the gym, I put the weight up by a tiny amount each week. This happens every single week. One week to the next doesn’t feel like huge progress, but if I just extrapolate that trend out, it means that within a few months I am going to be lifting a further twenty or thirty pounds on the bench press. There’s no way I’ll be able to do that without having a higher muscle mass, so therefore in a few months I am going to be in better shape.

Start thinking about being a line

So, my conclusion from all of this is that personally I am much more focused on daily habits and consistency than any single point or any future goal.

Mark Suster said that he invests in lines, not dots. His advice for us as entrepreneurs is to treat our fundraising strategy as a line, not a dot:

dont allocate two months of each year to hardcore funding activities but allocate a regular amount of time each month to it like any other job function.

Ira Glass has a fantastic video which hints at this idea too:

There is a gap. That for the first couple of years, that you are making stuff, what you are making isnt so good. Its trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but its not that good.

The most important, possible thing you could do is to do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Because its only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap.

Are you focused on dots when you might make more progress by focusing on lines, by thinking about consistency?

Photo credit: FullyFunctnlPhil

Two important and often overlooked aspects of creating a lasting morning routine

2012-12-31T14:12:00Z

Two important and often overlooked aspects of creating a lasting morning routine

"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, and at its core it revolves around waking up early (before sunrise), working on something important for an 90 minutes, and then hitting the gym. I recently shared my most recent routine in a blog post about creating new habits.

Today, I want to share a couple of things which I’ve neglected to mention in previous articles about my routine. These two aspects have enabled me to create a morning routine that has lasted several months, and it’s through my morning routine truly becoming habitual that I’ve seen massive benefits. I hope that these two insights can help you, too.

Why wake up early in the first place?

Before I jump into those two key insights that helped me, I want to share some of my thoughts about why you might want to wake up early at all.

Firstly, I’ve observed that many of the most successful people wake up early. In fact, I don’t know anyone who consistently wakes up before 6am and isn’t doing something interesting with their life. Some of the top CEOs are well known for waking up super early, many of them at 4:30am.

Additionally, I feel that waking up early sets the tone for my day of “making a choice”. If I leave it to fate as to when I roll out of bed, then I feel like that’s the outlook I’m taking in general. On the other hand, if I choose to get up early and do amazing things in those quiet hours, that’s when I feel like I’m grabbing hold of my life and controlling where I go. That’s the choice I want to make.

Finally, I’d like to ask you - are you working for someone else and have desires to create your own startup? If that’s the case, then do you leave your “startup building time” to the evening? Why do it after 8 hours of work? You’re going to be exhausted and struggle to be motivated. I advise you to think about what is a higher priority for you - your dream of a startup, or your work for someone else? Perhaps start working harder on yourself than on your job. When I started Buffer whilst working 5 days per week, it was the choice to work an hour first thing in the morning each day when I was freshest that made a huge difference.

So, if you’re thinking about starting starting an early morning routine, here are two things which took me a while to notice:

1. Craft your evening routine to get enough sleep

One of the most important things I’ve found when I have attempted to keep up an early morning routine for several days and weeks in a row, is that if I let my daily sleep amount get much below 7 hours for too many consecutive days, I will burn out sooner or later.

The best way I have found to counteract this, is to decide how much sleep I need (for me it’s about 7.5 hours a night) and then figure out the exact time I need to be in bed. Once I’ve done this, I set up a 30 minute winding down ritual (for me, it’s going for a walk) which allows me to disengage from the day’s work and not have work in my head when I hit the pillow.

The key thing I’ve found, is that in order to wake up early over a sustained period of weeks, this evening ritual is just as important as how much I think about my morning routine.

2. Wake up early at the weekend too

Another key aspect I’ve found to having a consistent early morning routine over a long period of time, is to pay particular attention to the weekend as well as the week. I certainly believe that allowing imperfection and some slack at the weekend is important, but I personally made the mistake of having a weekend wake up time which was too divergent from my week day wake up time. Only once I started to think about the weekend, I hit a chain of many days of early mornings.

Once you’ve decided when you want to wake up during the week, I recommend that you don’t wake up much more than 1 hour later at the weekend. This also probably means that you still need to go to bed quite early on Friday and Saturday night. The problem arises when you wake up several hours later on Saturday and Sunday, and then want to wake up super early again on Monday.

The most likely thing is that Monday will be a little later, and Tuesday too. Perhaps by Wednesday you are back to your early morning waking time, but you will not feel that magical state of gliding along, having several days in a row of early mornings and productive quiet hours. If you don’t try to wake up at a similar time at the weekend, it is similar to giving yourself jet lag every weekend. By waking up at a similar time at the weekend, you don’t stretch your body, and therefore you can achieve long term consistency with your morning routine.

Have you tried to have a long lasting early morning routine? Have you encountered either of these two challenges?

Photo credit: Kostas Kokkinos

The highs and lows of startup life

2012-12-28T14:42:00Z

The highs and lows of startup life

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 two years.

When I speak, I try my best to share useful information and this generally consists of mistakes I’ve made along the way and some of the greatest lessons I’ve come away with from the experience. At the same time, I also aim for my talks to be a little inspirational too, by sharing how I’ve been lucky enough to achieve some astonishing milestones despite the fact that I’m certainly no smarter than anyone else.

At the end of this particular talk, someone asked me a really fantastic question, which was “you’ve shared great lessons, tips and some amazing achievements, but what has been the lowest point in this journey so far?”. It is a great question and there’s certainly one moment that stands out amongst others as one of the hardest times I’ve had with Buffer.

A choice to raise funding

When Leo and I jumped on a plane to San Francisco around one and a half years ago, what we didn’t realise at the time is that in hindsight this was a clear turning point for us personally, and for Buffer as a startup.

When we first arrived, we quickly set up a number of different meetings. Notable people we met were Hiten Shah and Daniel Brusilovsky amongst a number of other founders at different stages of their startup career, including a few YCombinator founders.

What we quickly realised through conversations with people was that we could keep growing slowly and solidly without funding, but we were at a point with good traction and a clear bottleneck in terms of me being the only person working on the whole product and all technical aspects, where if we had some funding we could grow the team more quickly and get much faster growth.

Leo and I always have a very positive outlook which helps us a lot, so we quickly decided it made sense to raise investment and whilst we had no idea how to do that, we agreed that it was simply another thing we would figure out.

Switching our focus to fundraising

Of course, since we had literally no idea how raising funding worked, we asked many many people for advice, and we started to take action right away to attempt to make progress. One thing we were sure of was that we should try our best to reach out to investors and have meetings. We were scared to talk to investors since we didn’t know how to pitch or how the process works, but we knew that was exactly what we needed to do.

Due to our lack of experience and knowledge, we worked jointly on fundraising. We sat down together in various coffee shops and sent out dozens of emails to investors, to other founders and to people who had become casual advisors. We learned many things, including that you should always get an introduction to an investor, and that you should be very specific with a call to action in emails.

One of the important things we discovered, was that there should always be a clear focus of any pitch. Most pitches have similar content sections such as the market, a problem, your solution, current traction and the team. However, each individual startup will have a single aspect which is the strongest part of the pitch. For us, this was definitely our traction; Buffer already had 25,000 users, monthly revenues around $1,500 and we were growing 10% week over week.

The great thing was: it is often said that when pitching, traction trumps everything. Certainly looking back, since we were first time founders with no track record, traction was even more important. The problem was, whilst traction was the key part of our pitch and the traction was good, as soon as we switched our focus to fundraising our traction slowed.

A difficult few weeks of learning

The traction which we were proud of was largely driven by a lot of hard work. For the six months previous, the only focus Leo and I had was to build a great product which solved a real need, and to market it so that people who would find it useful knew that it existed.

We learned that fundraising is a full-time task, so what happened next was that around three weeks into fundraising, around three weeks after we had almost stopped working on the product and marketing altogether, our traction started to slow dramatically. We had some long-tail traffic, but a large portion of the traction was driven by articles about Buffer which we were triggering on an almost daily basis.

We essentially started to lose our most valuable asset in pitching Buffer. To add to the struggles, we were almost one month into our allowed three months in San Francisco on the visa waiver program, and we were also quickly running out of money because we didn’t realise how expensive the Bay Area is. With only two months left before we would have to move on from San Francisco, we were eager to raise the funding we had decided would be so valuable for building the startup further.

However, one of the things we learned while figuring out how fundraising works is that two months is a very fast amount of time to close a seed round, even for the most experienced founders.

A tough Saturday morning conversation

One Saturday morning around three weeks after we started our attempt to raise a seed round for Buffer, at the apartment where we were sharing a single room (alternating between one sleeping on a bed and the other on the floor on an airbed), Leo and I talked about what we were going to do to try and turn things around.

We had been trying for three weeks, and we had learned a lot about how to raise funding, but we now knew that a joint effort from both of us in order to try to quickly close a seed round was not going to be successful. We needed our traction to continue, since the fundraising was going to be a longer task. We had very little cash left, in fact I was actually borrowing money from Leo, who was well into his savings.

So we needed a new strategy. Since I was the coder, we decided that I would be the one to work towards keeping our traction going, which I would do by building the product but also by doing all the marketing tasks which I was much less experienced with. Leo, on the other hand, would focus entirely on fundraising and learning more, and trying to figure it out. I would be pulled into meetings only when we reached a point where we were discussing terms.

We knew it was going to be extremely difficult, with many highs and lows for both of us, which we would need to shield each other from and remain positive and optimistic. I think we both believed we could pull it off, but we knew there was a good chance that we might end up back home on a plane to the UK without closing the funding we sought.

An amazing high: Being accepted into AngelPad

The next few hours taught us how crazy life as a startup founder can be. We were both truly at a very low point, and we often look back with fond memories of that moment since it was a great example of the struggles founders have to go through.

Around 2 weeks into our attempt to raise funding, we had noticed that AngelPad had a class coming up, and that even though the deadline had passed, they were accepting late applications. Since we were struggling, we applied. We didn’t take too long over it, though, and we quickly moved back to focusing on our fundraising efforts. We had a number of emails back and forth with Thomas, Gokul and others in the AngelPad team, and even had a Skype interview with Thomas. Still, we weren’t too confident we would get in.

After our memorable Saturday morning discussion, Leo got a call from Thomas. We had got into AngelPad and would receive $120,000 in funding for Buffer. We’d go through the 10 week program with 14 other startups and have a demo day at the end, and we would be taught about how to raise funding. It was simply one of the most incredible moments of my life and I remember a real feeling of elation, compounded by the fact we had just had to make a very difficult decision a few hours prior, which no longer mattered.

AngelPad proved to be a significant part of the Buffer journey, and enabled us to get some amazing advisors and investors on board when we did our fundraising after demo day. Although it was not easy, after the struggles and learning we had gone through we were fortunate to be able to raise a $400,000 seed round for Buffer.

I have realised that when I have low points, they are the times where the most growth and learning occurs. I would therefore not change a thing about those tough weeks.

Have you had some truly low points during your startup journey so far? Have you found that these moments have taught you some valuable lessons?

Photo credit: TexasEagle

How to get more replies to the emails you send: be specific

2012-12-23T16:00:00Z

How to get more replies to the emails you send- be specific

"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 kept is difficult to overstate." - Seth Godin

It’s easy to be vague, broad, and to never commit to a particular direction. It’s frightening to be specific.

One of the key things I’ve learned in the last two years of doing startups is that to make real progress, it’s important to be specific. I think this applies beyond email, but with a specific example I think it’s easier to understand.

Why it’s hard to be specific in emails

I was recently looking back at some of the emails I was sending out when I was just beginning my journey with startups. It was quite frankly embarrassing. In almost every case the emails were far too long and had no clear call to action. Still, emails are consistently somewhere that I see new founders struggling the most. They rarely get a reply and they often wonder why.

What I’ve realised, is that it’s actually very difficult to be specific. If we take the example of trying to get a meeting with a well-known investor, then it’s easy to think that we should let them choose the time. So you say something like this:

How is your schedule looking next week?

It seems sensible. They’re probably much more busy, so if you suggest a time to meet it’s likely that it won’t work for them.

How vagueness fails to clinch that important meeting

"A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and dont buy the product." - Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice

What generally happens when the investor receives the email is that they have a number of options for “next week”. Rather than spending the effort to make that decision, they instead “decide not to decide” and you get no reply to your email. It happened to me countless times.

How I learned to be specific in emails

I was quite lucky - I was forced to improve the emails I was sending, because we were fundraising and email is still by far one of the most useful tools when raising investment. I learned by making the mistake over and over, and then deciding that a new approach was required.

I asked advice from many people and discussed our approach with my co-founder Leo. I read lots of articles with great insights such as the following from Elad Gil:

Add specific times. This reduces the friction to scheduling as if you leave it open ended it (a) does not convey urgency and sets up the timeframe within which you will meet and (b) makes the investor work harder to figure things out. Don’t put the burden on them to suggest a time.

How to write emails which get more replies

After many failed attempts to get meetings, I adjusted my approach. Instead of:

How is your schedule looking next week?

I started to say:

Would 10am on Thursday at South Beach Cafe work for you?

The above is from a real email that I sent during the time we were raising our seed round.

The interesting thing, is that by simply making that choice for them, it doesn’t mean it will always work for them but it means it is much easier for them to reply with a slight adjustment. We’d often get a reply such as:

Thursday is tough, but Friday could work.

or:

I could do 10a but it would have to be in Hayes Valley as I have a 9a and an 11a there. Would La Boulange in Hayes work?

From here, we were often able to confirm a meeting within one or two emails. This technique was crucial for us in securing investors for our seed round.

Have you tried being more specific in your emails?

Photo credit: Juli

Thinking about your goal with a startup

2012-12-16T16:30:26Z

Thinking about your goal with a startup

I often reflect upon the differences between my previous startup and Buffer, and think about what changes to my mindset affected the better outcome this time compared with my previous attempts.

One of the mindset adjustments which I think has had a large impact on my success is to think about what my goal as an entrepreneur is. The key thing has been to focus on a goal of succeeding overall with creating a startup, rather than to focus on being successful with a particular idea. It’s an interesting tweak to your thinking, but one which I’ve found very powerful.

A goal to succeed with an idea

With my previous startup, one of the mistakes I made was to make my sole aim to succeed with the particular idea that I started with. Despite that fact that I still made adjustments to the idea and it changed a little, I had a mindset that I wanted to make the idea work. I struggled, with little traction and almost zero retention.

When the goal is to succeed with the idea you have, you don’t give yourself much room to course-correct. The fact is, that almost all startups change considerably over their lifetime, so to stay fixated on that original idea can be detrimental to the success of the startup.

A goal to create a successful startup

"If you don’t succeed with your current startup, it’s not your fault. If you’re not successful in your career, it is your fault." - Chris Yeh

The better approach I’ve found is to focus solely on being successful with your startup, without the idea being involved in that equation. That way, you allow for the required change in order to arrive at an eventual success, rather than limiting your ability to adjust and move towards success.

I truly believe that if you have not found something that works, something that people are using and find valuable, then you should be doing nothing but trying to reach that goal. In essence, if you are pre-product/market fit, then your only goal should be to reach product/market fit. What I want to suggest is that the goal of any startup founder should be to reach product/market fit with an idea, not necessarily the idea they started with.

This ties in very well with the lean startup notion of validated learning being the measure of progress. A lot of the formalities can be forgotten in the early days of a startup. No need to incorporate, no need for an office. Just try to learn about your customers and figure out if your assumptions about your idea and market are correct. If not, make changes. If you need to make a big change and arrive at a whole different idea, then do it.

It’s a change in mindset

It may seem quite obvious to read, but I’ve found personally that this is very difficult in practice. I think a key reason Buffer was more successful than my previous endeavours was that I had reached a point with enough previous failure that I wanted so bad to succeed with something, with anything. That meant I didn’t mind if it was this idea or another I discovered. That slight shift in mindset makes you much more eager for feedback and learning, and makes you genuinely open to changing the idea based on that feedback. This means you listen and people can tell that you are truly appreciative of their time.

Your goal should not be to succeed with a particular idea. Your goal should be to create a successful startup.

Have you previously found yourself limited by a goal focused on an idea, rather than being open to change?

Photo credit: Kreg Steppe

The evolution of culture at a startup

2012-12-10T15:28:00Z

The evolution of culture at a startup

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, I’ve been thinking a lot about culture and asking many other founders about different aspects such as having an office, having company values and different forms of communication like team meetings and 1:1 meetings.

One thing I realised recently when talking with Thomas Schranz, the founder of the very cool Blossom, was that we’ve actually got quite a few cool things in place that define the Buffer culture. It occurred to me that the different aspects of the culture were introduced at various times along the 2 year journey so far, and it forms the evolution of culture at Buffer.

Since working on the culture has happened gradually, I wanted to document the things we’ve done for culture at the earliest stage of the startup, since as we go forward it might be more difficult to recall.

Culture as an evolutionary process

It seems rather obvious in hindsight, but only after growing a team over 2 years have I realised just how gradual and progressive building a startup culture is. When I started Buffer, I was a solo founder with no team for 3 months. Clearly, at that stage, there was no “culture”. Then Leo came on board and whilst we certainly talked about our approaches and put some things in place to help us be aligned, we still didn’t think in terms of a culture we we building.

Fast-forwarding to now, where we are 7 people, I find myself thinking about culture a lot and making changes from time to time. Examples of topics that are in my mind are team communication, our approach to customer support, our release cycle time and how transparent we are.

My belief now as a result of looking back at this process is that you can’t think too much about culture when you’re one or two founders, but you naturally need to think about it a lot more once you have a sizeable team. It’s certainly an evolutionary process, not something you just put in place once and never change.

Here is how the Buffer culture has evolved, including some of the specific things we do which shape the culture we have:

Culture is deeply influenced by the founding team

Although company culture is something that is worked on over time and can be adapted a lot, it is heavily affected by the personalities of the founding team. There’s no right or wrong with culture, it is simply a combination of natural personality of the founding team in addition to proactive work to push the culture in a desired direction and to maintain certain values.

A good recent example of this I’ve seen is Ev Williams describing his formula for startup success. One of his points is the following:

When you don’t sleep, eat crap, don’t exercise, and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers.

I would agree that for me, this kind of culture is something I choose not to have with Buffer. That said, I see other startups which are very successful and yet they encourage employees to be at work until 11pm and do all night hackathons a lot. In essence, I think it’s up to you to choose the values and build a culture around them.

Since the early days, Leo and I have had a strong focus on self-improvement, always discussing what we’re currently working on and changing our routines. This has influenced the culture we’ve created, and it’s one with an emphasis on working on yourself as much as the startup, with a lot of positive encouragement from everyone in the team.

It’s a choice to be proactive about your culture

The other thing I’ve noticed is that it is a choice for the founder as to whether you choose to ‘create’ a specific culture. I agree with Jason Cohen that with culture, one thing is certain:

Every company has a culture. The only question is whether or not you decide what it is.

This is something I’ve found very interesting to ponder. I’ve met founders where I feel like they have let the culture develop by itself, and it still seems to work. At the same time, I think to build a culture that can inspire people to want to work for you, you will want to take the time to make specific changes to shape it. At Buffer, culture is definitely something we’re starting to be more deliberate about.

On the extreme end of the “proactive” approach to culture, you can take an approach where you hire and fire people very specifically based on their fit with the culture. We are taking a path where we want to focus a lot on culture, so we’ve recently started to think hard about whether the next set of people who come on board are a great fit for the culture we’re creating. We’re definitely inspired by Tony Hsieh’s approach and commitment to great culture:

Even if someone’s great at their job, even if they’re a superstar at their job, if they’re bad for our culture we’ll fire them for that reason alone.

How much do you focus on culture at your startup? Is it something you try to grab a hold of and throw in the direction you want the company culture to go, or do you let it develop naturally?

Photo credit: quami77

Feeling like a fraud while doing startups

2012-12-03T14:00:00Z

Feeling like a fraud while doing startups

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 startups. These were not particularly big events, but nevertheless I somehow found myself in a position of being able to help people, and a position where people would come to me to brainstorm and get advice.

I remember the point just before I started Buffer, where these events and opportunities came up more and more, despite the fact that my startup was not exploding with any kind of success. I had neither generated any revenue, nor raised any funding, and we didn’t have great traction either. I remember often feeling like a fraud, standing up there and telling others what to do when I had no success myself. I often questioned whether I should be up there. It also was one of the things that gave me the burning desire to figure out how to make something work.

Why we often feel like a fraud

One of the most interesting things I’ve found with this feeling is that it seems like it doesn’t ever stop. I now have the opportunity to speak at even bigger events, to help people quite far along with their startups, and also to help people just getting started who want my advice for things I really don’t know that much about.

I recently attended Lean Startup Machine in San Francisco to mentor the teams and help them to validate their ideas. Eric Ries did a Q&A at the event, and one of the things he said was very interesting:

We are in the business as entrepreneurs to look at statistically insignificant sample sizes

This got me thinking more about why it is that we sometimes feel like a fraud, especially even as we make progress. It seems that as startup founders, we never have significant data. We can’t know for sure whether we were wholly responsible for all of our success, or whether other factors influenced things and we found ourselves being fortunate. That, for me, is the reason it’s easy to feel like a fraud.

Why we can help a lot even without ‘success’

Another thing I’ve found, is that we can usually help people much sooner than we realise. Over time I’ve managed to become quite comfortable Help with your startup, and the more I’ve done it the more I’ve realised that I can usually help a lot, and even if I can’t it’s always a fun conversation.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there are quite a few founders where the thought to help others has crossed their mind, and the desire to do it exists, but they often dismiss it and decide that they haven’t learned enough yet, or people wouldn’t want their help.

Helping others has been so powerful for me for lots of different reasons, so I think it’s great to try and get past this myth that you can only help people once you have had a huge exit. In fact, I think a lot of the times it’s the people at the earliest stages that can help the most, because the gap is smaller and so the person you’re helping can really relate to the position you’re in.

Just as these 'lizard brain' thoughts about how entitled you are to help others can affect whether you will do so, if you take the plunge and start helping others I think you will often find that you feel like you don’t deserve to be giving the advice.

Could it be that it’s optimal to feel like a fraud?

What I have started to realise, is that perhaps this is exactly how we should feel if we’re making progress. It may seem counterintuitive, but I am starting to believe that if you feel like a fraud and feel uncomfortable, it’s probably a great thing. Just as the adage that “the magic happens outside your comfort zone” I think perhaps if you’re feeling like a fraud, you’re doing things right.

I think the important thing is to remember that none of us have significant sample sizes or complete information about what we should do, or whether we deserve what success we have. Therefore it’s completely natural to feel like we’re not entitled, to feel like a fraud from time to time. I think the best thing to do is to remind ourselves that it’s our job to work with incomplete information, and to "do" where others stay paralysed by lack of a clear path.

Have you ever felt like a fraud whilst working on your startup?

Photo credit: Fabiana Zonca

Want to create a new habit? Get ready to break it.

2012-11-26T14:30:00Z

Want to create a new habit- Get ready to break it

"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 building upon my habits for a long time now, and working on good habits is probably one of the things that’s helped me the most to make progress with my startup. In addition, it seems like habits are now becoming popular again. This is a great thing, and books like The Power of Habit are helping lots of people.

I’ve discovered that perhaps one of the things which is rarely discussed with habits is failing with them. How do you keep going with building habits when you fail one day, or you have some kind of momentary setback? I thought it might be useful for me to share my thoughts on habits, and particularly the aspect of failing with habits.

Building an awesome habit

There are the steps I’ve found which work best for creating an amazing habit:

Start so small you “can’t fail” (more on the reality of that later)
Work on the small habit for as long as it becomes a ritual (something you’re pulled towards rather than which requires willpower)
Make a very small addition to the habit, ideally anchored to an existing ritual

How I built my most rewarding habit

The habit I’m happiest with is my morning routine. It gives me a fantastic start to the day and lots of energy. To build it, I took the approach above of starting small and building on top.

I started my habit two years ago when I was based in Birmingham in the UK. The first thing I started with, was to go to the gym 2-3 times per week. That’s all my routine was for a long time. Once I had that habit ingrained, I expanded on it so that I would go swimming the other two days of the week, essentially meaning that I went to the gym every day at the same time. I’d go around 7:30, which meant I awoke at around 7am.

Next, I gradually woke up earlier, first waking up at 6:45 for several weeks, and then 6:30. At the same time, I put in place my evening ritual of going for a walk, which helped me wind down and get to sleep early enough to then awake early. Eventually, I achieved the ability to wake up at 6am and do 1 hour of productive work before the gym. This precious early morning time for work when I was the freshest was one of the things that helped me get Buffer off the ground in the early days.

The next thing I made a real habit was to have breakfast after I returned from the gym. I then worked on making this full routine a habit for a number of months, and I had times when I moved to a different country and had to work hard to get back to the routine after the initial disruption of settling in. It was whilst in Hong Kong that I achieved being very disciplined with this routine and wrote about it.

My morning routine

Today, I’ve built on top of this habit even further. Here’s what my morning routine looks like now:

I awake at 5:05am.
At 5:10, I meditate for 6 minutes.
I spend until 5:30 having a first breakfast: a bagel and a protein shake.
I do 90 minutes of productive work on a most important task from 5:30 until 7am.
At 7am, I go to the gym. I do a weights session every morning (different muscle group each day).
I arrive home from the gym at 8:30am and have a second breakfast: chicken, 2 eggs and cottage cheese.
At 9am we have the Buffer team standup video Skype call.

It may seem extremely regimented, and I guess perhaps it is. However, the important thing is the approach. You can start with one simple thing and then work on it over time. I’m now working to build around this current habit even more.

Failing whilst building your awesome habit

One of the most popular and simultaneously most controversial articles I’ve ever written is probably The Exercise Habit. It’s one which has been mentioned to me many times by people I’ve met to Help with your startup. I’ve been humbled to find out that a number of people have been inspired by the article to start a habit of daily exercise.

Whilst in Tel Aviv, I met Eytan Levit, a great startup founder who has since become a good friend. He told me he had read my article and was immediately driven to start a habit of daily exercise. I sat down and had coffee with him and he told me about his experience, it was fascinating. He told me that he did daily exercise for 4 days in a row, and he felt fantastic. He said he felt like he had more energy than ever before, and was ready to conquer the world. Then, on the 5th day Eytan struggled to get to the gym for whatever reason, and essentially the chain was broken. The most revelatory thing he said to me was that the reason he didn’t start the habit again was not that he didn’t enjoy the exercise or benefit greatly from doing it. The reason he failed to create the exercise habit was the feeling of disappointment of not getting to the gym on that 5th day.

Get ready and expect to break your habit

"I deal with procrastination by scheduling for it. I allow it. I expect it." - Tim Ferriss

What I’ve realised, is that one of the key parts of building habits might be to know that you will not flawlessly create your habits. You are going to break your habit at some point, you are going to fail that next day or next gym session sooner or later. The important thing is to avoid a feeling of guilt and disappointment, because that is what will probably stop you from getting up the next day and continuing with the routine.

In a similar way to how Tim Ferriss deals with procrastination, I believe we should not try so hard to avoid breaking our habits. We should instead be calm and expect to break them sometime, let it happen, then regroup and get ready to continue with the habit. Perhaps we took too much on, and we cut back a little or try to add one less thing to our habit. Or maybe we just had a bad day. That’s fine, and a single failure shouldn’t stop our long-term success with building amazing habits.

Is there a habit you were building and are not anymore? Why is that? Which habit are you happiest with?

Photo credit: darinaniz

The maker/manager transition phase

2012-11-19T06:30:00Z

The maker-manager transition phase

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 have too. Here’s a key part of it:

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

The great piece is focused around two sets of distinct people in a startup: makers (typically coders) and managers (those with lots of meetings). The interesting thing I’ve found is that as a startup founder you often have to transition from a maker to a manager, and there will also be a period of time when you need to be both at once. I wanted to share my experience of dealing with the transition from maker to manager.

The maker focus

In the early days, being comfortable in a “maker” schedule, for example cranking out lots of code or content fast, is essential. Of course, there is an element of “manager” activities whether it’s getting press or doing customer development, but a large portion of the work around building a great product and gaining traction is “maker” work by nature.

The key question to ask, is, is 1 hour of my time better spent “making” or “managing”? In the first few months, you’re likely just a couple of guys, and you can’t move faster by delegating than by just getting stuck in and doing it yourself. For almost the first year of Buffer, I’d say Leo and I were mostly in “maker” schedules, where we would chat briefly for a small portion of the day, then just get on with our tasks.

I think as founders we all want to be visionary and do more than just write code, but to get to that stage we have to learn to thrive in the maker schedule and get the product off the ground.

The maker/manager split

I learned the hard way that you don’t just switch completely from being a maker to a manager. Additionally, the transition phase between the two is probably one of the hardest things I’ve experienced as a startup founder. There’s no way around it, you have to juggle being a maker and a manager for at least a few months, so you better figure out how to do that. Here’s how it worked for me:

The transition happened after the team had grown to 5 people. I suddenly realised that if I didn’t have a clear idea about what it is best for others to work on, then they would be much less effective. We realised having lists for people was efficient. I made the mistake of dropping coding completely, as I felt like it was no longer an important thing for me to do. I then took some time to think, and realised I needed to spend a number of months being both a maker and a manager. It’s a difficult phase.

Earlier this year, we realised how powerful mobile will be for Buffer, but the team was small and we had no spare resources for Android development. So I decided that I would learn Android from scratch, and at least get the app off the ground and learn what we needed from someone who would eventually lead our Android development. So, for 2-3 months, I spent 50% of my time coding Java, and 50% doing manager tasks.

For some weeks, I spent every morning coding, and every afternoon doing manager activities. This worked well, but often my maker time would overflow as I didn’t feel I’d achieved enough. I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with Eden Shochat about this, and he instantly recommended instead of half days, I do full days. I found this much better, and I also noticed that Ben Kamens does the same.

The manager focus

During the time I spent in the maker/manager split, I came across one of the most powerful concepts I’ve discovered as a first-time CEO: to “fire thyself”. It came from an awesome article by Joe Kraus:

If you’re a founding CEO, I believe that you are doing your company a disservice if you don’t fire yourself from your skill position. Your goal, crazy as it sounds, is to free up 50% of your time by constantly firing yourself from whatever skill position you’re playing.

Over the next month, I searched for a great engineer to take over Android development, and I was lucky to find Sunil. I gradually let Sunil take over and dropped my maker/manager split to 25% Android development, and eventually dropped it completely.

One of the hardest things as a developer transitioning into a manager role has been to get a feeling of progress without writing code. Progress is usually clear with code, and harder with manager activities. However, when you get towards 10 people in your team, coming back to the question from earlier is interesting: is 1 hour of my time better spent on “making” or “managing”? As a founder you’re in the best position to guide people and help them be super productive. That becomes your role. For me, I’m spending a lot of time finding great people to join Buffer, and also making adjustments all the time within the team.

As for coding, I still do a little. I help with development of our browser extensions, since that is the part of our codebase which has the least engineering resources, and is still very important for Buffer. Of course, I’m in the midst of firing myself from that, too. If you’re a JavaScript engineer in the bay area, I’d love to hear from you.

Have you found yourself torn between being a maker and a manager? Are you still coding when you should be building a company and awesome culture?

Photo credit: Paul Goyette

The Anti-Todo List

2012-11-12T06:30:00Z

The Anti-Todo List

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 time in my day just as much as those I have in my todo list. Previously, I found that these extra tasks detracted massively from my feeling of productivity and happiness.

It was when I read a great article from the guys at iDoneThis three weeks ago which I made some concrete changes and started to feel consistently much more productive. Since then, the Anti-Todo List has become a daily habit, so I want to share it with you.

The Anti-Todo List concept

My approach with the Anti-Todo List is to have not just a single list each day, as many of us do now (our todo list), but to have two. The idea of the Anti-Todo List is that it is the account of progress for that day. In some ways it’s a “Done” List. This is really powerful, because you can always look back at your Anti-Todo List and see how much you’ve got done (even if the items weren’t on your todo list).

Just like how you get a little rush by crossing something off your todo list, the Anti-Todo List goes even further and suggests that you actually write the items down fresh, and write all the additional tasks you end up accomplishing which weren’t necessarily on your todo list. This has given me an extraordinary feeling of productivity and fulfilment and I’ve found it helps me sustain my productivity throughout the week, whereas previously I would be “knocked down” a little by the fact I sometimes had extra things come up which I needed to complete.

The Anti-Todo List and feeling productive

I’ve realised that without the Anti-Todo List, whenever I was doing a task not on my todo-list, no matter how important and useful the task (and many unexpected tasks lead to massive returns!), I generally always had on my mind that it was detracting from the time I had for the items on my todo list, and that it didn’t “count”. Here’s an example, the tasks in the lower half are the ones which were not on my todo list:

The split between todo-list tasks and non-todo list tasks could be defined as proactive vs reactive. Clearly, we need to be proactive in order to make great progress moving forward (we shouldn’t be controlled by the emails we receive), but we inevitably have tasks during the day which are not on our todo list but do deserve our time. The key, is to write those items down in your Anti-Todo list, and get that same feeling as when you cross something off your todo list. With this little change, I now feel more like this most days:

It’s made a real difference for my feeling of productivity, since a lot of the time I used to have that “where did the day go?” feeling without being able to remember what I did. Now I look at my Anti-Todo List and feel great about all the things I got done. It’s literally possible to move those tasks above the line and create a feeling of productivity. That’s powerful.

My changing role at Buffer, and the Anti-Todo List

One of the most interesting things happening right now is that my role is adjusting rapidly. Whereas previously I would spend a lot of my time coding, I’m now spending lots of time hiring and working on the culture at Buffer. This has meant I’ve switched from a pure maker workflow to more of a manager schedule.

One of the most important things is that I’m now a potential blocking point for people to get on with their work, and I need to avoid that. Matt Blumberg put it well in his article What Does a CEO Do, Anyway?:

Dont be a bottleneck. You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut, but you do need to make sure you dont have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects. Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team.

As a result, a lot of the time I have things I do during the day which weren’t on my todo-list. Things which come up and I need to do, which are actually a big part of moving Buffer forward. The Anti-Todo list has been a vital lifeline for me in this change from a maker schedule working through a todo list without much deviation, to a manager schedule with useful interruptions.

The other great side-effect is that I can take a look at my Anti-Todo list each day to validate that I’m making progress on the right things. If I have too many unexpected tasks and not enough from my to-do list, I stop to think about whether I’m letting my tasks be defined too much by others. I then make some adjustments and prioritise the more proactive tasks. I think it’s about a balance, and having two lists is a great way to achieve that.

Have you ever tried keeping an Anti-Todo List each day?

Photo credit: Anna-Maria Mueller

What are your top 3 challenges?

2012-11-05T06:30:00Z

What are your top 3 challenges-

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 this was when we raised funding for Buffer last year. We quickly learned that in order to get a meeting with an investor, we’d need a good introduction from someone they knew. Since we weren’t asking & pitching that person, we realised we should ask them for advice. It was only then that I discovered the power of knowing our current key challenges.

Anyone wants to help you

I think one of the big myths is that people are too busy to give advice, or that people don’t want to help you. The reality I’ve found is that everyone wants to help you, and the key is deciding you want their help, and approaching them with a definite question. People love to talk about themselves, and love being asked about the challenges they’ve overcome.

"Most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help." - Steve Jobs

Always have 3 things in mind that you want help with

After I realised that people genuinely want to help, a powerful habit I’ve developed is to always have in mind my top 3 challenges. Here are my current 3:

Hiring. We need more engineers and I’m working almost full-time on that task right now. How do you approach hiring?
CEO role. Now that we’re 7 people and hiring 2-3 more engineers as well, I’ve realised my role is changing a lot. What was the transition like for you from a handful of people to 10+?
Growth. We’re 100% focused on growth right now, and we’ve found mobile will be key. What are the key growth drivers for you?

Having these three challenges easily to mind is super powerful. It means that if I happen to have the chance to meet someone, I can always get a lot of value, and make a good impression. Just yesterday I had a chance to ask someone about the growth challenge. What’s more, smart people who you want to speak with will like it, because I’ve found most successful people want to maximise the time they spend having interesting discussions around ideas, rather than talking about people or events:

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt

How to know what you want help with

In order to figure out your 3 things you would love help with, you’ll need to actually spend time reflecting on what is holding you back. Some of the key changes I’ve made within Buffer have come into my mind during my evening walk, when I spent time with the laptop closed.

Gabriel Weinberg talked about a similar concept in his recent article on why you should avoid working at full capacity:

"I think you have to consciously not work on things, which is always hard to do."

This is one of the hardest things to do as a startup founder, and the easy thing to do is to work all hours and sacrifice your sleep and health.

Go out there with your purpose in mind

Once you’ve figured out what you need help with, and you have it easily to mind, the key is to get out there, take some risks and ask people for help. I often talk about my experience of first landing in the bay area with friends who have had success out here, and we always came to a similar conclusion: silicon valley can truly accelerate your success, so long as you know what you want to achieve. As soon as people figure out what you are trying to do, they will do all they can to help. The pay it forward culture here is very real.

Have you had success in asking others for help? What is the best way you’ve found to make the most of the chances you get?

Photo credit: Karel Seidl

Start something small

2012-11-02T07:00:00Z

Start something small

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 over 15 million copies, originally started:

I prepared a short talk. I called it ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ I say ‘short.’ It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes.

After giving this talk for some time, Carnegie found that the attendees started discussing their experiences and some “rules” emerged. Eventually the talk became a course, and there was a need for a textbook of sorts. Here’s how the now famous book became a reality:

we started with a set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard. The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets, each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen years of experimentation and research came this book.

I found that absolutely fascinating. The book came out of a short talk and a few notes on a postcard-sized piece of card. Interestingly, I think a lot of the really big successes start like this.

The dangers of “big”

The challenge for a lot of us, is that when we go about our lives we interact with so many “big” things, and we forget or don’t even know how they originally started. It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of products and brands contributes and is vital to what they are today. We also all have big aspirations and want to get there fast.

I’ve personally made the mistake of trying to jump to “big” too soon many times before: the goal my previous startup was to kill the business card, and we struggled to execute effectively on a much smaller scale. I think there are probably countless other examples out there where founders try to have an immediately huge vision.

Great things start small

What I’m starting to notice more and more, is that great things almost always start small. Most of us know that Branson started the Virgin brand with a student magazine, but Virgin is just one of many examples which shows that the reality is counterintuitive: actually, the best things we know and love started as tiny things.

I’ve found that if I look into my own life, I find similarly that some of the most important achievements I’ve made started as little projects. My startup Buffer itself is a great example: it started as a two page website and in addition the short blog post describing this process has now turned into a talk I’ve given more than 30 times.

Make it smaller: you’re more likely to succeed

One of my most interesting realisations from this thinking and from seeing many examples is that actually in order to succeed, we probably should think and execute on a smaller level. If we do this, we’re more likely to succeed. I wrote about this previously, in the context of not trying to change the world right away. I was pleasantly surprised when Paul Graham wrote a comment in the discussion on my recent article which suggested similar:

Don’t even try to build startups. That’s premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.

Start everything with an MVP

I think Eric Ries really nailed this concept with his notion of the Minimum Viable Product. The great thing is, we see that even historical successes like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, started as just a short talk and a few notes on a small piece of card. That was the MVP, and it was a perfect way to start. And if the content in this smaller form hadn’t resonated with people, my guess is that the book wouldn’t even exist.

I believe that we could and should start to think about everything beginning as an MVP, starting much smaller than we might currently think about it. Andrew Chen has a great example: decide what blog posts to write based on Tweeting the potential headline. I think there are countless other opportunities for this too, in all areas of life.

Have you thought about the relationship of big thinking to success? Did something work out better when you started smaller?

Photo credit: Toby Bradbury

Thoughts on dropping out to do a startup

2012-10-28T20:26:00Z

Thoughts on dropping out to do a startup

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 about a lot is the subject of whether you should drop out of college to work on your startup.

I personally didn’t drop out, but my co-founder Leo has as a result of the success we’ve had with Buffer and I’ve talked to him a lot about the topic. I also talk to many startup founders regularly who are still at college and are thinking about whether they should drop out. As a result, it’s been necessary for me to have an answer to this question.

College is powerful

"One of the amazing things about being in college is you can work on all these hobbies and code a lot of stuff and try a lot of different things. It’s this amazing flexibility that I think most people take for granted." - Mark Zuckerberg

One of the things I’ve realised only looking backwards is just how powerful college can be if you want to build a startup. In my own time at Warwick University, I had many many side projects and even two courses in which I did projects which looking back felt a lot like startups.

No pressure

When you’re studying, there is absolutely no pressure on you in terms of building a startup. As a result, you can experiment and try lots of different things. You can learn new languages, you can try different startup concepts such as customer development and lean startup. You can get out of the building and try talking to people about the problems they have, and then try to solve them. You can easily try charging for something you build, with no pressure to make enough money to be able to eat. Everything is taken care of, so you can relax and experiment.

Like minds

It’s relatively easy to find like-minded people at college. There is such a vast number of students at any university that as long as you have the desire to seek these like-minded people, you will find them and you can work with them. I know that countless great co-founder relationships started at college. That’s the case for Buffer, Leo and I met whilst we were both at Warwick University, and we met at an entrepreneurship event we were both helping out with. So go out there and take advantage of the environment.

Start an experiment

When you’re in college, you can have many ideas and try them all out in your free time. Each of these ideas can potentially be a great startup, but since there’s no pressure you can use the concept of an experiment and this can help you in many ways. I think Vinicius Vacanti, the co-founder and CEO of Yipit put it best:

"The beautiful thing about experiments is that disproving your hypothesis isn’t thought of as a failure. It’s thought of as progress."

You can really take this “experiment” approach at college, and learn a massive amount about startups in a short space of time.

Blocks of free time

Every college student has something in common: that they have various blocks of time throughout the year where there is less workload. It’s in these times that you have a great opportunity to create something that could become big. There’s no better example for this than when Facebook started:

"I wrote the first version of Facebook in January of 2004 and released it in February. The reason why I did it in January is that Harvard had intersession."

My best advice for students is to use these lighter blocks of time wisely. Start a new project each time, take the learnings and keep building stuff.

Dropping out is not usually so dramatic

My belief and experience with going through Leo dropping out is that when it is good to drop out for your startup, you will know it. That said, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to abruptly cut everything off and burn all your bridges with university.

How I’ve seen it play out more often than not, is that someone does many different side-projects during college and then when something begins to work, they go through a massive amount of learning and progress in an incredibly short space of time. This is very much related to Paul Graham’s notion of compressing your life:

"You can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four."

This is exactly what happens and how it feels when one of your startup ideas begins to “work”. Another great way to describe it is how Marc Andreessen describes reaching product/market fit:

"You can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers."

I think when you reach this point, you’ll feel that it may be worth dropping out of college. The interesting part is, even at this point you don’t need to dramatically “drop out”. You can just take a term off, or take a year off. In fact, we’ve now reached almost a $1M annual revenue run rate with Buffer, there are 7 people in the team and we’ve hit 370,000 users, but Leo is technically still in college. He hasn’t officially dropped out yet, and you don’t need to hastily do that. I was fascinated to hear Zuckerberg describe his experience in a very similar way:

"Harvard has this policy where you can take as much time as you want off from school. So why don’t we just take one term off and then just try to get it under control and build the toolings so we can go back for Spring semester and grow it more autonomously. Spring term came along and we hadn’t quite built the tooling and automation so let’s take another term off. Then finally at some point we decided we were out, but by then we had millions of users."

Keep studying. Keep building.

Unfortunately, startups are pretty hard. I know that for myself, it’s been a tough few years since I realised I wanted to build my own startup, for it to actually work in reality. I had a few failures during college which were much more learning than failure, and the fact I was still studying meant it didn’t matter at all.

After I graduated, I worked on another startup whilst working as a contract web developer on the side. I can assure you, it’s a lot harder to stay committed to making a startup work once you’ve left. I think many don’t make that leap because it’s so hard. It’s much easier to get a normal job and have a definite salary each month.

As a result, my advice to anyone thinking of dropping out is to keep studying, and use every opportunity to build projects and startups on the side. When something starts to work, you’ll have that same feeling that many others have, and you’ll know that it’s your duty to keep building it and bring it to the world. Until that happens, keep studying and keep building. When it happens, drop out slowly.

Have you had to think about whether you should drop out to pursue your startup? Did you drop out?

Photo credit: Steve Garfield

Want to be successful? Be inconsistent

2012-10-21T17:49:00Z

Want to be successful- Be inconsistent

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 familiar it felt as I read each next line. The post was all about “changing your mind”. The way I would describe the overall theme, is “inconsistency”. Here’s the key part of the post, paraphrased:

People who are right a lot of the time, are people who often change their mind. Consistency of thought is not a particularly positive trait.

I find this fascinating, because one of the biggest challenges I’ve found as a founder for the last few years is the times when I change my mind, when have a realisation and I become inconsistent on a thought I previously had. This is amplified as your startup grows, because you have users, co-workers and stakeholders who you are in touch with who are there to witness and be affected by your inconsistency.

Success and inconsistency

If you’re part of a startup, I believe that your success might actually be defined by whether you are willing to be inconsistent. This means that actually changing your mind is not just a good trait as Jeff Bezos has mentioned, but “staying consistent” might actually be the reason your startup fails. I think this also probably applies to a much wider context than startups: I think your success might be determined by how willing you are to be inconsistent.

The reason you need to let go of consistency at times, is because as a founder you need to act and move forward without having complete information for each decision:

"Entrepreneurs make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day. They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct." - Mark Suster

Making decisions where 30% of the time you will be wrong is just the pace you need to move at to make progress with a startup. It’s a change from a normal job, where everything is laid out. It also means that when you realise which were the wrong decisions, you’re going to have to make changes - you’re going to have to be inconsistent.

When you’re early in a startup, a founder or one of the first few people to join, you will at times realise that new information from customers or a smart mentor shows that what you were working on for the last weeks or months is the wrong thing to do. The hardest thing now is to accept that and move on to other things. Letting go completely is really tough, but you can’t “keep it going on the side” and expect to succeed. You’ve just got to move on to the next thing you’ll try. If you’re a leader, it can also be hard, because you’ve got to be the one to deliver the news to someone who’s been working and had their mind immersed in something you’re about to ditch. It’s not easy at all, but these are some of the key calls to make.

The inconsistency of my startup journey

If I look back on my journey with startups to where I am today, I cringe with how many things I’ve changed my mind on, with how many things I was super passionate about for a while, and then dropped completely. It causes so many ups and downs, and you question yourself and your ability a lot, but I’ve now realised that this was exactly what I needed to do. In fact, I've had this on my articles page from the very start of my blogging journey:

I don’t know whether the same lessons will apply to you, but I hope you’ll find my thoughts useful. Take what fits, and tell me what doesn’t work for you: I’m always learning. I’m pretty sure I’ll even contradict my own advice at times as I learn more.

Here are some other examples from my experiences in the last few years:

The study project turned startup

Back when I was at the University of Warwick I worked on a little project, or at least it started small. It was something I did with 4 of my Computer Science classmates, and it soon took over my life and I saw it as a true startup. It was a location based startup on web and mobile, but this was back when the first phones with GPS was released, the Nokia N95 and N82. It was early days.

I ended up at an event and was asked on the spot whether I wanted to join the panel. I said “sure!” and ended up speaking in front of around 50 people. I was asked “where do you see lasyou being in the next 3 years”. I said I would see it expanding from just Warwick and be global, with millions of users. I was passionate, and I wasn’t just saying it, I truly believed we could pull it off.

Fast forward a few months and I’d decided that I couldn’t continue with lasyou, and I moved on to another startup. That time it was a realisation about the dynamics of the team that meant it couldn’t work. I went back on my word which I had told everyone at that event, with such determination. And it’s exactly what I should have done.

Bootstrapping vs fundraising

One of the things I’ve probably been most inconsistent with in my journey as a startup founder is the decision about whether to raise funding or to bootstrap. It’s one of the most widely debated topics, perhaps the most interesting discussion was Jason Calacanis vs. David Heinemeier Hansson on This Week in Startups.

So, I’ve been a huge believer in bootstrapping and still am, we’ve also taken funding for Buffer. With our funding announcement, someone called me out on my inconsistency in the comments on Hacker News, pointing to slides from a presentation here I advocated bootstrapping:

Joel was standing in front of me practically a year to the day in the UK advocating bootstrapping and now he’s suddenly raised $400,000

So why the inconsistency? Well, the answer is quite simple. I gained new knowledge, new information. I spoke with Hiten Shah and some smart folks who had been through YCombinator, and someone who had sold his startup. I had conversations and realised that with the position we were in after 10 months of bootstrapping, raising money made sense. We could move faster by having funds to hire people.

Let’s focus on web. Let’s focus on mobile.

On the product side at Buffer, we’ve also gone back and forth many times in lots of different areas. We focused for many weeks on doing consistent updates to the Digg Digg WordPress plugin, then practically stopped working on it to focus on other areas. We created basic mobile apps, then decided we should instead fully focus on creating a great web experience. Then we decided we were wrong to drop the mobile apps, and we’re now so focused that more than half our engineering effort is in mobile. To some, it looks like we’re very indecisive. However, right now we’re in a better position than ever and there are some super exciting things on the way for Buffer users.

Embrace being inconsistent

My conclusion on the topic of consistency is that it’s not required for success. There is a lot of talk about hard-nosed businessmen needing to be true to their word and never change their mind. I think a better approach is to be open to making adjustments as you learn more. That’s the smarter thing to do. It’s also much more difficult.

I’m glad to see Jeff Bezos mentioning this and 37signals sharing it so openly. I was also glad to see Travis Kalanik, the CEO of “Private Driver (read: not a taxi) service” Uber, stand on stage yesterday at Startup School and announce Uber TAXI, a cheaper, more taxi-like service.

Even Zuckerberg said in an interview from the early days of Facebook that they’d never expand beyond being a college network.

Inconsistency is everywhere when you actually track successful people for long enough and notice the patterns. My failure with a previous startup I worked on for a year and a half was largely that I didn’t change the idea in a big enough way, quickly enough - that I stayed consistent. So go ahead and be inconsistent, it’s exactly what you need to be. Some don’t realise it, and you’ll drive a few people crazy by doing it. You’ll also feel weak and guilty every time you have to tell people you’re changing your mind, but you just need to get used to doing it, repeatedly.

Have you found changing your mind and your path difficult as you’ve learned more? Have you been inconsistent many times? Or do you think you could do better by being more inconsistent?

Photo credit: Christo de Klerk

The magic of a great startup ecosystem

2012-10-14T19:22:00Z

The magic of a great startup ecosystem

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 just the last year to spend time in Hong Kong, Japan and Tel Aviv.

We’re now back in San Francisco, and my recent time in Tel Aviv combined with being back here has made me think a lot about what a great startup ecosystem means personally for me.

Sheer numbers

One of the key things I’ve noticed simply walking around and being present in various different places, is the impact of sheer numbers of startup-minded people in a location.

UK

I remember in my time in the UK, from Sheffield to Birmingham to London, there were respectively increasing numbers of startup minded people. I spent almost a year in both Sheffield and Birmingham, and as I struggled to find other startup founders I created events in each of those cities.

I had a fairly broad reach to startup founders through Twitter and other event organisers in each city, and I still only attracted around 30 people to these events. This gives me an indication of the numbers of startup-minded people, and it makes a real difference when you feel like a fish out of water amongst people taking very different approaches to life and work.

Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, there is actually quite a lot going on for startups. I was lucky to speak at an event when we first arrived, and there were around 60 people at the event. There are also a number of other events running and they generally attract good sized audiences 50-100 people.

Tel Aviv

The great thing about Tel Aviv, is that it is a tiny place and there are many startup-minded people living there. These two things combined means that there is a lot of knowledge and acceptance of startups amongst the general community. It is the closest I’ve seen to the bay area in terms of a high volume of startup minded people concentrated in a single place.

San Francisco Bay Area

In San Francisco, you can literally get off the plane and take the BART and Muni (transport to and within the city) and feel the presence of startup founders. You can simply look around and see that a lot of people are working in tech or even on their own startup. It’s one of those vibes that is hard to describe, but anyone who has been there knows the feeling.

If you ever talk to someone and mention you’re doing a startup, it is a very normal thing for them to here, to the extent where the response is often “like everyone else here, then”. Also, it’s one of the few places I see actual billboard and physical advertising for startups and tech conferences.

Levels of serendipity

With a higher concentration of startup-minded people in one place, the opportunity for serendipity increases. It has been said many times that the role of serendipity in startups is very powerful. Indeed, Tony Hsieh is even known for his "planned serendipity" in the way he set up the Zappos office.

UK

When I was in Sheffield and Birmingham in the UK, the lack of numbers of startup-minded people meant that the only real opportunity for serendipity is at events, where you could potentially come across someone who might be useful. That said, events also were few and far between, to the extent that I created an event for startups myself in both of these cities. London fairs better, and whilst I don’t have experience of living there, on many occasions where I’ve met someone in a London coffee shop I have ended up bumping into other people.

Hong Kong

My time in Hong Kong was similar to my time in the UK from a serendipity perspective. The only real opportunity to meet startup people was at specific events. That said, there was a couple of occasions where I was in a coffee shop and someone came and said hello due to the stickers on my laptop, and one where I saw someone with Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week and I started a conversation. These kinds of occurrences are the kinds which I think really define whether a location has that startup vibe which places are trying to create.

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv was certainly much better for serendipity. Beyond the events where serendipity is likely to happen, I ended up chatting with people in many coffee shops and even had some great meetings as a result. Especially along Rothschild Boulevard there were many opportunities for natural serendipity.

San Francisco Bay Area

In my mind, in terms of occurrences of serendipity in a truly useful sense for startups, the San Francisco Bay Area is far beyond any other place on Earth. When we were here last year, serendipity played a large role in our eventual success of going through AngelPad and raising our seed round, as well as getting great advisors and investors on board.

In addition, just in the one week I’ve been back here, I’ve ended up meeting far more startup people than I would in a single week in any other place. All the apps on my iPhone have come to life, such as Highlight, Instagram, Foursquare and others, where I now get comments from people very regularly seeing whether I’d like to meet up.

Social interaction

The final important part I’ve discovered of a great startup ecosystem is all to do with the level of social interaction which is possible with people I meet. One of the things I’ve struggled with the most throughout my startup journey is to find like-minded, ambitious and positive people who I can speak with on a similar level. It’s a reason I make such an effort to meet lots of people, and it’s a reason I created events when I was in the UK. It’s so important that I truly prioritise finding those people.

One of the things I’ve come to thrive is conversation about ideas, about improving myself and open discussion about crazy things without any hint of it not being possible. I often grab dinner with my co-founder Leo, and our conversations are always of this nature. There are very few places I’ve found people I can have this kind of conversation with. I’d say out of all the places I’ve travelled, Tel Aviv and San Francisco are the two where I’ve been able to find people to talk with about these topics.

Finding somewhere you’re not an outlier

The above points of numbers of people, opportunity for serendipity and social interaction, I’ve realised all lead to one overarching point, which is that for me, a great startup ecosystem is somewhere you can feel at home amongst others.

I used to almost pride myself in being an “outlier”, in feeling out of place, when I was in the UK. What I’ve realised over time, is that when I felt like an outlier in the UK, it was just that I hadn’t found the place where I was amongst like-minded people. I think Seth Godin put it very well:

"The easiest way to thrive as an outlier is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers.

Surround yourself with people in at least as much of a hurry, at least as inquisitive, at least as focused as you are. Surround yourself by people who encourage and experience productive failure, and who are driven to make a difference.”

San Francisco is the one place where I can talk to others about what we’re doing at Buffer, and it is just a normal conversation they hear regularly. Basing Buffer here means that people see us and encourage where we’re going. There’s not much explanation needed, and we’re truly at the bottom of the game again.

Have you found the place where you feel at home amongst others doing similar things? What are your thoughts on startup ecosystems?

Photo credit: ah zut

Maximize your excitement

2012-10-02T19:21:50Z

Maximize your excitement

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 disastrous and no matter how much you love an idea, if it isn’t growing and becoming viable to build further, the fun won’t last. However, what I urge you to do is focus on the lean startup notion of your startup idea being a hypothesis.

Since your idea is a hypothesis, you can make it whatever you want. Think big, get excited by your idea. It will be amazing. Sure, you’re going to go ahead and validate it, but at least start by trying to validate that you could work on something really damn cool.

Do what you want. Build something that the thought of makes you jump out of bed each morning. Test the assumptions and make changes based on what was incorrect, but out of the possible options for the next path, choose to first try the path which maximizes your excitement.

Photo credit: Michael Wallace

Thoughts on when to incorporate

2012-09-29T13:14:00Z

Thoughts on when to incorporate

Update: I originally posted this article with the title “Incorporate your startup only when you’re forced to” and I had amazing feedback, particularly from Andrew Payne and David Hauser who have been through incorporating startups many times and know this domain much better than me. The original title wasn’t a great representation of my views in this post so I’ve adjusted it. Thanks for all your comments!

I previously wrote that I believe you should be very hesitant about incorporating an idea, and instead you should maintain focus on what matters in order to take your idea to something that could be a real business: users and a product that solves a problem.

However, what happens when things start to work? When your product starts to gain traction and you have many users and perhaps some paying customers. Clearly, it’s important to incorporate a startup at some point in time. With this article, I want to explore: when is the right time to incorporate?

You don’t need to be incorporated

With Buffer, we were fully focused on product and traction for a long time before we thought about incorporating. The thing is, you can run a business without being incorporated as a C-Corp in the US, or a Ltd. company in the UK and other places.

You can run a startup simply by being registered as self-employed, and you can even register this long after you have been running.

In short, you don’t need to have incorporation in your mind at all, and I believe it shouldn’t be in your mind. There are much more important things to do.

If you will raise funding

If you plan to raise funding for your startup, then I think it is a great idea to wait until that point in order to incorporate.

If you reach the point where you can seriously consider raising investment and believe your startup is fundable, then that is a good time to incorporate, since you’ll need to be incorporated to formally close the round and investors will ask you if you about company structure.

If you apply for an accelerator program such as AngelPad, YCombinator or TechStars, you’re generally in a better position if you apply without being incorporated. In fact, YCombinator strongly prefer it if you’re not:

"Don’t incorporate, though, if you can avoid it. It’s easier to start with our paperwork than to transfer an existing LLC or S-Corp to a C-Corp."

The thing is, once you get into one of these programs they will put you right through to the very best lawyers, accountants and anything else you need.

If you incorporate too early, you risk doing it in a less than optimal way, which could actually put you in a worse position. I’m very glad we didn’t incorporate Buffer in the UK before we got into AngelPad, since when we came to raise our seed round many investors asked us “are you delaware incorporated?” and we had an easy “yes” answer. It’s one of those checkbox questions you want to avoid trouble with.

If you won’t raise funding

If you won’t raise funding, I think it is still a good idea to delay incorporating. Again, you can run a business without being incorporated, and you have too many other things to focus on with the startup without the hassles of incorporating.

I think incorporation is one of those aspects where it is best to stay lean and do activities which will take you closer to becoming a solid, lasting business with a brand, users and revenues before you think about incorporating. When some of these important milestones start to happen, then perhaps it is a good time to consider incorporating.

Asides from fundraising, I see a few different scenarios during the process of building a startup, which may be good trigger points to incorporate:

you get a government grant and need to be incorporated
you hire a full-time employee
you’re setting up an office and need to be incorporated for the lease
you give equity or stock options to employees or founders
you want to formalise a founders agreement (vesting, etc.)
you need to set up a company bank account

Some of these things are good milestones which generally correlate with building a meaningful business, and therefore will be better times to incorporate than simply with an idea.

Incorporate when you’re forced to

This brings me to my current stance on when to incorporate. With the personal experience I’ve had of incorporating too early with a previous startup, and incorporating at a good time with Buffer, as well as speaking with many other founders.

I believe the best way to choose when to incorporate is to simply wait until you are forced. With Buffer, we had $120,000 of funding from AngelPad and needed a bank account to put it in. For that, we needed to be incorporated, so we got set up as Buffer Inc.

If you wait until you’re forced, there’s a much higher probability that you actually have something that could become a lasting business. If you don’t wait, it will most likely be a hangover going forward with whatever you do. I have a previous, dormant business with no revenues and it’s a hassle that it’s incorporated.

When did you incorporate?

Photo credit: AgriLife Today

5 realisations that helped me write regularly

2012-09-26T17:10:00Z

5 realisations that helped me write regularly

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 current challenges, and amongst some things to do with the startup, blogging also came up as something Eytan wanted to find regularity in. I’m happy that our chat triggered him to start writing again.

I’ve also since spoken to Andy, Alyssa and Sunil, who are getting into regular blogging and seem to be going through some of the experiences I had at the start of my blogging journey. I thought sharing some of my realisations about what held me back might help people create a habit quicker than I did.

I’ve now written over 50 articles on this blog over the last two years, and I’ve recently successfully written an article every week for the last 5 months. Luckily people have noticed this, and seem to enjoy the articles, and as a result I get a few people asking me how I’ve kept up blogging as a habit. This triggered me to think about the key things that helped me:

1. Research or strong points are not necessary

I used to often believe that I needed some very solid research to back up any thought I penned down in an article. I also frequently found myself thinking that my ideas or experience were not interesting or valuable enough for others.

I’ve since realised that by simply writing from a personal experience perspective, sharing lots of details about any topic I’ve recently touched on in my startup, personal projects or thoughts about life, I usually creating content that was interesting for people to read.

2. Delaying an article with the belief spending longer will make it better usually just means it won’t get written

I used to create a draft in Tumblr every time I had an idea for a blog post. Then I’d let it sit there for a while, because I believed the idea wasn’t fully formed yet, or I didn’t have enough points to share about the topic. I believed by delaying, the perfect post would eventually come to mind.

What I’ve realised is that there is no better time to write the article than when the thought first enters your mind. I should only write it at another time if I simply can’t open my laptop and write it all the way through right at that moment. The content is freshest when it first appears in my mind, and in that state I write the best posts.

I’ve gotten much better at this over time, but I have 10s of drafts lying in Tumblr from the early days when this caught me out time and time again. If you delay, the more likely outcome is that it just won’t get written.

3. We should fear not publishing articles, rather than fearing the bad outcomes of putting something out there

Over time, the concept of “shipping” started to really fascinate me. I forced myself to, despite it being uncomfortable, “ship” everything I did earlier and earlier. Whether a product, a blog post, a speaking opportunity, I’d quit delaying and just put it out there or say “yes” to speaking.

One of my biggest learnings in the last year is that there is immense power in doing a huge volume of work. If I write a blog post every week, I learn a massive amount about what works, and it gives me much more inspiration for more articles. Also, if I write each week, I’m gradually reaching more people, growing my connections on Twitter and Facebook, and putting myself in a better position overall. I know now, that if I don’t publish one week, I’m missing out on these benefits. Therefore, I actually fear not shipping.

4. When I have a strong connection between writing and my higher level goals and purpose, it’s easy to write

One of my aspirations for some time which has driven many of my actions around writing and helping startup founders, is that I eventually want to be a fantastic advisor and angel investor for other startups. I want to be the kind of advisor who has been through many different experiences, and has a lot of thoughts about startup challenges and solutions right in my mind.

This higher level purpose is what often helps me go through the tougher times, since I need that experience first-hand in order to help others. It’s also what helps me continually write, because I know that if I write a blog post about a topic, it is always very clear in my mind from then onwards. If someone asks advice on something I’ve written about, it’s very easy to help them and add a lot of value.

5. Choosing a schedule for writing is a great hack to ensure regularity

Finding a pattern and rhythm for writing is really helpful of course. I’ve found that once I get 3. and 4. very clear in my head, that I fear that I’ll fail to put something out there, and that I attach my writing to a higher level purpose, then it is much easier to establish a regular writing habit. In this way, I’ve been able to write consistently once a week for the last 5 months.

In the early days of my blog, I set myself a rule that I would always write on a Sunday, and always publish by noon. This worked very well, and it also meant that people began to notice my pattern and look forward to the content. I follow a similar pattern now - I always write on the second day of my weekend (whilst here in Tel Aviv that’s been Saturday, normally it is Sunday).

Are there any cool realisations you’ve had whilst working towards a regular blogging or writing schedule?

Photo credit: Kartikay Sahay

How an investor who turned me down ended up sleeping on my couch

2012-09-22T10:50:00Z

How an investor who turned me down ended up sleeping on my couch

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 event in Jerusalem.

The story of how I know Jon is a crazy one, and one which whenever I think about always reminds me of the power of being on great terms with as many people as I find myself being in contact with.

Brief contact years ago

I first met Jon several years ago, when I was working on my previous startup. At that time, I’d just graduated and had jumped straight into the startup scene with a lot of passion to build something. I had no clue about what was involved in creating a startup, and ultimately the startup I worked on at that time was not successful.

I was very naive and looking back at some of the things I did and the way I wrote emails or thought about building the startup leaves me feeling grateful for how much I’ve been able to learn in the last few years. I was, however, always looking for opportunities to meet others in the startup scene (small as it was in the north of the UK), and so I created my own startup meetup and attended many others. I also tried to continually push myself out of my comfort zone, and I met Jon when I pitched the previous startup at an event in Manchester (something very uncomfortable for me at the time).

Startup accelerator rejection

At the same event I pitched my startup, Jon spoke about the startup accelerator he was creating. It was modelled on TechStars and was unique in the UK, especially in the north. Since the first accelerator around 2 years ago, Jon has gone on to help start 12 accelerators from Montreal to Moscow and runs 5: Springboard, ignite100, Startup Wise Guys, Eleven and TexDrive. I think there may well be even more on the way, too.

After hearing Jon speak about the accelerator, I spoke with my co-founder at the time Oo Nwoye and we decided it made a lot of sense to apply. We felt like we had a pretty good chance, especially since we were moving fast and had some users. A couple of weeks later, we got our rejection email and felt quite disheartened. We pushed forward regardless and ended up getting into a smaller scale incubator with a grant in Birmingham before eventually deciding that the startup wasn’t working out.

I exchanged a few emails with Jon at this time, and I remember a feeling of a lot of mutual respect. Despite the rejection, things were very amicable, and I’m happy that was the case.

No contact but a lot of progress

After that short-lived connection, the two years following were defining for myself, and evidently now with 12 accelerators he is part of, they were two short years with much progress for Jon too. For myself, I realised that the previous startup wasn’t working out (Jon made the right call) and moved on to Buffer, where applying my learnings of lean startup got the startup off to a great start. Since then, we’ve gone through AngelPad, brought great investors and advisors on board and grown Buffer to 325,000 users, an $800,000 annual revenue run rate and a team of 7.

An email to kick things off again

One of the most fascinating things about Jon is just how good he is at email. He shared with me his calculation about how much email he does, and the result was that whilst working (which is by no means any normal working hours) he sends an email every 6 minutes. Jon is someone I’m very inspired by to become much better at email. With this kind of volume, it’s no surprise that even after not being in touch for 2 years, his “touch base” email was the following, in its entirety:

Hey dude

Congratulations on AngelPad and follow-on funding - when you are next back in the UK - let me know and can catchup and grab a coffee/beer.

jon

I know now that even the “Hey dude” was a slight exception for Jon. He gets straight to the point and this is something I’m trying to do more and more, too.

"Could I crash over?"

I’d been in touch a few times after we reconnected via email, and Jon introduced some smart people to me.

Around a month ago I got another classic Jon Bradford sized email:

What are you doing on the evening of Monday 10th? Could I crash over?

jon

I jumped at the opportunity to get some of Jon’s time and learn from his experiences and accumulated pattern recognition. We grabbed dinner in the evening, and then headed back to the apartment where Jon made some amazing introductions for me.

This whole experience made me realise how great it is to know lots of people, even if only as acquaintances initially for a long time.

Have you had any experiences like mine of an unlikely connection becoming something very powerful?

Disclaimer: I’m a mentor at ignite100 and know a few startups who’ve gone through Springboard.

Photo credit: Andrew Ferguson

The power of ignoring mainstream news

2012-09-15T11:51:00Z

The power of ignoring mainstream news

"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 reading and watching mainstream news. I don’t read a single newspaper, offline or online, and I don’t watch any TV at all. I recently mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook and it created a lot of discussion, so I wanted to expand on my thoughts and experiences.

When I first started ignoring news, I felt that I was simply making an excuse, that if I had more time I should read the news. Today, however, it is a very deliberate choice and I feel consistently happier every single day due to ignoring the mainstream news. It just so happens that the last 2 years have also been the most enjoyable and productive of my entire life, and have contained some of my greatest achievements. Here are a few reasons I think we should stop consuming mainstream news:

News is negative

"The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news and it’s not entirely the media’s fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news." - Peter McWilliams

The most interesting fact I learned in the last few years about mainstream media is that is that almost all news reported is negative. Studies have shown that the ratio of bad news to good news is around 17:1. That means that 95% is negative. This is a massive number, and I’m sure if you stop to think for a moment about the most recent news you watched, it has also been overwhelmingly negative. In my experience, 95% is absolutely the correct ratio in the news. However, 95% is a very bad reflection of the real ratio of good to bad in the world. Many great things happen, they just don’t sell newspapers.

Mainstream news report about wars, natural disasters, murders and other kinds of suffering. It seems the only natural conclusion of watching or reading mainstream news is that the world is a terrible place, and that it is getting worse every day. However, the reality of course is the complete opposite: we live in an amazing time and the human race is improving at a faster pace than ever before.

The effect of negative news

"When you turn on the television, for instance, you run the risk ingesting harmful things, such as violence, despair, or fear." - Thich Nhat Hanh

Another very interesting thing I’ve learned in the last few years is the incredible impact that being around the right people can have on your trajectory to achieving what you want. This comes down essentially to your environment, and whilst it can mean some hard decisions to change our environment, we actually have a lot of control over it.

These two aspects - that we are subconsciously affected by our environment, no matter how much willpower we believe ourselves to have, and that we have much more control over our environment than we realise have been a key factor of some of the success I’ve had in the last few years.

In a TED talk titled "Information is food", JP Rangaswami compared eating McDonald’s for 31 days, as in Supersize Me, to watching Fox News for 31 days. In essence, mainstream news is the fast food of information. There are much healthier types of information we can and should consume.

The opportunity cost of watching news

The other key thing that I think it can be easy to overlook, is what you could be doing in the time you are spending watching the news.

I remember as a kid, my parents always used to watch the 6 o’clock news. It became so ingrained, it was what would always happen at exactly 6pm, and if we didn’t watch it, we would surely miss out on something vital that could affect our lives.

As a teenager, over time I managed to gradually escape that more and more often. At first, I simply turned to something I enjoyed. I played games online in the evenings instead of sitting with my family and watching the news. The most interesting thing, however, is that my passion for gaming turned into a powerful hobby of learning to code, and I accredit this for a lot of my startup success.

Not only is watching news going to put an out of proportion amount of negative thoughts in your mind, which will affect what you can achieve, it is also valuable time where there are many amazing and meaningful things you could be doing:

you could go to the gym and feel better every day
you could help someone and at the same time feel happier
you could build an MVP which could turn into a startup
you could write an article and start building a useful resource for others

Try a month off mainstream news

Abstaining from mainstream news has been one of the single best decisions I’ve made in the last two years for both my productivity and my happiness. If you’re still in a habit of watching or reading news, I strongly recommend you take Thomas Jefferson’s advice and try a month off news:

"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it."

Do you read or watch mainstream news? Have you thought about stopping consuming it? Have you also given it up and felt better?

Photo credit: Jon S

Why context is so important

2012-09-08T05:35:00Z

Why context is so important

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 any situation is very important. Hiten Shah clearly already understands this very well. This Tweet from him popped up with great timing for the thoughts I had in my mind, and it is what’s tipped me over the edge to write this post to share some of my further thinking around context:

Get context before you give advice.

Hiten Shah (@hnshah) August 30, 2012

Why we should seek context at all times

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood" - Stephen R Covey

The above quote is Habit 5 of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve read the book a couple of times, and I’ve read other content around the topic of gaining context, but it’s something which has only just “clicked” for me as to why it’s so important. Also, after now understanding the importance of context, I’ve found it to be very difficult to actually practice.

The premise is quite clear as to how vital context is: without context, we immediately jump in our heads to what we want to say next, based on the very first few words we hear from the other person. This is something I find myself doing far too frequently.

Most of us listen to someone with the intention of replying, and therefore as soon as we have a “reply” in mind, we stop listening and wait our turn to reply. No matter what remarkable new insights are uncovered in the subsequent words from the other person, it is likely that we now have a strong desire to share that initial thought we have about what to say back.

With context, on the other hand, we can achieve so much more. If we truly understand the background of the other person, we can tailor the approach for each occasion. I believe gaining or having context can be useful in so many scenarios:

giving advice
receiving advice
meeting a stranger
making friends
getting press
raising funding

The conversation that shocked me

I was recently in a Skype call with someone to try and help them with their current startup challenges. This is Help with your startup several times a week, and it seems to be very useful for many.

In this particular Skype call, as normal I asked about the founder’s startup and what stage he was at. After uncovering a tiny amount of context about his previous experiences and where he was now at, I unfortunately slipped and switched to my own thinking about what the best next steps were for him.

I proceeded to advise him based on my previous experience. The experience I based my advice on was the following:

I had worked on an idea for a year and a half which I never charged for
I therefore generated no revenue, and consistently had to work on the side
Whilst I had a few thousand users of traction, I failed to raise funding

I advised him to charge for his product from day one, since that worked for me the after the first failure. I also advised him to aim for revenue and not worry so much about user numbers, since that’s what truly freed me from working on the side.

Luckily for me, he was very receptive of my advice even thought it was the wrong advice for the situation he was in. Even luckier, he went on to share extra information about his context which changed everything:

He had a previous startup for which he had hundreds of paying customers and good revenues
He was still making money from the idea and had runway to last almost indefinitely working on a new idea
He got into an incubator with the idea
He went to the valley to raise funding, but since he had low user numbers (even though they were all paying) he struggled to raise funding

I could now completely understand why, in fact, he shouldn’t just follow the advice I gave him. He had almost entirely the opposite previous experience to me, yet equally valuable and foundation building. He was perfectly poised to try an idea which could gain massive visibility rather than simply making money. Making some money was not his biggest challenge, as it was for me when I started.

Our opposite contexts meant that in fact opposite choices for next steps made complete sense. I was genuinely taken aback when I realised this.

Some techniques to uncover context

Practicing “searching for context” is something I’ve found to be very exciting. When you approach a conversation without any need to have the intent of replying, without any need to have a “smart” response, it changes the entire flow of the discussion.

Here are some of the things I’ve found very useful in trying to be focused on understanding the other person:

Give the other person your full attention

Whenever I have a Skype call, or whenever I get dinner with someone, or when we have a team standup, I turn my phone over and try to adjust my posture to lean forward, into the conversation, and focus on hearing every single word. It can be a challenge, and sometimes my mind drifts, but with conscious effort to do this, I have found I can “train the muscle” and focus for longer.

Remember that you don’t need to respond

I used to feel that I always had to respond if there was the slightest moment of silence between myself and someone I was speaking with. This assumption led me to prepare a response in my mind. As soon as the thought entered my mind, I would stop listening and wait for the other person to finish talking. I literally wouldn’t hear any more words, and sometimes I would even jump in before they had finished.

I’ve since realised that there is great pleasure in simply listening with the knowledge that I don’t need to respond. If I pause to think, and I say “hmm, that’s interesting” after the other person has spoken, that is something that is respected. Also, often if I pause for a little while, the other person will pick up again and if it’s a challenge we’re working on they might come to the solution by themselves. It’s much more powerful if they find the solution, than if I come up with it.

Ask lots of thoughtful questions

If it is indeed my turn to talk, I try to avoid “giving advice” or “stating my opinion” for as long as I possibly can. Instead, I ask questions based on the previous thing the other person just said. I listen very carefully and then once it is my turn, I simply respond with a genuine question of something I’m interested in based on the topic, but which he didn’t quite cover or for which I’d love to hear more detail.

If I have an idea to help the other person, I try to always present it as a question. I aim to guide them to my idea through questions. This means that if they reach the same idea and it’s the right thing for them, it will be much more ingrained and they will be much more likely to have determination to follow through.

Be open to whatever path the conversation takes

This final point is the one which I think has been the most powerful recent discovery for me. I’ve realised that if I simply sit, feel no need to respond, and focus on hearing every word and learning quickly about the other person’s context, then very often the conversation will go down a whole new path than the “initial thought” I had which I used to respond with or jump in and cut the conversation off with.

This is amazing, because I often learn so much. I get to walk down a whole new area of understanding, which I haven’t experienced, rather than just responding based on my experience, which I’ve already gained. The biggest bonus I find is when I can help the other person come up with a better solution suited to their context, by listening and asking questions. This is often a solution I never would have thought of based on my own context.

Do you ever catch yourself having a response in mind and struggling to listen to the other person?

Photo credit: Donald Lee Pardue

An invitation to come and hack on Buffer

2012-09-03T20:16:09Z

An invitation to come and hack on Buffer

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 and Tel Aviv. I’m now lucky enough to work with a team on a product which reaches over 300,000 who post well over 130,000 daily posts to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn each day.

This is why we need one more person (you) to take Buffer to the next level. We are a tiny team of 5 and I am excited to find someone who wants to make a difference through what they work on every day.

The culture at Buffer

What we care most about, is that the whole team has a great day, every day. Therefore, we do things to be happy. Here are some of the things that define the Buffer culture:

A new approach to the daily standup

Most startups have a ritual of a daily standup meeting. Similarly to a normal standup, each person has 3 minutes to share what they’ve done that day and what they’re working on next.

The thing that makes the Buffer standup different, is a third section for each person called “improvements” where we share something we’re working on to improve ourselves. I remember this week Leo created a new schedule to continue learning Ruby and Tom decided he will speak to one new person every day as part of his personal improvement.

The Buffer rocket ship

It’s always the case, that a startup grows faster in brand awareness than the individuals working on it. I think this gives us a unique opportunity for everyone in the team to benefit.

We actively encourage and help everyone to cling on to the Buffer rocket ship so that whilst it’s soaring into the sky, you go up there with it and reach new heights of learning and reputation.

Andy has recently published on Forbes and Tom has created a technical resource with his blog which will be invaluable to any growing startup.

We focus on embracing the lean startup

Since the beginning, and to this day, we follow the lean startup concepts in a disciplined way. We are always asking "what can we do right now?", and so we are often pushing code out early to test and validate new features.

Bring more awesome to the table: is this for you?

Working at Buffer you would:

work primarily with myself and my co-founders Leo and Tom
be a happy, positive-minded and kind person who has a great approach in dealing with others
be a Buffer user (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
have a strong technical background in
PHP and MongoDB to work on our web app and API, or
Java to build our Android app.
be friendly and comfortable helping our users
be based in the U.S. and willing to move to San Francisco
have experience working with another startup before (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)

Why being on board will be awesome

You’ll be amongst people who are striving for success and pushing themselves forward each and every day. Everyone here seems to progress at an incredible pace, we want to do everything to make that happen for you as well. Whether you want to start speaking, blogging, learning marketing or have other areas of personal growth, you’ll have my personal support and the whole team and a wide range of supporters as a resource too.

We provide anything you could need to have the perfect working setup, which as an example normally includes a new MacBook Air. We also offer a competitive salary in the $50k-$100k range and equity options.

Does this sound interesting for you, or someone you know? Shoot me a note directly to [email protected]?subject=Hacking%20on%20Buffer">[email protected]. I’m excited to hear from you!

Photo credit: Judit Klein

Why you should continue working on your bad idea

2012-09-01T10:40:00Z

Why you should continue working on your bad idea

"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 we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!" - Randy Pausch

I’ve recently had a few email exchanges with startup founders struggling with an idea. Often they’ve been working on their idea for a while, and they have found some things haven’t played out as they imagined they would.

When we’re in the early stages of the startup, the valley of death, we will often find ourselves questioning our ideas many times. This is great, as we need to validate our assumptions, but it also means we can find the lizard brain kicking in and persuading us we should give up.

In addition to our own minds suggesting we should stop working on our idea, in the early stages a startup is so fragile that it is very easy for others to influence us. If someone remarks that our idea isn’t useful to them, or that we should do something else, or that we should get a “proper job”, it can easily make us stop and think.

3 reasons you should keep working on your startup

Whilst the many factors can make us feel like we should stop, I want to share some motives for continuing regardless.

Earn the required experience and learning

"Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every overnight success is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them. Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game." - Chris Dixon

One thing I’ve found through personal experience as well as /tag/overnight-success/, is that a startup journey is a process which is best treated like a career (read: it takes a while). Unless you are extremely lucky (and there is luck involved in startups), the chances are that you won’t hit the jackpot first time around. It took me a few tries, and in the process I learned a massive amount. I often call my previous not so successful startup my “required learning” which led me to have more success with Buffer.

If you have the inclination to do a startup, then I suggest that you always have an idea you’re working on, because the learning tends to only happen through doing.

You want to have something you’re doing

I think it is very powerful to have something you’re actively working on which is your own. Maybe you call it a project, maybe a startup, but something beyond “work” means that you have something to drive you.

This “something” can be what causes you to reach out to someone key for your success, or attend an event, or even offer to speak at an event. All these kinds of activities create serendipity which can have a huge impact.

I’ve chatted with many successful founders who similarly took the plunge at some point and travelled to Silicon Valley. One thing which always seems to come up, is the power of having a purpose of being there, a reason to get meetings with smart people. For us, we got into AngelPad, raised a seed round and got a great group of investors and advisors on board for Buffer.

Jumping on a plane to the valley is an amazing thing to do, especially if you have something you want to achieve out of the trip.

Good ideas come through iteration

"real startups tend to discover the problem they’re solving by a process of evolution. Someone has an idea for something; they build it; and in doing so (and probably only by doing so) they realize the problem they should be solving is another one" - Paul Graham

In general, the startups which are most successful are vastly different today than the initial idea. I think that this is actually the norm rather than the exception. Here are three examples from a great article by Vinicius Vacanti:

Flickr started as a web-based massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending
Instagram started as an HTML5 supported location-based service
Groupon started as a way to allow groups of people to band together to accomplish a goal called ThePoint

Sometimes through iteration you uncover learning which invalidates your idea or some key assumptions. At the same time, this means that further iteration can also lead to the exact opposite: uncovering an idea or features which people want and will gain traction.

Have you ever given up on something and feel in hindsight it would have been better to continue? Are you considering quitting your startup? Maybe you dropped an idea and it was actually a great move.

Photo credit: Sergio Alvarez

Pricing your product: It doesn't have to be so complicated

2012-08-25T12:03:00Z

Pricing your product- It doesn't have to be so complicated

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 understandable, since there are so many decisions to make: When do you start charging? How much do you charge? Do you have a free plan? Do you have a trial period? How many tiers do you have? If you’re like I was, it can also be very difficult to imagine anyone would pay for something you build. To add to that, pricing can feel very final, so it can be hard to take the leap and charge.

I want to share some of my thoughts around pricing based on my experience with Buffer and talking with others who have successful startups out there with pricing plans.

Why you should charge early

One of the most interesting things is that whilst pricing can be the single biggest block for startup founders, I think it can actually also be one of the most powerful things for a startup founder to do. To start charging is a leap of progress:

Paying customers are one of the best forms of validation

The eventual goal of a startup is always to make money, so why delay? No matter how much validation we get in other key metrics, revenue is clearly the one where when we see money hit the bank we have very good reason to celebrate.

Paying customers will motivate you more than anything

I remember that motivation was a real struggle in the first couple of years of trying to create a startup. It’s definitely tough when you’re working away and feel like things aren’t working, or that people aren’t noticing. Even when you’re getting signups, it can be hard to stay motivated. Since I was working on the side, seeing the first few payments come in for Buffer was a huge motivation boost. It was easy to stay focused when I had the ability to imagine the monthly revenue growing to a stage where I could drop my other work.

Revenue gives you freedom

Having paid plans for Buffer from day 1 is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. As a first time founder, I’ve found that it’s difficult to raise money with just an idea. You’re much better off focusing on building traction. After we reached ramen profitability, we were able to raise funding and since then it’s also given me the opportunity to travel the world.

Why pricing doesn’t have to be complicated

There are many questions around pricing, and it’s easy to think that they all need very good answers. In addition, we often fall into the trap of thinking that we can’t change our pricing once it is decided. What happens to existing customers?

There’s no need for perfect

As a result of making the decision to charge from day 1, and also to launch a truly minimal MVP, the first version had many rough edges. It didn’t do much, it had many bugs, it had paid features which hadn’t been built yet, and the upgrade process was me getting a PayPal payment and scrambling from my email to the database to upgrade them manually.

None of it mattered, though. Despite the bugs and missing features, I had my first paying customer after 3 days. I think it’s important to remember the early users are a different breed and they not only tolerate, but enjoy being part of the early stages where imperfection is prevalent.

You won’t get it right first time

"It’s unlikely that you’ve got the price right the first time regardless how much research you put into it" - Dharmesh Shah

One of the most useful concepts I’ve come across in my journey of working on startups is that a key characteristic of a founder is not for every decision to be perfect, but to make decisions quickly:

"[Entrepreneurs] know that they need to move the ball forward everyday and make decisions with incomplete information. They know that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be wrong and they find ways to correct their direction." - Mark Suster

It’s not possible to know how users will react until you have something out there, so let’s spend less time planning and more time building and seeing what happens.

It’s easy to change your pricing

I remember I used to think that it wasn’t possible to change pricing. What happens to existing users? Won’t there be outrage? Then we came to the point with Buffer where we felt that the pricing needed to change. So, we changed the pricing. It was no big deal, in fact it was quite amazing. We followed this simple rule:

"we have a rule at HubSpot, it’s been in place for five years, we’ve changed prices, increased prices, consistently relatively for 5 years maybe twice or so a year, we continue to do that step up and there’s lots of goodness that comes out of that, but we don’t screw existing customers." - Dharmesh Shah

The key part of what Dharmesh says here is “don’t screw existing customers”. If you stick to that, changing the pricing is easy and becomes much less of a big deal in your mind. What it means is that you do what is best for the customer. If you put the price up, keep existing customers on the original price point. We even offered the previous price to anyone who signed up before the pricing change.

The pricing you have at the start will eventually be wrong

The interesting thing we found is that the pricing actually must change at some point. It’s almost inevitable. The reason is this: you’re working away, every single day, to make the product even more awesome. If 3 or 6 months down the line, the product is not worth more, then surely something has not worked out?

In addition, your goals might change over time. At the start of Buffer, revenue was the number 1 priority. We needed revenue just so we could eat. Now, we’re lucky have a very solid model and we make more each month than we spend. We also have funding. Our 100% focus now is growth, and revenue is less of an issue. We know that if we focus on growth and we get more users with the same conversion through our funnel, that can be better than optimising revenue with our existing users. With that in mind, we simplified our pricing and now have just a single paid plan: the Awesome Plan. Our upgrades actually doubled pretty much overnight.

Every product has changed its pricing many times

The interesting thing is, the more I speak with established startups, the more I found that they’ve all changed their pricing many times. The reasons are always one or more of the above, and it has always worked out well for them. Dharmesh mentioned that HubSpot has changed it’s pricing roughly twice a year for 5 years. If that’s the case, surely we don’t need to worry so much about getting it right?

Free your mind of “pricing”. Just start charging.

With all of this in mind, I think we can agree that the pricing decision is temporary, and the best thing to do is to start charging and give yourself a chance at the amazing benefits ahead along that path.

"go ahead and act as if your decisions are temporary. Because they are. Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson and fix what doesn’t work. No sweat, no need to hyperventilate." - Seth Godin

Have you started charging for your product yet? Or are you thinking about how you’ll price your product?

Photo credit: Teddy James

6 things I do to be consistently happy

2012-08-18T17:57:00Z

6 things I do to be consistently happy

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, I’ve started to notice a few patterns amongst the ups and downs that come with building a startup.

One of the most important things I’ve learned during this time is that I perform the best when I’m happy. It really does change everything. If I’m happy then I’m more productive when hacking code, I’m better at answering support, and I find it easier to stay focused.

I’ve found that there are a few key habits which, for me, act as great rituals for enabling me to be consistently happy. They also act as anchor activities to bring my happiness level back up quickly whenever I have a period where I’m not feeling 100%. So here are 6 of the things I do:

1. Wake up early

One of the things I love about running my own startup is that I have complete freedom to experiment with my daily routine.

Through experimentation, I’ve found that waking up early every day makes me feel most invigorated and happy. It gives me a great start to the day, and this almost always leads to a great rest of the day. Over time, I’ve found I crave that “early morning” feeling, a time I can do some great work and be super focused. Gretchen Rubin from The Happiness Project mentioned something similar a recent article:

"I get up at 6:00 a.m. every day, even on weekends and vacation, because I love it.”

Waking up early every day requires discipline, especially about what time I sleep. Right now, I have a sleep ritual of disengaging from the day at 9:30pm and sleeping at 10pm. I now love all aspects of this ritual and with it in place I awake at 6am feeling fresh.

2. Exercise daily

"We found that people who are more physically active have more pleasant-activated feelings than people who are less active" - Amanda Hyde

In the last three years, I’ve gone from dabbling with exercise to it becoming something I do every weekday without fail. At first I had no idea what to do at the gym, so I asked my brother, who’s a personal trainer. I then went a few times with a good friend and soon I was hooked.

Over time, I developed this into a daily ritual so strong that I feel a pull towards it, and by doing it consistently I feel fantastic and can more easily take on other challenges. I recently discovered that exercise is a keystone habit which paves the way for growth in all other areas. I’ve also found that it helps me to get high quality sleep each night.

3. Have a habit of disengagement

"The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal" - Loehr and Schwarz, The Power of Full Engagement

As I mentioned earlier, a key way I am able to wake up at 6am is through my ritual of disengaging in the evening. I go for a walk at 9:30pm, along a route which I’ve done many times before. Since the route is already decided and is the same every time, I am simply walking and doing nothing else. This prompts reflection and relaxation.

Various thoughts enter and leave my mind during the walk, and I’ve found this to be very healthy. Sometimes I think about the great things I enjoyed that day. Other times I will realise a change I should make in order to be happier day to day. I also feel calm and relaxed by the time I return from my walk, and I can therefore go straight to bed and fall asleep sooner than if I been engaged in my work and had closed my laptop only a few minutes earlier.

4. Regularly help others

One of my most fascinating discoveries about myself so far this year, is how happy it makes me to help others. For some time I had been consistently meeting founders to help them with their startups without realising that it was making me so happy. Then when I read Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard I connected the dots of when I was happy and the activity I was doing: helping others.

I read Ricard’s section on the link between altruism and happiness and everything clicked. Since then, I’ve been consistently helping many startup founders and it’s brought me much happiness through both the challenge of finding ways to help each person, and the feeling that comes when I help the other person discover ways to make faster progress with their current challenges.

If you’d like to get startup advice via email or Skype, Help with your startup.

5. Learn new skills

"Being in the moment, focusing completely on a single task, and finding a sense of calm and happiness in your work. Flow is exactly that." - Leo Babauta

One thing I’ve found during my time working on Buffer, is that a key reason I’ve been happy for most of that time is that I’ve consistently had new challenges to take on. It may seem odd that new challenges can equate to happiness, but it is the times when I’ve slipped into a few weeks of working on something I already know well, that have led me to feel less happy than I want to be.

I think a key part of why learning new skills can bring happiness, is that you need to concentrate in order to make progress. The “flow” state has been found to trigger happiness. In addition, when learning something new you are able to learn a lot in a short space of time due to a steep learning curve. For example, in the last two weeks I’ve started learning Android development from scratch and I’ve personally found incredible the amount I know now compared to nothing two weeks ago.

6. Have multiple ways to “win” each day

Since the above activities are habitual, many days of the week I actually accomplish all of them. If I succeed with all five, I have a truly amazing day and feel fantastic. I have goals for Buffer, and I have goals in my weights routine too. In addition, I try to schedule one or two meetings or Skype calls to help people each day. I do this based on learning from around a year ago through an interview Tim Ferriss had with Matt from 37signals. I’ve mentioned it before on my blog, but it’s so good that I want to repeat it:

"If your entire ego and identity is vested in your startup, where there are certainly factors outside of your control, you can get into a depressive funk that affects your ability to function. So, you should also, lets say, join a rock climbing gym. Try to improve your time in the mile. Something like that. I recommend at least one physical activity. Then even if everything goes south you have some horrible divorce agreement with your co-founder if you had a good week and set a personal record in the gym or on the track or wherever, that can still be a good week."

So if I start my morning with a gym routine, work on Buffer during the day and help two people during lunch, I have 4 chances to have a great day. It almost always works.

Are there any key activities or habits you’ve found bring you happiness?

Photo credit: iko

How to name your startup

2012-08-11T08:33:00Z

How to name your 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 key thing is to move on to actually building something we can put in front of users.

Here are 3 steps I would take if I was naming a new startup:

1. If you can, stick to 2 syllables

Often constraints are good when undertaking a creative process like naming your startup. One of the best constraints I’ve found with startup naming is to try to stick to 2 syllables. It’s something I remember talking about a lot with my previous co-founder and good friend Oo. Generally following this rule results in a great name. Just look at some examples of 2 syllable names:

Google
Twitter
Facebook
Foursquare
DropBox
Pocket
Tumblr
Flickr
HipChat
Sparrow
Tweetbot
Reeder

All great startups. There are always exceptions to any rule, but I find it much harder to think of many successful startups which have names of more than 2 syllables than those with names with 2 syllables. There are some great single syllable names too, but that’s even harder:

Square
Path
Box

2. Make it easy for yourself

I used to try to be very clever about naming my startup. I’d try to combine words in a smart way and come up with something really catchy that sounded great.

Unfortunately, I’m not the most creative person. I have a good idea from time to time, but they happen much less frequently for me than some other people I know. For example, my co-founder Tom is really great at thinking of short, clear names like Skinnyo, SlideReach or Quotespire.

Therefore, since I don’t have that creativity, I take a slightly different approach. I simply think about a real word that describes the service or a key feature of the service the startup will provide. This is how I arrived at the name Buffer.

I also like the “real word” approach for a couple of other reasons:

You’re more likely to end up with a name that can be “spoken” without confusion. I can assure you it’s not fun to spend the years on your startup having to always clarify the name.
It’s much easier to stick to the 2 syllables rule if you’re using a real word rather than combining words to create a new one.

3. The domain name doesn’t matter

I see many, many founders limiting themselves with the domain name. One thing I’ve learned and embraced with naming my own startups is that the domain name doesn’t matter at all. The name itself matters much more than having the same domain name. Pick a great name, go with a tweaked domain name.

My current startup is named Buffer, but the domain name is bufferapp.com.

My previous startup was named OnePage, but the domain name was myonepage.com.

The most interesting part is that having a matching domain name seems to have no bearing at all on whether you will succeed with your startup. Chris Dixon said this recently:

Names are underrated, but domains names are (increasingly) overrated. Square, Dropbox, Box.net all started with temp domains.

chris dixon (@cdixon) July 13, 2012

Just take a look at all these successful startups which either had a temporary domain name, or which still have a different domain name to their name:

Square was squareup.com
DropBox was getdropbox.com
Facebook was thefacebook.com
Instagram was instagr.am
Twitter was twttr.com
Foursquare was playfoursquare.com
Basecamp is basecamphq.com
Pocket is getpocket.com
Bitly was/is bit.ly
Delicious was del.icio.us
Freckle is letsfreckle.com

Pick a great name, then add something to get a domain name. It really doesn’t matter all that much - whether you get the domain later or don’t. Then get building!

How did you think about naming your startup? Did you have a different approach? Or, are you going through this process now?

Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski

How coffee shops helped my startup

2012-08-04T12:11:38Z

How coffee shops helped my startup

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 with laptops hustling away. I come here every Saturday to work on my personal project of helping others through my blog posts and Help with your startup.

Recently Jason Shen wrote an awesome post on the importance of coffee meetings in Silicon Valley, and it prompted me to think about the role coffee shops have played for me as an entrepreneur in the last couple of years.

What I’ve realised is that they’ve actually been a big part of my lifestyle and have served me very well as places to both get lots done and have important meetings.

4 amazing things that happened in coffee shops

Only when I looked back at the journey of Buffer so far across four very different parts of the world did I notice that even whilst moving around and being within very different cultures, so many of the key milestones were achieved in coffee shops. Let me explain with four examples:

Getting advice from amazing people

When we first arrived in San Francisco last year, before we had funding, we were pretty clueless about the fundraising process. We came across Mat Johnson, an AngelList Scout, and we reached out to him to see if he’d be willing to chat to us about fundraising and AngelList.

He replied back and suggested we meet at Coffee Bar in the Mission. We had an amazing and helpful meeting, casual yet purposeful and succinct. After the meeting, Coffee Bar went on to become one of my favourite places to work from and we even hosted our “Buffer & Coffee” meetups there.

How we raised funding from coffee shops

After AngelPad demo day late last year, we focused 100% on closing our seed round for a couple of months. I’m not sure how it has worked for everyone else, but for us coffee shops had a key role in our seed round. We had meetings with over fifty angel investors in dozens of different coffee shops across SF, from SoMa to The Mission and South Beach to Hayes Valley.

The coffee shop environment was perfect for raising an angel round. It was great to pitch investors in the relaxed environment of a coffee shop, we just pulled out a laptop and ran them through our deck. In particular South Beach Cafe, right around the corner from the AngelPad office, is the one place we met many investors and advisors who we were lucky enough to get on board. Here’s how we ended many of our emails with investors:

We’d love to meet and explain our vision for Buffer in more detail. Would 4pm on Monday at South Beach Cafe work for you?

Perfect for developing partnerships and strong connections

We’ve also met people in coffee shops in order to discuss partnerships for Buffer and make some very cool integrations happen.

We met Linden from IFTTT at his local coffee shop The Grove and discussed how a Buffer action in IFTTT might work, as well as the whole flow for a user. Within a couple of weeks it was done and available to both of our userbases, and it has been one of our best received integrations to date.

A great environment for helping others

As some of you may know, I love to help others on a frequent basis, and I’ve found it’s a key thing that makes me very happy.

I almost always meet founders in coffee shops when I’m doing a 30 minute session to help them with their biggest startup challenges.

The atmosphere of a coffee shop makes it easy to quickly get into a very open conversation, where we can really get into the current specific struggles the other person is having. I’ve found I can almost always use my own experience or knowledge of other people’s experience to help them with some concrete steps forward.

Have coffee shops helped you in any way for your startup or personal projects?

Photo credit: Martin Fisch

Why I'm helping startup founders

2012-07-28T14:04:00Z

Why I'm helping startup founders

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 activity”. I briefly mentioned that I’ve been regularly helping startup founders, and since then I’ve had a few people get in touch to ask how I do it and, more importantly, why I started helping others in the first place.

It’s true that as a startup founder you have more than enough to do without helping others. However, helping others is something I’ve found to be very useful for many reasons, so I want to share some of my reasons for doing so and why I think you might want to start helping people too.

6 reasons I help startup founders

I enjoy helping people

One of the key reasons I help other startup founders is that I genuinely enjoy helping others. It gets me excited to hear about people’s challenges and about how to improve a situation. Whether they’re struggling to get traction, having difficulties with juggling a startup alongside work, or finding it hard to stay motivated, I get a thrill out of working with them to think of the best steps to take.

A duty to the amazing community

During University I got hooked on the idea of creating a startup. Since then I’ve made many mistakes and learned a lot of lessons. One of the things I’ve been blown away by is the “pay it forward” culture of startups all around the globe. The very least I can do is Help with your startup positively to this amazing community, wherever I happen to be.

Do you think I might be able to help you with your startup? Help with your startup

Learning about success and failure

We all know that success doesn’t come overnight, and often there are failures along the way. I love meeting people so I can pass on the lessons from some of my failures and at the same time start to spot what works and what doesn’t through other people’s experiences.

A way to experience more startup challenges

There’s simply no way I can experience first-hand what’s involved with all the different types of startups, marketing approaches or technical challenges, even if I build many different startups throughout my career. Whilst it’s never the same to hear about someone else’s learning than to go through it yourself, by meeting other founders you can be exposed to much more and multiply your experience and knowledge.

An outstanding support network

Meeting lots of founders also gives me a fantastic group of people to call on whenever I have a challenge. I might meet an awesome Android developer who needs to chat about struggles of creating a startup such as validating their idea or gaining traction. If I’m having challenges with Android development, I can easily hit them up for help.

Practicing being an amazing advisor

I’ve heard many times before that the investors who succeed are the ones who are very good at recognising patterns. Mark Suster describes this well in his article Invest in Lines, not Dots:

"If you’re an investor looking at dots somebody else may be looking at lines. Meet entrepreneurs early and watch how they perform maybe even at their previous startup. I always ask to meet people before they’re officially fund raising well before actually. It helps me spot patterns."

One of my aims is to be a fantastic advisor, and eventually do some angel investing too. I want to become someone people can call on who has lots of fantastic advice in many of the challenging areas of running a startup. I can only hope to achieve this by experiencing different aspects (bootstrapping, finding product/market fit, gaining traction, raising funding, hiring etc.) and through practicing being concise and useful in short advisory sessions.

Why you can start helping others now

When we were making just $20 per month with Buffer, I had the feeling that I couldn’t help people: I wasn’t successful yet! What I’ve found, however, is that I could help far more people when I was at that stage. I believe you can too, whatever stage you’re at.

Imagine you go to a conference and there’s a big guy on the stage who’s sold his 3rd company for a billion dollars. He’s so far away from the founder sat in the audience who’s just starting with their idea or maybe doesn’t even have an idea yet. The best you can hope to get is inspiration. The worst case is you actually feel stalled by how small the chance of this happening to you is.

With most people I meet, I find that I’m just a few steps ahead or behind. This means the learning is very fresh, the advice is actionable and the results feel achievable. I think this is much more powerful. Even if you’ve just had your idea and are starting to plan the steps ahead, how many people are there that haven’t even got to the idea stage yet?

Have you started helping others, or have you considered it?

Photo credit: Michael Scott

Plan or build?

2012-07-25T19:25:00Z

Plan or build-

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 experiences with Buffer.

When we’d almost finished our 30 minute meeting, Jesse said “I have one last question”. He asked me the following:

"Plan vs build. Where do you stand?"

I thought it was a fantastic question. Clearly it’s not a binary choice, yet I think it’s also good to ponder which of the two you should focus on.

What does it mean to plan?

I believe planning is an essential part of making progress. I think there’s no way you could dismiss it. If you have a startup idea, or if you have an idea for a new feature, it would not be productive to start building without spending some time deciding what work is involved, how the idea should be approached and some of the milestones being aimed for.

That said, from my experience of building startups I now think the focus should be firmly on building over planning. I think a good ratio of building to planning would be 95/5 or even greater.

The daily standup

As an example, a daily standup has become a common and important ritual for teams. One of the widespread principles of a daily standup is a 15-minute duration:

"Keep the meeting to 15 minutes or less. Minds wander and focus is lost if the meeting continues beyond this time frame."

If you think about the ratio 15 minutes equates to in an 8 hour day, it is around 3%. I think this is perfect.

Brainstorms at Buffer

At Buffer, we wouldn’t get very far without the time we spend planning. Often we say to each other:

"can I spend a few minutes brainstorming what might be best for me to work on next?"

Other times we’ll brainstorm the next steps for a specific feature, or thrash out the technical details of how something should be implemented.

However, we’ve found that we have formed a culture with a focus on acting with incomplete information, and a bias for progress over discussion. When we brainstorm, after around 20 minutes one or more of us in the discussion will feel itchy to move on from the brainstorming and get back to building.

What does it mean to build?

I’ve come across some seriously smart people who decide they want to build a startup. One of the things I see people struggling with the most is getting out of the planning phase.

To start building takes real guts. To actually put something out there, to ship something, that’s scary. It’s terrifying because it then becomes real. All the plans are tested. However, we all know that “shipping” is what we must do to achieve great things.

"What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship." - Seth Godin

You can’t learn by planning

A quote I keep coming back to, and find myself repeating to many founders I meet, is the following by Matt Mullenweg:

"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something youve created until its out there."

This is something we try to embrace at Buffer. I truly believe you can’t learn a lot by planning. You’ve got to ship it and see the results.

The surprise of data

Until you start shipping regularly and thinking about everything in terms of how quickly you can get usage and test your assumptions, it’s easy to imagine that things will often go to plan. The crazy part is, in my experience, the more likely case is that things won’t go to plan.

Here are two examples of data which surprised us recently:

In a new version of the Buffer browser extension popup, for which we conducted user testing, we found a key feature was completely misunderstood by 90% of users.
We built an MVP of a new weekly email feature, aimed at being sent to all users. We manually calculated results which would later be calculated by an algorithm and found that the results were only good enough for us to email 40% of users.

What can we do right now?

In both of the above examples, we were lucky to have created a culture of doing things lean. What this means is that we don’t feel invested in something when it fails, and we can quickly make decisions about adjustments to work towards great results.

As a result of doing more of these quick lean validation activities, we are increasingly asking ourselves "what can we do right now?" whenever we plan a new feature or significant change which has untested assumptions.

How do you feel about planning vs building? What is the approach you take with balancing the two activities?

Photo credit: Dave B

Achieving overnight success: Tom Preston-Werner

2012-07-21T13:04:00Z

Achieving overnight success- Tom Preston-Werner

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 founders who have achieved incredible milestones started their entrepreneurship journey. This article follows the first in the series where I looked into the path of Kevin Systrom of Instagram.

Tom Preston-Werner is one of the co-founders of GitHub, a social coding platform which has grown into the largest code host in the world. GitHub has taken an unsual path amongst startups in that it was bootstrapped completely for many years, all the way to over a hundred employees. It made headlines recently by announcing it’s first ever funding, a whopping $100M round valuing GitHub at $750M. I’m sure most of you don’t see GitHub or Tom Preston-Werner’s achievements as an overnight success, however the media can sometimes easily give that picture. Let’s have a look at the actual journey Tom took to build a business worth almost $1B.

The “new shoes” startup: side projects

"When you sell a company, there’s four levels of money that you can make from it. When you sell a company, you can get new shoes, a new car, a new house or a new life." - Tom Preston-Werner

I’m not sure that at this stage of his journey Tom would call his activities “startups”, but to use his own analogy I think the countless side projects he hacked away at were “new shoes” startups.

In an interview with Andrew Warner, Tom talks about one of his earliest projects as coming up with a technique called “flash replacement” to allow using any font on a website. Some years ago, there was a certain set of fonts you could use on a website, and you were limited to these. We now have the luxury of things like Google Web Fonts and Typekit, but back then fonts were a real limitation. Tom’s solution was built on and improved by Sean Inman and became a popular technique known as sIFR.

My conclusion from reading about Tom’s projects is that this one was amongst Tom’s first stepping stones to having a reputation and reach in the open source community which would let him have a springboard to launch other projects.

The “new car” startup: Gravatar

"When you sell a company, you can get new shoes, a new car, a new house or a new life. I guess Gravatar was a new car." - Tom Preston-Werner

Tom’s motivation for coming up with the flash replacement technique was to be involved with and part of the community. He talked of industry leaders as “gods” and clearly wanted to be in that game.

After his taste of the community and open source with flash replacement, Tom went on to hack away at countless other side projects. In one interview alone, he is quizzed about three different popular open source projects which he ran.

His most popular project of this type was Gravatar. It was initially his way to work on something fun alongside client projects. The idea was to help people avoid maintaining a separate avatar across dozens of services, by having a single place you update it, and tying it to an email address.

Tom reached out cold to some of the biggest bloggers he knew, and after some time managed to grow traction for Gravatar. It grew at a rapid pace after this, but with no business model around the idea, it was a fine line between horrible mistake and runaway success. After many struggles, Gravatar was eventually acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

The “new life” startup: GitHub

Tom’s fairly humble beginnings of hacking away at many open source projects is something I think we can all take great inspiration from. I think many of us could also have success if we have the persistence to keep going and drive to do something other than working for others as Tom did.

The most interesting thing I see with Tom’s story so far, compared to what happened next, is that the link between the two is very strong indeed. Tom’s life for the many years before GitHub was immersed in web design, web standards and open source. This is the area which GitHub catered to. The other illuminating thing is his explicit learning from Gravatar that having a business model is crucial. I think this alone is what triggered Tom and his co-founders to build something with revenue from the start and bootstrap GitHub all the way to a company able to employ 100 people with no outside funding.

It’s clear to me that GitHub is the “new life” startup for Tom Preston-Werner, and I am truly inspired by the path he has taken to reach this stage.

Our turn

Are you working away at projects that may eventually be dots along a line that leads to something truly great? Are you getting involved with a community and getting to know people whilst producing things of value?

Sources & recommended reading/viewing

Photo credit: Andy Delcambre

Thoughts on travelling with your startup

2012-07-15T13:46:00Z

Thoughts on travelling with your startup

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 annual revenue run rate and a team of 6, we’ve done so from 4 separate regions of the world and experienced completely different cultures.

One thing we’ve wondered along the way and as Buffer has grown is whether it is truly possible to continue to grow at a rapid pace whilst moving around.

The journey around the world

It’s been a truly wild journey so far:

Europe: Birmingham, UK (October 2010 - July 2011)

Buffer started in my bedroom in Birmingham in the UK. Birmingham is hardly the startup capital of the world, however after I reached the first paying customer Leo quickly came on board and we grew the startup to 20,000 users and almost enough revenue to cover our monthly costs.

USA: San Francisco, CA (July 2011 - December 2011)

Having dropped my freelance work, Leo and I decided we wanted to jump on a plane to San Francisco simply to see what the place was like. After speaking with experienced people, we decided fundraising made sense at the stage we were at. We managed to get a place on AngelPad and Tom joined us as soon as we did. After demo day we closed our seed round and got some amazing advisors on board.

Asia: Hong Kong (January 2012 - June 2012)

Without visas to stay in the US, we had to choose where to move to. After an amazing time in SF, we wanted a new experience rather than heading back to the UK. We pulled up Google Maps and decided Hong Kong would be a good place to focus on product as well as somewhere to find balance and have new experiences. Whilst in Hong Kong we grew Buffer from 100,000 to 250,000 users and the team from 3 to 6 people: 3 in Hong Kong, 3 in the UK.

Middle East: Tel Aviv, Israel (July 2012 - present)

After 6 amazing months in Hong Kong, we sat down once again and thought about the criteria for our next place based on our experiences so far. It came down to the following:

great culture and concentration of startups
high “craziness factor”, somewhere we can feel uncomfortable
sunshine, near to the coast (preferably beach)

The clear winner from our search was Tel Aviv. Having been here a week, we’ve had such a warm welcome and I’m excited about the progress we’ll make with Buffer here. I also hope to leave a little mark and Help with your startup. Please get in touch if you’re in Tel Aviv and want to meet up!

Why you should travel with your startup

Having spent time travelling with Buffer, I can say there are definitely some great benefits to doing so.

Good for your startup culture

I think travelling at the early stages is fantastic for the culture of the startup. The “jump on a plane” mentality of being unafraid to do whatever it takes and going anywhere with your life packed in a tiny case is a great one to instill. This seeps into all areas and helps us ship fast and think big.

Opportunities to meet many amazing people

Luck combined with our approach of being vocal about our story and progress has meant being invited to speak and mentor at some great events in Hong Kong and Tel Aviv and we’ve been able to quickly meet a lot of people. This is great personally and for progressing the startup through shared connections.

Enjoy yourself and have great experiences

A key reason for us to travel around has been to simply see new parts of the world, experience different cultures and have lots of fun. Most of us have a routine of working 5 days on Buffer, then having 1 full day off and 1 day working on ourselves through activities such as learning to code or blogging. We get a lot done, and at the same time can maintain it consistently. We don’t feel we need a traditional “2 week vacation”.

Will travelling impact growth?

So far, the travelling has had a very positive impact on Buffer. We’ve hit some great milestones and managed to grow to 6 people by hiring from my personal network.

Is productivity impacted?

There are many great reasons to have people in different locations. One key one for us is in order to provide the high level of happiness through support that we aim for. However, the times when we’ve had the whole team together have been super productive. I think that although we have some great technology for collaboration now, face-time is crucial:

"Most of our portfolio companies open international offices in the US and many of them have development in eastern Europe and encouraging travel between the different sites is the key to getting the face time necessary to build trust and help keep everyone pulling in the same direction." - Nic Brisbourne

Hiring becomes a challenge

One thing we’ve experienced as we have grown the size of the team is that we’ve had to make a decision about whether we want to grow as a distributed team or eventually base ourselves somewhere and establish an office. I think we’ll always maintain the spirit of everyone in the team having full control over their schedule with a lot of freedom, but we’ve started to see benefits of having a base.

Since we eventually aim to have a base, the more people we hire who are not able to work at that base for reasons such as commitments or lack of visa, the harder it will be for us to base ourself in the best place for the business. It seems Ryan Carson has had similar thoughts with his startup Treehouse which is experiencing crazy traction:

"Now that we’re up to 40 people and things are going 110mph with Treehouse, I’ve decided it’s no longer viable to manage the team from another country."

Where is the best place for what you do?

Another key reason for us wanting a base, and planning to be in San Francisco eventually for the long term, is the idea of thinking about the best place in the whole world for whatever you are trying to accomplish.

I see this similarly to if someone wanted to be the best actress in the world, she would inevitably go to Hollywood. We’ve considered many places, but for what we’re trying to do with Buffer, San Francisco and the Valley area is simply the best place for us to be.

Have you thought about travelling with your startup, or do you have experience of trying it?

Photo credit: Joakim Wahlander

Your startup is a rocket ship

2012-07-01T09:33:00Z

Your startup is a rocket ship

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 ship takes off, the best thing you can do is to cling onto the edge of the rocket ship and get the most out of it that you can.

Help people get the most out of the startup

The most important reason I want to encourage “clinging onto the rocket ship” is because I believe it is the best way for the individual people on the team to get the most out of the lifetime of the startup.

Each person can use the rocket ship to further their own reputation

My co-founder Leo put this best when I discussed it with him:

"Everyone in the team already has a reputation internally. Through blogging, Tweeting, doing interviews or speaking, they can make this reputation an external one too."

It’s vital for everyone in the team to become comfortable putting themselves out there. We try to encourage this at Buffer by helping each other in an “improvements” section of of our daily Skype call.

Everyone has a chance for enormous personal growth

By choosing to take hold of the rocket ship and cling on for the ride, everyone in the team gives themselves a chance to grow personally much faster than they could by any other means.

"you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years" - Paul Graham

Everyone in the team has a chance to develop their core strengths further, becoming domain experts. They also have the opportunity to develop skills which aren’t their natural focus.

If things begin to work, the startup will become well-known. That’s a given. Whether you become well-known is optional. It’s completely up to you.

Examples to be inspired by

Some of the people who I’ve seen continually grab hold of the startup rocket ship are Kevin Rose with Digg, Dan Martell with Flowtown (and now Clarity), and Cindy Alvarez with KISSmetrics and other compaines. Be sure to follow them to learn from the best.

Everyone in your startup is a marketer

The other reason I encourage everyone in the team to cling onto the rocket ship is that Leo and I have found this is actually a really great way to do marketing for the startup.

The Buffer rocket ship

Everyone on the team does an awesome job of clinging on to the rocket ship.

For example, Tom's recent post was noticed by MongoDB who we’re now speaking lots with, and he’s been invited to speak at an event about how we use MongoDB.

Therefore, I try my best to encourage everyone in the team to grab hold of the rocket ship. Here’s something I said to Alyssa who has amazing knowledge, experience and insights about customer happiness which I hope she will soon start to share:

"I’d also very much encourage you to get as much as you can for yourself in terms of "reputation". I sometimes see Buffer as a rocket ship which I’m desperately clinging onto and using to catapult myself as high as possible, both in terms of personal development and in terms of opening further opportunities down the line. The higher a reputation we all have individually as well as Buffer as a whole, the easier it is to "get in" to places we need to."

Examples to be inspired by

Two compaines which have somehow managed to create a phenomenal culture of encouraging their team to “cling onto the rocket ship” are HubSpot and 37signals.

When the rocket ship is soaring and everyone is watching it, be sure to shout about the fact you’re helping to fly it. When the rocket lands back on Earth at the end of its journey and people’s memories of it start to fade, you want to have gained as much as you can and have people recognise you individually. That way, the next rocket can be bigger and more ambitious.

Are you clinging onto the rocket ship of your startup?

Photo credit: Matthew Simantov

Want to be happy and successful? Bring happiness to others

2012-06-27T14:34:00Z

Want to be happy and successful- Bring happiness to others

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 been truly enjoyable and fascinating. I feel I’ve had a positive impact on many, and at the same time I’ve learned a huge amount and made some great friends I’ll definitely stay in touch with.

I’ve been meeting 3-4 founders most weeks and almost all of the meetings I had were 45 minute slots during lunch time. This worked very well as I needed a break and to get lunch anyway.

After doing it for a little while, I started to notice that in the afternoon after I’d met a startup founder I was always extremely happy.

A lesson from the happiest man in the world

I’m currently reading Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard, who has been called the happiest man in the world.

Ricard discusses the “joys of altruism”, relating altruism to happiness. He mentions a series of studies which found a very strong correlation between altruism and happiness:

"The satisfactions triggered by a pleasant activity, such as going out with friends, seeing a movie, or enjoying a banana split, were largely eclipsed by those derived from performing an act of kindness."

He concludes the section with the following concise explanation:

"Generating and expressing kindness quickly dispels suffering and replaces it with lasting fulfillment."

When I read this, it hit me. This was exactly the reason why I was happy. Helping someone for 45 minutes during lunch is a far better way to be happy than watching a funny video or procrastinating on Facebook for 45 minutes.

Hiten Shah: bringing happiness to the startup world

"You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want." - Zig Ziglar

Every email Hiten sends has the above quote in his signature. He is the person who I’ve seen best embrace the methods Ricard talks about.

The amazing thing about Hiten is that he truly helps anyone. When I first had contact with Hiten two years ago, I was nobody. However, he took an hour of his day to jump on a call with a stranger in the UK.

I’ve found Hiten is one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. He seems to have really ingrained this idea of constantly helping others, and I imagine it may be at least partially triggering his happiness.

Taking this approach to the level that Hiten does is something which I have always aspired to since we first spoke. This is also main reason I started meeting founders here in Hong Kong.

Building a startup around this philosophy

"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success." - Albert Schweitzer

At Buffer, as a whole team we try to internalise this philosophy. Every day we have a Skype call at 6pm where we help each other to work on personal improvements which will make us happy. We know that if we can simply be happy, we will produce great work and be productive.

On the other side of the equation, we also try to apply this to our approach with user happiness, largely inspired by Zappos. In general, we try to make this all we do. We sit down, we type, and we try to bring happiness to others. We do this hours on end with email support, and we do this by writing thousands of lines of code to create an amazing experience.

What are you doing to make others happy?

Photo credit: Jill G

Don't register your idea as a company

2012-06-24T13:02:00Z

Don't register your idea as a company

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 have a number of different experiences and perspectives with this, and I now believe that by far the best option in almost all cases is to delay registering a company for as long as possible.

Don’t incorporate a hobby

I’m no lawyer, so it’s probably best not to take too much of my advice on this. One of the lawyers who I have a lot of respect for, especially when talking about scalable tech startups, is Ryan Roberts, who runs the Startup Lawyer blog. His advice is this:

"Don’t incorporate a hobby. Incorporate when you are serious about making your startup a business."

I think that’s pretty sound advice.

Being serious about your startup idea

I’m sure if you were to talk with someone else about the idea for your startup, you probably wouldn’t want to call it a hobby. You’d be very serious about it, this idea is the one. Right?

I think that’s great, it’s definitely good to be determined and ambitious. However, when it’s still an idea I think it’s perhaps good to think about it as a hobby.

As an example, I spoke yesterday at Leancamp Dublin and one of the things I mentioned about when I first had the idea for Buffer was this:

"The idea came from a personal need, and I knew I’d find the product useful for myself. However, for it to be more than just a hobby, I needed lots of other people to find it useful as well."

This is the point in time when I decided I needed to go through a validation process for Buffer before I launched it. I needed to find out if lots of other people would find it useful. Over time, this worked out well. With 230,000 users and good revenue, we’re most certainly a startup now.

However, realistically, it remained a hobby - an experiment - for quite some time before it became a true startup.

Don’t launch a company, launch an experiment

Vinicius Vacanti, the co-founder and CEO of Yipit has a great way of phrasing the benefits of framing your startup idea as an “experiment”:

"by thinking of it as a quick experiment, that fear tends to go away. The beautiful thing about experiments is that disproving your hypothesis isn’t thought of as a failure. It’s thought of as progress. And, getting early user feedback, even negative, is definitely progress."

I think that’s a great way to think about it. Each assumption or hypothesis which is disproved is very real progress, since the measure of progress for a lean startup is validated learning.

What matters? Product/market fit

One reason that it is great to think about a fresh startup idea as an experiment is described very well by Marc Andreeson’s definition of “product/market fit”:

"Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market."

When you reach product/market fit you essentially have built something people want. You naturally get traction, and things unfold very quickly. Reaching product/market fit is perhaps the most important thing for a startup. Andreeson puts it this way:

"Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to."

The pre-product/market fit phase is one of the biggest challenges of creating a startup. You have to get out of the building and face those assumptions. You need the flexibility to make drastic changes. The best way is by thinking about the process as a series of experiments, with the eventual goal of arriving at something people want.

When you manage to achieve product/market fit, you’ll know it. This was the key difference between Buffer and my previous startup. Andreeson was right:

"you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening"

Delay incorporating to stay flexible

With a company registered, and perhaps the name related to the idea, it can be very difficult to let go of an idea in pursuit of succeeding as a startup, rather than with the particular idea. Being too attached to the idea or a particular solution could kill the startup.

Therefore, I believe that it is best to delay incorporating our startups. In this pre-product/market fit stage, we should be focused completely on reaching product/market fit, as Andreeson has told us. This gives us the best chance of finding something that does get traction (it flows when you hit product/market fit). Once you’re there, it’s becomes worth incoporating and giving it the focus as a startup rather than a hobby or experiment.

Have you incorporated your startup? How early did you do it and what were the reasons?

Photo credit: Juli

Are you interested?

2012-06-17T06:10:55Z

Are you interested-

"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 you." - Dale Carnegie

Earlier this week I took a trip to the barber since my hair was getting a little long. It ended up being one of the most fascinating times I’ve had my hair cut.

The last few times I’ve been to this barber, they’ve always washed my hair in the sink before I’ve had my hair cut. The way they did it was to turn the chair around, tilt it back over the sink and then wash your hair while you lean back and rest your neck on the edge of the sink. The sink is clearly designed for this as it has a gap for your neck.

Interestingly though, this time the lady who washes my hair did it a different way. We were having the usual friendly chatter and she began to wash my hair, only I was still sat upright in the chair. I found this fascinating, so I asked her more about it. I said “this is a new method, isn’t it?”. This simple question triggered a captivating conversation.

She went on to explain that someone else had mentioned that they found the other method uncomfortable, and the staff had talked about it afterwards. They decided to try this new method since it would be a better experience for clients. I then asked how they knew about this new method, and how they’d come to the decision to try it, because it seemed very unconventional. She told me that one of the senior stylists is from Singapore, and that in Singapore they always do it this way. This was amazing to me, to realise that there are different ways things are done, and that the overlap of different methods and cultures can be so powerful.

Thinking about it now, this particular aspect reminds me of how Bret Taylor, who previously worked at Google, described his recent few years experience at Facebook just as he has made the decision to depart as CTO:

"Cross-pollination among companies is what drives so much of innovation"

I then asked the lady washing my hair about whether they consciously ask for feedback from clients, and mentioned how surprised and amazed I was that they had actually listened, discussed it and made a decision about how to improve the experience. That's something we’re focusing on a lot as an early stage tech startup, but I was under the impression that in general, with traditional businesses a lot of the decisions were simply passed along and were accepted as “the way it is”. The method of washing hair, especially, seemed like something that might be hard to consider changing.

We spoke lots about this general concept of traditional businesses taking feedback and having personality. She told me about a small independent coffee shop nearby which she prefers compared to bigger chains because they are much more individual and she feels she can connect better with the staff.

The whole conversation went on for quite some time and was genuinely fascinating.

Why it’s so amazing to be interested

The quote from the start of the article is from How To Win Friends and Influence People, and the book is my favourite of all time. It’s also probably the single book that’s had the biggest impact for my life so far.

The most amazing thing happened after my conversation about the new hair washing technique and other aspects. She started to ask me questions about what I was doing in Hong Kong, how long I’d been here, and all the different places I’d checked out. She gave me a great suggestion for a new beach to check out. By showing a genuine interest in what she was doing and something that is a big part of her life, she became much more interested in me.

This is one of the key principles Carnegie talks about in the book: “become genuinely interested in other people”. This is something I’ve worked hard to ingrain. Since I read the book and started to consciously try to bring into focus this and other concepts, the results have been quite remarkable.

I’ve found there is always something genuinely interesting about what somebody is doing. All I need to do is to pursue that interest I have, and ask more questions and continue along that conversation. It’s both fascinating for myself and at the same time builds a greater connection and opens up more opportunities.

The key word in all of this, however, is “genuine”. I think that’s really important. Carnegie himself puts it best:

"The principles taught in this book will work only when they come from the heart. I am not advocating a bag of tricks, I am talking about a new way of life."

Photo credit: John Davey

Making money with a product: A myth?

2012-06-13T13:11:00Z

Making money with a product- A myth-

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 overcome that.

First, a coffee shop conversation

I was chatting with my friend Joss in a coffee shop recently, and he told me about his new project, Open Exchange Rates, which is gaining a surprising amount of traction. He’s a great hacker and he’s done countless side projects and many open source collaborations, and he’s had great success with many of them. He’s also done work for many different people and has no problem finding great, well paid work.

From traction to a mini brainwave

The traction with the recent project got him thinking, though. This was a turning point for him. He had a hunch that this could be the project he could turn into a startup venture. He knew he could enjoy spending his time building this and scaling it up. The key realisation was that if he could make it work - and the signs were good that he could - then he could stop working for others and spend his days working on something he enjoyed and something he was accumulating value with, which belonged to him.

Thinking more about paying for products

What he shared with me next in our coffee shop conversation was very interesting. He said that after this realisation he hit a problem. He started to think about how he would achieve this, and realised that to make it the only thing he worked on, he’d need to make money from the product. He then thought about other products people pay for. He thought about products he pay’s for, and realised he doesn’t pay for products, or at least it was very rare for him to. He thought long and hard and tried to understand why anyone would pay for anything. In his mind, products generating revenue was a myth and he couldn’t reach the mindset where it existed in reality.

A familiar feeling

The most interesting part for me about the whole conversation, however, was that I suddenly realised that I had this exact same feeling just before I had the idea for Buffer almost two years ago. I’ve now realised by discussing it with others that this is a very natural mindset and feeling. For some like my friend who is a fantastic developer, it seems crazy to pay for something which would only save you a bit of time. Also, as a developer, to pay for something which you could just spend half a day or a day coding and have something almost as good, seemed unimaginable.

Why does it feel like a myth? 5 thoughts.

Since having this coffee shop conversation and talking with a few others about this topic, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and looking back to when I had the very same feeling.

Clearly, getting past this feeling that it is a myth to make money is an essential thing for any aspiring entrepreneur. Here are 5 thoughts on why it feels like a myth:

Saving time seems like a crazy thing for people to pay for

When we get started, we often don’t value our time too highly. We spend a little longer, do it ourselves or find a free solution, and save the money. It’s easy to forget that time is a commodity that many will pay for quite freely.

For a small task, we think people can just do it themselves

Many of us who think about creating products are able to build products, which is why we think about charging for something we build. When we can fairly easily build it ourselves, we forget that this is not the case for many others, especially the target customer.

$10 seems like a lot of money. It can feel unimaginable people will hand over $10

A lot of the time, we start from a situation where we don’t have too much money ourselves. This is great because it puts fire in your belly and you have a determination to succeed and get out of that situation. However, in this scenario we cut costs everywhere we can and do everything ourselves. It’s very understandable to feel that most people will not pay for something. We easily forget how small an amount $10 is.

It requires hustle and practice, things which are rarely taught

It takes a certain amount of courage to ask for money, whether you do it in person or you close your eyes and hit the button to put your site live with a payment process in place. It also takes a lot of practice to know how to ask for money, both offline and online, and it takes persistence to keep going until you make that first buck.

Feeling like it’s wrong to make money

People often feel like it’s somehow wrong to make money. It can be hard to realise that by making money you can genuinely have a positive impact on many other people. This is probably one of the most important reasons we don’t “take the leap”. When chatting with my good friend Isaac about the topic, he shared this article which was the tipping point for him:

"Probably the biggest thing that holds people back from getting money are hangups about it. How do you get over that?

Practice? Philosophy? Desperation?

Probably all of them. But Id bet on the guy with no hangups about getting money and a little drive getting more money faster than someone with tons of skills but hangups about it. Theres silly amounts of opportunity all over the place. The menus at the place I eat breakfast in Saigon are worn out and cheap-looking. I know the top printshop in the city and theyve done work for me.

I could offer the owner to give him a full set of new menus for a few bucks when Im on my way to the printshop anyways, and then drop them off the next morning at breakfast. In fact, Im going to do that tomorrow.”

Making money with a product: no myth

Of course, we all know that there are many products which are very profitable, and making money with a product is not a myth at all.

How I overcame the myth

It personally took me a long time to take that plunge and try to make money. I had many previous projects and a previous startup and none went too far. None gave me the freedom I now have as a result of the success we’ve had with Buffer. The mistake? I never charged for anything. I only ever charged directly for my time. I was so into startups that I even created an event for like-minded people to meet monthly and talk startups.

I gained a reputation as someone who knew what he was doing, but I’d still never made a “scalable” penny. I actually felt like a fraud in some ways because people were coming to me for advice, but I’d never made money with a product. That was the turning point for me, I had to fix it. That’s why I charged from day 1 with Buffer, and luckily I had the first paying customer after 3 days and everything changed.

Do you have any feeling that making money with a product is a myth? Have you overcome this mindset?

Photo credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme

Use the happiness advantage

2012-06-10T05:49:00Z

Use the happiness advantage

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 process and tell these people how crucial their feedback would be. There are a few different things involved, but overall the best way to describe it was to simply make them happy.

Now as we move forward in a slightly later stage of the startup where we have hundreds of thousands of users instead of just hundreds, and we’re really trying to perfect the product and drive massive growth instead of being in a validation phase, we’ve actually also switched back to a focus on making users happy.

What is the happiness advantage?

In the simplest terms, the happiness advantage I am describing is giving the users a real feeling of surprise and happiness through the product and the service provided. Mark MacLeod, the former CFO of Tungle and Shopify, described it very well in his talk on SaaS Math:

"You really need to shower your users with love. People buy technology from startups for one of two reasons. One, it’s technology that they can’t get anywhere else, or two it’s a level of service and support and love that they can’t get anywhere else. The startups that do really well and take off have showered their users with love. You send a request to support and you hear back right away. They’ve got a very active blog and they build a community. Every time an executive goes to a different city they’re having dinners for the users in that city. They’re building massive loyalty and those users are going out and becoming ambassadors and helping recruit more users."

Why use the happiness advantage?

Of course, giving this much attention to people who use your product does take extra work. It also takes a whole new mindset to genuinely appreciate every contact from users, and to cherish the conversation no matter whether they are delighted, confused or complaining. I truly believe, however, that this extra work is worth it in so many ways. Here are some of the benefits we’ve seen:

Early stage benefits

In the earliest stages, you very likely have a product you’re embarrassed about, but you’ve pushed it live anyway because you know how important it is to learn quickly whether your assumptions are correct.

There are many things against you, but the great thing is that you aren’t flooded with support emails and you don’t have many users. Therefore you can be in touch with all of your users individually, and you can not only learn a massive amount from them about the next steps for the product, but you can have a profound impact on them and make them true ambassadors of your product and brand. They can be your best friends.

What’s even better is that these first few users crave this involvement and know that the product won’t be perfect. As Leo has put it, the first users are a different breed, and you want to know them.

Later stage benefits

As Buffer has grown, we’ve tried many different things to try and continue to improve the rate of our growth. After trying many different things, we’ve eventually come back to using the happiness advantage as our key driver of growth. Marketing directly can’t compare to simply having users who love to tell others about the product. With this approach, we have a multiplication effect.

One of our biggest inspirations for a lot of the ways we approach things is Evernote. I believe they use the happiness advantage to great effect. Here’s how they describe their approach:

"The job of getting someone whos never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job." - Phil Libin, Evernote

How we are doing it at Buffer

In the last few weeks at Buffer, we’ve been working hard on making use of the happiness advantage even at a larger scale now. We get over 100 emails per day, but we’re determined to answer them all swiftly and not only that but solve their problems and make improvements to the product as a result of the conversations we have.

For the last few weeks, we’ve worked hard at this new focus. Leo and Alyssa especially have done a fantastic job. We’ve now managed to achieve 50% of emails being answered within 1 hour, and 77% within 6 hours:

(The chart above is from the Reports feature inside Help Scout. It’s an awesome product and we certainly couldn’t do as good email support without them)

We are also starting to receive a lot of very positive Tweets about the experience from users, such as this great Tweet from Marci:

When I had an issue w/ @bufferapp 2day the co-founder personally helped me solve it!Great support. @tweetdeck…still waiting!

Marci Liroff (@marciliroff) June 7, 2012

It’s Tweets like this which confirm in my mind what Mark MacLeod says about users becoming ambassadors.

On Thursday, Leo, Alyssa and I had a great brainstorm about changes we can make this week to move this to 60% within 1 hour and 90% within 6 hours. We’ve made some adjustments to when we will do support emails and even to our sleeping habits to achieve this. I’m very excited about the impact we can have with this.

It involves the product too

In this article, I’ve tried to stay very focused on how interactions with users can provide massive benefits, and how focusing on making people happy can turn them into ambassadors. One thing that’s definitely important to mention alongside this discussion is that I definitely believe the quality of the product plays a key role too.

Not only is it important to have a great product that people are eager to share with others, it is also vital that when people have interactions with you and you tell them that you’re working on improving something, they need to see those improvements happen. This is what inspires confidence and creates long-lasting loyalty.

For this reason, at Buffer, we have just two focuses: making users happy (wowing them) and building an awesome product (with an aha moment). To ensure these two things are bound together, we all have input into the product development, and we all do support at some point every week.

Are you using the happiness advantage?

Photo credit: Chapendra

What can we do right now?

2012-06-06T13:59:00Z

What can we do right now-

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 result of my thinking around this, I’ve started to believe that the following question can be one of the most powerful questions for startup founders to say to each other:

"What can we do right now?"

"Right now" means faster validation

The reason I think this question is so powerful is largely based on the core nature of startups. Unfortunately for us startup founders, the key difference between what we do when we’re building a scalable startup and what you would be doing if you’re running a service business is that a large amount of the work we do every day is building things which are not yet validated.

There are three common scenarios in a startup where we’re handling assumptions which need to be validated as soon as possible:

we haven’t launched yet and so almost nothing is validated
we’re modifying the experience of a current feature
we’re adding a new feature we expect will improve one or more metrics

Therefore, a lot of what we spend our time building hasn’t yet been seen by our potential or existing audience. This is a key issue that many founders agree is vital to address:

"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something youve created until its out there. That means every moment youre working on something without it being in the public its actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world." - Matt Mullenweg, WordPress

Two examples from Buffer

Just in the last few weeks, there are times when between Leo, Tom and myself one of us has used the powerful “what can we do right now?” question to great effect. Here are a couple:

Getting a user on Skype for user testing

We’ve recently been working on an overhaul of the browser extension popup that you see when you use Buffer to add a new Tweet or Facebook update about a page you want to share. Initially, we thought about launching it to everyone without getting feedback. However, there are some new concepts which are quite different compared to the current version, so we decided it is best if we try and validate our assumptions about how clear the new experience is.

To do this validation, we’ve been connecting with a few users through Skype and enabling the new version for them. As they experience the new version, they share their thoughts and we ask questions to specifically get insight into whether they understand the different parts of the experience.

At first, we said to each other: “maybe we could do some user testing next week”. Then, in the same conversation we moved towards “how about this week”. In the end, we took it even further and said “why not today” and then finished by concluding “let’s Tweet right now and have a call with someone in the next few minutes”. Within 20 minutes, we’d done an interview and learned a massive amount. We’ve since done ten more user interviews and learned even more.

Hacking and hard-coding UI changes

Whilst conducting these user interviews, we’ve learned a massive amount very quickly. Some of what we’ve learned has proven that our assumptions were in fact incorrect. Part of the interface we have built for the new browser extension popup is not being perceived as we expected it to, and users are getting very confused about the purpose of that particular section.

As a result of invalidating this assumption, we’ve realised we need to make some changes in order to improve the clarity and help people “get it” faster. As we started to tweak the interface, we quickly agreed that we’d need to do more user interviews to check whether we’ve achieved the clarity we are aiming for.

When we first started to tweak the UI, we were doing it very thoroughly, checking that everything worked perfectly. After a while, since we knew we had to test the UI through user interviews again, we decided we should try and shortcut the process. We asked “what can we do right now” that would help us to learn whether we’ve improved the clarity. What we’re doing now is hard-coding these types of changes and leaving out large parts. Then we jump on another Skype call. If we find something that works, we can built it out further and add polish.

Validated learning is the measure of progress

The key thing that this process of asking the question “what can we do right now?” reminds me of is the way that Eric Ries defines the measure of progress in a lean startup:

"Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty." - Eric Ries

When was the last time you asked your co-founder “what can we do right now?”.

Photo credit: christopher charles

Why I crave mistakes

2012-06-03T21:12:00Z

Why I crave mistakes

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 and a half years pursuing.

A lot of the reason we got traction and reached product/market fit so fast with Buffer was due to my learnings from the time I spent on OnePage.

And using those learnings seemed to work out perfectly. For most of the first year of Buffer it felt like we had done everything right and couldn’t have done things any better. We hit product/market fit, got good traction and raised our seed round.

In that year, Leo and I spoke a lot about how we could do better than we were. We’ve had consistently good growth but we always want to grow faster. Alarm bells were ringing in our heads when we couldn’t think of many things we could do better. Over time, these alarm bells grew louder and louder, and we started to try more and more drastic things to trigger even faster growth.

The realisation of a few big mistakes

In the last few weeks, experimenting with more drastic adjustments has triggered the realisation of a few mistakes we’ve made:

As you gain traction, you don’t need to do more

One of the amazing things about gaining traction is that you have a massive amount of continuous immediate feedback about your product. This means that you have good validation for new features based on how often certain feature requests comes up. However, it also means you have lots you could build which you think would make many people happy.

We built out extensions for all browsers, added features to the web app, built mobile apps, built our Buffer button and acquired a great WordPress sharing buttons plugin. We only realised recently that we were spreading ourselves very thin. We’ve tried to change this recently, by focusing on a few things and improving them continuously rather than doing more. Kevin Systrom describes this very well, and Instagram is a perfect example of succeeding by focusing:

"What do people love about the product and what can we go deeper into? Not: what do people love about the product, let’s add a bunch of shit."

Internally we have started to say that “the extensions are Buffer, Buffer is a browser extension” rather than the extensions being “goodies” or “an addon”. We’ve already done a lot to improve the extensions and we’ve just hit 50,000 weekly active users for Buffer on Chrome, where the extension is starting to trend.

Even after product/market fit, qualitative feedback is invaluable

In the early days of Buffer, one of the things I did quite well was Steve Blank’s notion of "getting out of the building". When I built the product-less MVP to test whether people would want and pay for the product, I was in touch with many people via email and I had Skype calls to chat about the problems people had in being able to post consistently to Twitter. Ultimately, this lead to great traction when I launched and resulted in having the first paying customer after 3 days. The first paying customer was someone I’d talked with in the validation phase and had told me he would pay for Buffer if it solved the problems I had discussed with him.

We reached product/market fit for Buffer in the first 6 months, and since then we continued to receive qualitative feedback through customer support emails, but we stopped doing as many Skype calls. There’s no real good reason why, I think we just thought that perhaps it wasn’t scalable, or that we didn’t need much more feedback. The thing is, however, hearing someone’s voice and the way they describe their process of using a product, or the way they describe your product to you (and others) is extremely useful.

In the last few weeks, we’ve been preparing a whole new version of our Buffer browser extension experience, which as I mentioned above really is the single thing Buffer is all about now. Almost on a whim we decided it might be cool to do a few user interviews. We enabled the feature for them whilst on a Skype call, asked them to visit a web page we provided and then asked them to share that page using the Buffer Chrome extension. We asked them to talk aloud about their experience. It has been absolutely fascinating, and we found that a key element of our redesign was being misunderstood. We’re making changes and have another round of interviews planned next week.

Mistakes are learning, so I now crave them

These two recent realisations of mistakes we’ve made have been an amazing experience. I remember turning to Leo whilst walking to a steak place we often get dinner and saying “it feels so good that we’re finally realising some mistakes we’ve made during Buffer”. We went on to talk about how the more quickly we discover these mistakes, the faster we can learn the best approach.

In general, I think the more we can have a mindset where we crave mistakes because we know they are directly related to learning and progression, the better we can do. This quote sums it all up very nicely:

"Entrepreneurs think of learning the way most people think of failure" - Peter Sims

I’m genuinely very excited to uncover the next mistake.

How do you feel about mistakes? Do you enjoy the discovery of mistakes?

Photo credit: Mark Menzies

The exercise habit

2012-05-30T13:59:00Z

The exercise habit

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 6am, I opened my MacBook Air, switched to the desktop with TextMate open and got coding. I worked for just under one hour on some important new functionality for Buffer. At exactly 6:59am, I pushed the few commits I’d made to our Git repository. I then took my octopus card and Fitness First card out of my wallet and put them in my pocket. I put my wallet in the gym bag I’d packed the night before, and headed out of my apartment door. I got the lift down from my eighth floor to the ground floor, cheerily said good morning to the concierge and headed out of my apartment building.

Once outside, I very specifically walked across the street to the 7-11. I entered the shop, said hello to the lady and went to the back where the fridges are. I knew exactly what I would buy. I grabbed a can of red bull and a small bottle of Volvic water. I went back to the counter I’d walked past, put both on the surface and waited for the lady to key in the items. I had my octopus card ready on the scanner to make the payment, and as soon as I heard the beep to confirm the payment, I cracked open the red bull, and walked away with the red bull in my right hand and the Volvic in my left.

I set off on the 3 minute journey to my gym, and sipped the red bull on the way, a little caffeine to enhance my performance during my weights session. As always, I finished the red bull exactly as I approached the Hopewell Centre where the gym is located, and tossed the empty can in the bin as I walked past.

I headed to the escalator, and when I reached the top I walked over to the lift which takes you to the 16th floor where Fitness First is. As always, when I got into the lift I opened up my gym tracking app on my iPhone and checked what my first exercise for the day would be, and how much weight and reps I did last time. As I got to the top, I knew exactly my first exercise and how much I’d aim for this time. I walked out of the lift and headed to the counter to exchange my Fitness First card for a locker key and towels. Once I got to the changing rooms, I put my bag in locker number 115 along with the octopus card and locked it. With the Volvic in hand, I was ready to start and headed straight to the bench for my first exercise: 12 reps of dumbbell bench press, with 30kg dumbbells.

After I’d finished in the gym, I went straight home and had my usual breakfast of 4 Weetabix. As soon as I’d finished, I opened my MacBook Air, turned on the Pomodoro app and set the timer ticking for 30 minutes. I spent 30 minutes replying to emails from my “to-reply” label in Gmail, and then stopped when the timer went off. I quickly packed my bag and headed to Caffe Habitu, ready for a productive rest of the day.

The power of habits

Almost all of this pattern is now completely habitual for me, Monday to Friday each week. I alternate the gym which I do Monday, Wednesday and Friday with running or swimming on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The rest, however, stays the same. It requires very little mental energy for me to choose what to do, and it requires almost no willpower for me to force myself to accomplish the routine.

By 9:30am, I’ve done an hour of coding on the most important task I have right now on Buffer, I’ve been to the gym and had a great session, and I’ve done 30 minutes of emails. It’s only 9:30am and I’ve already succeeded, and I feel fantastic. The rest of the day is a breeze. I continue to code, and I slot in a 30 minute Pomodoro to fill my Buffer, a 30 minute Pomodoro to read a startup book (right now it’s Delivering Happiness) and one other 30 minute Pomodoro for emails later in the afternoon. I usually also meet with a startup founder here in Hong Kong during lunch and help them with their current biggest challenge. If I start the day like this, I almost always have a very productive day, and in our daily standup team Skype call I have plenty of good progress to share.

Exercise as a keystone habit

The interesting part is, this routine has taken me quite some time to build up. Looking back, it all started with just the exercise. I managed to create exercise as a daily habit around one and a half years ago when I was based in Birmingham in the UK. Over time, it became such a strong habit that there is no way I would skip it. If the rest of my routine falls apart, I will always achieve the exercising.

Right now I’m reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg and everything suddenly became very clear. Exercise is what Duhigg calls a “keystone habit”:

"Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change."

Have you considered starting the exercise habit? Do you exercise regularly?

Photo credit: Tomomi Sasaki

For the first few people, hire from your network

2012-05-27T12:20:15Z

For the first few people, hire from your network

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 consisted of just myself and Leo. When we arrived in the valley just under a year ago, we weren’t initially looking for funding but after talking with a few people we quickly realised that with product/market fit, good traction and bottlenecks in building as quickly as we wanted to, it made sense for us to consider funding.

We were fortunate to get onto the AngelPad batch last Summer, and as soon as we were accepted we brought on board our third co-founder Tom. After demo day, we raised an angel round and got many smart investors on board too. We’ve been working with some great freelancers, and I’m excited to say that we’ve also just hired our first employee Andy who will start full-time soon.

We’re still figuring out the best approach to hiring, but I wanted to share some of the things I’ve come to realise from the hiring I’ve done so far.

The importance of culture-fit for early hires

One of the things Leo and I talked about a lot in the early days was how we wanted to shape the culture of Buffer. Culture is often a very abstract thing to talk about, but we had specific things we wanted to do such as providing outstanding customer service and having a very positive environment where no ideas are dismissed, no matter how crazy. We’ve definitely been influenced heavily by a few books, the key ones being How to Win Friends and Influence People and Delivering Happiness which we’ve all read and discuss frequently within the team.

Get to know each other first, work on freelance terms

With these values quite clear, I knew that finding people to fit the culture may be difficult. There are a number of great articles out there about hiring employee 1 and many suggest great reasons you should date before getting married. I was therefore convinced that I needed to work with people for a long time, probably on a freelance basis, before they came on board full-time as an employee. This has been a very good thing for us to do, simply because there are personalities of the new hire and the combined personality of Buffer and it could easily not be a good fit.

Better yet, know each other already

Even better than meeting someone new and working with them for a while before bringing them on board is to know them already. That’s how it’s worked for me so far with Buffer. It won’t scale forever, but for the first few hires at least it seems like a perfect approach and is working very well. If you know someone already and have maybe worked on a few side projects together, done a Startup Weekend or Launch48 event together or simply been bouncing projects and challenges off each other, then it’s much easier to have a good gut instinct about whether you will be able to work well together.

How we’ve done it with Buffer

As I mentioned, we’ve now grown the Buffer team, bringing on board Tom as a third co-founder and more recently Andy as our first employee. We’ve used the “hire from your network” approach rather than trying to post jobs in various places. We’ve tried the more traditional method in a minimal way but not had much success.

Tom Moor, Co-Founder and Chief Hacker

After graduating, I headed back to my hometown of Sheffield in the UK and found there wasn’t much going on for startups. After some time, I decided that rather than complain I should create a meetup for startups, and so I did that.

Tom came to the very first meetup, and was by far the most startup-minded and pro-active of all the people who came along. After that we bounced our startups and side-project ideas off each other lots, spent weekends working on our startups together and we went to a Launch48 event together. We knew we were thinking on the same wavelength and could work together. Tom came on board after 10 months when we were still getting off the ground and had many struggles. He’s now integral to Buffer and we would not be where we are without him.

Andrew Yates, iOS Coder and Full Stack Hacker

Whilst I spent some time in Birmingham in the UK, I also created a version of the startup meetup there too. Through that and other networking activities, I met many awesome people and even found freelance work. Andy was someone I met through a friend of a friend in this network, and also someone I started to bump into very regularly at Urban Coffee where I did a lot of coding.

When I launched Buffer, Andy was one of the first to sign up and was also a very early paying customer. In that sense, getting Andy on board was very much what Gabriel Weinberg calls Inbound Hiring. After we had been launched for almost a year, we decided that it made sense to develop an iPhone app, and I knew Andy had been building an awesome app called Magic Bean. We worked on a freelance basis for about 6 months before I asked him to come on board fully. Luckily, he has agreed and will start soon.

How have you approached hiring for your startup?

Photo credit: Thomas Watson Steen

What online gaming taught me about startups

2012-05-19T13:13:00Z

What online gaming taught me about startups

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 earliest recollections of something that impacted his journey with startups was that he played Doom II a lot:

"That was how I got into it actually. I’ll credit Doom II for everything."

Kevin Systrom

I got really into online games when I was around 11, and there were a few things from the experience which seem oddly similar to lessons I’ve learned doing startups in the last few years:

Pick a small market and you can dominate it

When I got into online gaming it was a fairly small game which got me hooked. I played more popular games like Age of Empires and CouterStrike, but it was a simple racing game called Midtown Madness 2 with a small audience that captured my attention. I can remember there were only ever around 300 people online, and after a while I knew almost all of them. When I got involved in the community and formed my own team, since there were not many people we were able to dominate.

Over a decade later whilst journeying into the world of startups, I initially tried to make a product work immediately in a large market with OnePage, “your business card in the cloud”. It was when I switched my efforts to build Buffer, a product with a seemingly smaller audience that I had much more success.

Start niche and nail it, then expand

In Midtown Madness 2, there were many different game modes: “circuits”, “checkpoint”, “blitz” and “cops n robbers”. When I started my own team, I started with just a few friends and we only competed in “cops n robbers” games. Even within this, there were people who would compete with just a specific vehicle. That’s how we began, and we became very good at that single type of game. Eventually, we expanded to all “cops n robbers” vehicles and eventually all game types. It was much easier to expand to others and attract more players by starting strong in one area.

I made many mistakes whilst spending a year and a half on my previous startup, and during that period I read a lot about the lean startup concept. Today, Buffer has a whole host of features and integrations. However, when I first launched, it was only available as a queue to delay Tweets for a single Twitter account. This proved to be a good approach, and it was easier to choose the best next steps once I had usage. This is similar to the bowling pin strategy and I believe it’s key to triggering initial traction.

Trust that you will learn everything you need to know

When I started playing Midtown Madness 2, I had no idea that teams even existed and how people came together at certain times to play regularly. I didn’t know all the language people were using, and I was constantly called a ‘noob’. When I had my own team and realised it’d be useful to have a website, I had no idea how to build one. Eventually though this is how I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP which are the very skills I’ve used to build a high growth and profitable startup.

With Buffer, neither me nor my co-founder Tom had done much sysadmin work before we started. However, when we began gaining traction we had to learn how to scale up the technology. I barely knew what a database index was at the start, but now we have 10 servers with database replication and load-balancing. If there’s any one thing that’s helped me, it’s a belief that whilst I don’t know what I need to know right now, I know I will be able to learn it or talk to the right people for help.

It requires a huge amount of time to succeed

I was a real geek. I got completely obsessed with Midtown Madness 2, and whilst other kids were playing out in the street I was playing the game online with friends I had never met. I would play for hours on end, and I also spent hours coding the website for the team I had created. I spent probably two full years in this state of obsession, and eventually we competed for cash prizes and had some success.

In my article on Kevin Systrom’s “overnight success”, I attempted to validate through research my assumption that in fact it takes a huge amount of time to succeed in a big way with startups. Looking back at my own journey with startups, it actually started all the way back with gaming, since that’s how I learned to code. I’ve also spent almost two years on my previous unsuccessful startup before Buffer. Even with Buffer, we’ve now been running for one and a half years and we still feel like we’re just getting started.

Are there any experiences in childhood that have some correlation to things you have found to work today?

Photo credit: Futurilla

Work harder on yourself than you do on your startup

2012-05-12T08:34:00Z

Work harder on yourself than you do on your startup

"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 Rohn. It stuck in my mind, and as the years have gone on, I feel I’ve increasingly started to learn the true meaning of it.

I feel that in a startup, the quote is even more relevant. Here are some of the reasons I’ve discovered that tell me that you may want to seriously consider working harder on yourself than you do on your startup:

It usually takes a few tries

I certainly hope you do things better and faster than I have, and I know people far smarter than me building kickass products, but looking back and joining the dots of my own journey it is interesting to recall the number of different projects and startups I’ve started before hitting something that has worked.

Unfortunately, the Internet is literally littered with my previous startup attempts, and it has taken me many tries and many years before I started Buffer and have started to have some success.

For that reason, I think it’s not a smart approach to put all your eggs in the “current startup” basket. Instead, it’s good to work on yourself.

Be open, vocal, and build your network

Looking back, one of the things that has helped me the most when starting Buffer was the fact that during the year and a half I was working on my previous startup, I was consistently sharing my progress via Twitter, Facebook and blogging.

Many ask how I drove the initial traction to the product-less MVP of Buffer. The truth is, I was rather lucky. As a result of being open and quite vocal about startups and my learnings, I had reached a total of 1700 followers on Twitter, and a few on other platforms too. Since the initial target user of Buffer was a Twitter user, this was a great channel for me.

Whether your case is as good a fit as it was for me with Buffer or not, you can still benefit by having a personal Twitter profile and sharing your progress frequently. In addition to the “launchpad” effect at the start of Buffer, I now believe that with just over 6,500 followers I have an amount of credibility which can help to put me in the lucky position to speak at events and connect with people I couldn’t otherwise.

Do activities to improve all aspects of yourself

Of course, sharing your progress on social networks is just a one of the things you can do to improve yourself.

I think that working on these other aspects of yourself can also help you to have a much better chance of succeeding with a current or future startup:

Marketing and blogging

If you’re a coder, you should definitely try attempting to get press for your startup and blogging, or at least pay keen attention to the marketer on your team. It’s an invaluable skill to be able to communicate clearly and hustle your startup to be featured by press. This personal blog is something that has brought me far more benefits than I originally realised it would.

Coding and technical skills

Whether you’re a long-time coder and you hack away on open source projects in addition to the startup, or you’re the marketer and you start to dabble in code, improving understanding and skills on the technical side of a startup are a massive win if you start something by yourself. Whilst researching my previous post on Kevin Systrom of Instagram, I was surprised to see how his activities leading to starting Instagram shaped him to be both a phenomenal marketer as well as very able engineer. This is even more relevant in these current times, since Andrew Chen has clearly highlighted the immense power of a "Growth Hacker" who is both a marketer and an engineer.

Exercise and paying attention to your body

I have quite a rigid schedule and a number of rituals to help me both get great consistent sleep, and also to exercise daily. Working on myself in this way means I am super happy a lot of the time, and this very directly converts into productivity when I’m hacking away on Buffer or positivity and enthusiasm when I’m in an important meeting. In addition to these benefits, having a few different things I can “win at” each day means I always have a great day.

Speaking and mentoring

I’ve recently increased the amount of speaking I’m doing, and each time it becomes much easier. I’m not the kind of person who naturally loves to speak, so it’s been an amazing experience to become more comfortable with doing it.

As well as speaking, I’ve been offering help to local startups here in Hong Kong to talk about validating their idea, gaining traction, fundraising timing and strategy, scaling and other interesting topics. It’s been amazing to widen my viewpoint of the different challenges people face, and also to be in touch with many super smart people. This is outside of the normal startup work, but I have no doubt it benefits Buffer in many ways.

If you want to ask me a question via email or jump on a Skype call, Help with your startup.

Are you working harder on yourself than your startup?

When you’re doing a startup, it’s hard to separate life and work. Therefore, why not work away on yourself just like you do on your startup? Plan the necessary disengagement from the startup just as carefully as you’d plan the time you work on it. If you can systematically improve and expand your skills, then whether this one works out or not, you’ll always be in an increasingly better position as the weeks and months pass.

In what ways are you working hard on yourself?

Photo credit: Pandiyan V

Achieving overnight success: Kevin Systrom

2012-05-05T07:34:00Z

Achieving overnight success- Kevin Systrom

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 some time I’ve had a slight intuition that perhaps by looking at the founders behind these “overnight successes”, it will become clear that the achievement is no coincidence. Therefore, I’ve started this achieving overnight success series to look deeper into how these founders started.

Kevin Systrom is the Co-founder and CEO of Instagram, a photo sharing app for iPhone and Android that lets you apply a filter to a photo and share it on the service or on other social networks. Instagram is one of the biggest recent successes: it was acquired by Facebook for $1B less than 2 years after launch, and it has just hit 50M users, one of the fastest growing services of all time. How did Kevin begin his journey towards startup and this success? Let’s take a look.

The early days

Kevin grew up in a small town in Massachusetts
First computer in the house at age 12
When he played Doom II he started to edit levels for the game: “That was how I got into it actually. I’ll credit Doom II for everything.”
Kevin first dabbled with programming in the QBasic language
When he got AOL, Kevin made programs in Visual Basic to boot people offline
At high school, instead of biology, Kevin took Computer Science classes

The Stanford days

The entire time Kevin was at Stanford, he coded on the side
Kevin created a competitor to craigslist, targeted at Stanford campus
The service was used by 8000 people at Stanford. This was one of the first tastes of a startup for Kevin.
"Stanford is one of the best places to meet engineers who are extremely smart but are also very well rounded"
Kevin signed up for a Computer Science class at Stanford
Kevin remembered finding the class very difficult, and didn’t get a great grade. However, he remembers many of his classmates and in fact one of them works at Instagram.
Kevin was selected to be part of the Mayfield Fellows: a work/study program to learn about growing technology companies
Enrollment is limited to a dozen outstanding Stanford undergraduate or coterminal students
During his time at Stanford, and through his activities and Odeo internship, he met Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, Adam D’Angelo and others.

The Odeo internship

Kevin successfully secured an internship at podcasting startup Odeo
As many will know, Odeo later became Twitter. Kevin was at Odeo before it became Twitter, but Jack Dorsey was an early investor in Instagram many years later. To secure the internship, Kevin found Ev Williams’ email by doing a whois lookup on the Odeo domain name. He didn’t hear back the first time he emailed, but after two more emails Ev agreed to meet Kevin.
"The best work is that grunt work because what I do day to day at Instagram is that stuff"
It takes a lot of hard work, and an internship is a great way to learn that
In 2005, during the Odeo internship, Kevin met Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg and had the opportunity to work for Facebook.

Work at Google

After Stanford, Kevin took a job at Google as Associate Product Marketing Manager.
Kevin had marketing experience from doing internships at a number of marketing agencies.
Kevin worked on Gmail and Google Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets while at Google.
At Google, Kevin learned “how to talk about products”.
Kevin transitioned into the Corporate Development team handling acquisitions of startups, which sparked him to want to be part of a startup himself.

Nextstop

While working in the Corporate Development team at Google: "I saw so many entrepreneurs having tons of fun starting companies, that I jumped to a company started by some Googlers"
Kevin joined Nextstop, a startup started by colleagues at Google.
Started in marketing, but switched to engineering.
"Only at my next job at Nextstop would I say I went from being a hobbyist to being able to write code that would go into production."
After Kevin left Nextstop, it was eventually acquired by Facebook.

Burbn

After 1 year at Nextstop, Kevin decided to begin his own startup called Burbn.
Kevin worked on Burbn by himself.
Burbn was a mobile check-in app built purely in HTML5.
When you checked in on Burbn, you could post a video or a picture.
Kevin met Steve Anderson from Baseline ventures, and during the meeting Kevin got texts notifying him that people were joining Burbn. Steve knew some of the people signing up, and was intrigued enough to decide there must be something here. In this meeting Kevin secured his first $50,000 of investment for Burbn.
A colleague at Google introduced Kevin to Marc Andreessen who wrote him a check for $250,000 of the $500,000.
Kevin got enough other people interested in Burbn to secure a total of $500,000 seed funding.
Mike Krieger was a very early user of Burbn, and he was also a Mayfield Fellow. He became Kevin’s co-founder and a key part of Instagram.

Instagram

Kevin sat down with Mike and they decided that they were not differentiated enough in the check-in space, and realised that photos were something that people were enjoying in Burbn, so they decided to focus completely on photos. Instagram was born.
Instagram was built around 3 real problems: people couldn’t take beautiful photos with their phone, it was hard to post to multiple networks, and uploading in other apps was very slow.
When Instagram took off and they had scaling problems, Adam D’Angelo became their lifeline and walked them through steps to get back up. Adam D’Angelo was also an early investor in Instagram.

A sequence of steps

I may be wrong, as I often am, but looking at all the different things Kevin has done prior to and including Instagram, it seems clear to me that with each thing he built on top of the previous.

Without playing around with Doom II and finding enjoyment in editing levels, he very likely wouldn’t have found a passion in working on side projects. Without that passion, he may not have built the craigslist competitor at Stanford, and it’s likely that played a large part in him securing the internship at Odeo.

With the Odeo internship and his many side projects, he was probably in a strong position to be scouted by Facebook and this enabled him to meet Mark Zuckerberg and have access to Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO) when he had scaling problems with Instagram.

It seems all these previous things contributed to him getting a job at Google, and during his time there he transitioned to the team who handled acquisitions of startups. This gave him a taste and helped him take the plunge to join Nextstop. During his time at Nextstop, he went from being a marketer to a full-time engineer who pushed code to production.

Through all of his previous experiences, Kevin was clearly both a fantastic marketer and very able engineer by the time he started Burbn and Instagram. He also knew a great many people who could help him with all aspects of a startup.

Our turn

Are you doing little things each day, which over time are building on top of each other? I’m very far from achieving anything of the level Kevin Systrom has, but looking back on my journey so far I can clearly see that my side projects before and during university, and my previous failed startup had a massive impact on the success of Buffer so far.

Sources (and very recommended reading/viewing)

Photo credit: JD Lasica

Raising funding as a first-time founder

2012-02-26T15:11:00Z

Raising funding as a first-time founder

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 really feel the passion and determination they have, and I know that if they will just continue there is every chance that eventually they will be very successful.

One interesting topic which came up on a couple of different occasions was timing of raising funding as a first time founder. I’ve had entrepreneurs often talk to me with just an idea or a very early prototype with no traction and tell me that they want to raise funding. We closed our $450K seed round for Buffer at the end of last year, and joining the dots looking back I can see that a number of things came together which enabled us to raise the round.

Times during a startup at which you can raise funding

What I’ve learned from talking with some very experienced and highly respected successful serial entrepreneurs is that there are only really two good times to raise funding. The first is when you have just an idea, and you’ve not even started to build. The second is when you have a product with good traction you can show to investors. The thing is, if you choose to raise funding when you have an idea and nothing else, you lose the “traction” card. It’s been said many times before that "traction trumps everything", so if you’re trying to raise funding and you’re not using traction as leverage, then we must think about what else you have. In almost every case I’ve come across where I’ve seen founders raise funding just based on a concept, they’ve got a very good track record with probably an exit or two under their belt. This is what you’ll need if you decide not to make use of traction when you’re pitching.

Unfortunately for us first time founders, we don’t have the track record which we very much need in order to close funding without traction. Even if we were able to do so simply based on our idea, experience and passion, you clearly have to sacrifice your valuation and the quality of investors in order to close the funding:

The best path to funding for first time founders

So my advice for first time founders who want to raise funding is almost always to put that thought aside until you have good traction. Instead, focus completely on traction. Focus on product/market fit. When you have good traction, it becomes much easier to raise funding.

The other aspect here is how much time and effort it actually takes to raise funding. If you’re a typical two man startup and you’re both first time founders, you’ll probably want to both be involved in the fundraising process. The problem is, it literally takes months to raise funding, and it’s a full-time task easily capable of creating enough work for two people. So your product will suffer, and you will be sacrificing the most important thing to enable you to raise funding - traction. You can’t build traction if you’re trying to raise funding, and you probably won’t raise funding without traction.

A note on incubators

Incubators and accelerator programmes certainly have a lower barrier to entry than raising a seed round. Many even encourage you to apply with just an idea. These can be great springboards, and they often have a demo day at the end which will give you the best possible scenario to raise your seed round.

However, even approach incubators with caution, because the same issues can also apply. Most incubators have a 10 week programme, with the final 3-4 weeks dedicated completely to the fundraising process, putting together your deck and pitch, and iterating many times until you are ready to go out there and raise. This leaves you with 6 weeks to build a product and try and gain traction. I would say that 6 weeks is a short period of time to try to build a product and gain traction to the point where your startup is investable.

Incubators are fantastic for the ecosystem and certainly accelerate the path for a founder in many ways. That said, whilst the structure of the programme and a “demo day” at the end are great, it does not guarantee raising a seed round.

How we did it with Buffer

Looking back on the path we took with Buffer, I think it is useful to share as in many ways we stumbled through and certainly made mistakes which cost us time, but in the end we found a path to raising our $450K seed round and the above thoughts are a result of what I’ve learned on that journey.

We were in the Summer 2011 class of AngelPad, an awesome incubator in San Francisco run by super smart people. A lot of our class were at very early stages with their startups, but we were fortunate enough to have good traction. The reason is that we worked on Buffer for around 10 months before we started the programme. We started AngelPad with 30,000 users and were generating around $4,000 per month at the time. We also had consistent 40% month on month growth.

We were able to spend the first 6 weeks of AngelPad taking that traction even further, doubling our userbase and tripling our monthly revenue. By the time demo day came, we had 60,000 users and an annual revenue run rate of $150,000, as well as the initial $120,000 from AngelPad. Looking back, it is quite clear that this was the largest factor in our investor pitches and essentially what enabled us to raise $450,000 and get some amazing investors and advisors involved.

Are you thinking about raising funding? What is your strategy?

Photo credit: Tracy O

It takes hard work. Do the hard work.

2012-01-28T04:49:30Z

It takes hard work. Do the hard work.

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 elusive thing, the idea of optimal focus and maximum effort. However, I think there is something to be gained from stopping for a moment and considering how focused we are when we do our daily activities.

I think two things apply here: single-mindedness and massive effort. To truly excel at something, we need to be very focused. We can have different things we are striving to succeed with, but when we are working on one thing, we should be completely focused on it.

This idea of “single-tasking” is something which Tim Ferriss and Leo Babauta amongst many others believe is a key habit of top performers.

The other key aspect seems to be to put in the hard work when you are single-tasking. To describe this, I want to share three videos by top performers which I’ve been hooked on recently:

Will Smith: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill

I love Will Smith’s take on this topic, because he brings things very much down to earth. He has said many times that he doesn’t see himself as particularly talented, rather that it has been his “ridiculous, sickening work ethic” which has got him to where he is. I think this is something which everyone can take and use to their advantage:

"The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, but if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: you’re getting off first, or I’m gonna die. It’s really that simple."

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Go through the pain barrier

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first success was in the world of body building, but he has gone on to reach the highest levels in Hollywood and politics too. There’s clearly a lot we can learn from him, and this clip from “Pumping Iron”, a film about his success in body building is one of my favorite clips to watch to get me motivated:

"The body, it is not used to the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th rep with a certain weight, so that makes the body grow, going through this pain barrier. And that’s what divides one from a champion and one from not being a champion. If you can go through this pain barrier, you make it to be a champion, if you can’t go through, forget it."

Eric Thomas: You don’t want it bad

Eric Thomas is not as well known as Will Smith or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but what I admire about him is how he can go into a school and get students fired up whilst talking on a level they can relate to. This video of one of his speeches is sure to get you motivated to try harder with everything you do:

"I’m here to tell you that most of you say you want to be successful, but you don’t want it bad, you just kind of want it. You don’t want it badder than you wanna party, you don’t want it as much as you want to be cool."

What this means for me

This doesn’t mean we have to jump in all at once and head towards inevitable burn-out and failure. We can start small in terms of time commitment, and that’s likely the best way to create habits, but let’s commit to going that extra step when we are doing a specific activity. It takes no more time to put extra effort in during the time we’re spending on a task. It might not be comfortable, but it’s surely the way to grow.

I also strongly believe that in order to easily put in this extra effort, it is important for us to feel purpose for the activities we are doing, and to love what we do.

Photo credit: Jon Tunnell

Avoid the 50/50 co-founder model - here's why

2012-01-10T04:15:00Z

Avoid the 50-50 co-founder model - here's why

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 is certainly a topic which has had heated discussion many times previously. So why would I choose to add even more noise to this debate? Well, in the past few years I’ve had experiences of failed co-founder partnerships and with my latest startup Buffer I found a better solution for my own personality. This may resonate with others, so I want to share it.

The 50/50 co-founder model

When I talk about the 50/50 co-founder model, what I really mean is the equal stake model. Whether you have two, three, four co-founders or even more, I believe you should very rarely have equal ownership of a company across founders.

I have a few key reasons I believe that an equal split of equity can be a recipe for failure.

Fundamentals of problem discovery

I think more often than not, if you begin a startup with someone you believe will be a great business partner, you will sit down and “talk ideas”. You might have a long brainstorming session about what startup you could build together and how you can take over the world and become the next Larry and Sergey, or the next Chad and Steve.

I think it could easily happen that you might have this whole conversation for an hour or more without ever talking about a “problem”. The thing is, a “problem” is what matters for a startup. If you’re not solving a problem, you’re going to struggle to reach product/market fit and gain meaningful traction. Successful startups almost always come from problems, and problems are normally discovered when a single person personally suffers the problem for enough time to decide to search for a solution and then choose to solve it themselves.

If you delay finding a co-founder, I believe you have a much higher chance of building a solution to a problem worth solving. Pay attention to what you do each and every day, a little more than you do right now. Eventually you’ll come across problems which need to be solved. Find one and start solving it yourself. Then find a co-founder when you desperately need them to help you build upon the traction you have.

Validation of meaningful contribution

One of the hardest parts about finding a great co-founder is whether they will be worth the large equity stake you need to give them. Even with vesting (which I highly recommend), you are making a big commitment which will still be a hassle if it doesn’t work out.

The key thing about founders is that you need someone you can truly rely on to get their part of the work done. If you’re technical, you need a guy who can do serious hustling to get your product in front of masses of people. If you’re the hustler, you need someone you can count on to build a great product.

If you delay finding a co-founder until you’ve validated your startup with a first version and some meaningful traction, then they can see that you have validated the contribution you will make. Then, bring someone on board slowly and ask them to join you fully as a co-founder with a decent stake once they’ve proven their contribution.

A better approach

I believe that perhaps the best approach to finding a great co-founder for your next venture is to initially act as if you will never have a co-founder. I had no idea at the time, but looking back and connecting the dots I realise that this is what I did with Buffer, and it worked very well.

By taking the mindset that you will have to build the startup completely by yourself, it forces you to learn the parts which don’t come naturally. If you’re a coder, it means forgetting about beautiful code for a moment and thinking about what really matters. It means questioning whether you’re building something people want. If you’re not a coder, it means finding ways to build a very basic prototype to test and market to get enough traction.

The outcome? I think Andy Young puts it best:

"you’ve no idea how much more motivating it is to someone technical to look at the shitty prototype you had built for $500 on Rent-a-coder, or painfully clubbed together yourself, and say, Obviously I can help you build that much better, than it is for them to listen to a shitty pitch."

Similarly, as a coder I put together a good first version of Buffer and got traction with minimal marketing skill and that’s when Leo came on board. For him, I think he could see massive potential to attract users to the product.

Mark Suster’s take on this topic is also worth a watch:

There will be exceptions

Of course there will be exceptions, and I’m sure there are countless startups out there formed on successful 50/50 partnerships. However, almost all startups I know which have failed (including one of my own) were formed on 50/50 partnerships.

I believe that experienced founders with a number of successful exits may be able to partner with another experienced founder and make it work. They will have experienced and observed enough failures to avoid building a solution to a nonexistant problem, and they have already proven they can make massive contributions and build something from nothing.

For the majority of us, however, we are first time founders and we have much more learning to do. This was the case for me, and when I validated the idea myself and took on a co-founder gradually to allow him to prove his value. He went far beyond my expectations in proving his value, and that’s when things really changed. I couldn’t have taken Buffer to that next stage without him, and he has a stake which reflects that.

Photo credit: Helena Eriksson

10 lessons from my startup journey so far

2011-12-19T18:34:00Z

10 lessons from my startup journey so far

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 blogged 26 times. I’ve been lucky enough to have fantastic comments on many of my posts, and this has always extended my learning even further by hearing others’ experiences and insights.

I thought it would be a useful reminder for myself to pick out the top 10 lessons I’ve learned. I hope it might be useful and interesting for some of you, too.

Let’s get started:

1. Getting regular exercise can improve your sleep

Over the last year, I’ve consistently had times when I’ve felt mentally drained but not physically tired. The single most important change I’ve made in the last year is to become disciplined about going to the gym, and to realise the value of exercise. I now go to the gym most mornings. It gives me a great start to the day and helps me sleep much better overall.
Read the full article

2. Bootstrapping on the side is a great way to start

![](http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1277/4692932272_ac25a4a216_t.jpg) We’ve now built up Buffer to almost 80,000 users. We’ve been through the AngelPad incubator in San Francisco, raised a little funding, expanded the team to 3 and have great monthly revenue. Interestingly, however, it all started with me working on the side whilst working full-time. There are many benefits of working on something on the side.
Read the full article

3. Achieve scale by doing things that don’t scale

![](http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4143/4806018093_efce15bac2_t.jpg) One of the biggest influences on my attitude to building startups is Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Methodology. It’s all about reducing waste, and many of the concepts are easy to grasp but very hard to implement. One such concept is to do things initially in a way which is unscalable. One example: to begin with, personally email people instead of setting up an automated system. This is a key technique which, looking back has served me well, and looking forward will be important to keep reminding myself of.
Read the full article

4. Embrace feeling uncomfortable

![](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/57/217849066_f011b26437_t.jpg) This post clearly resonated with a lot of people, as hundreds went on to share it with their friends and followers. It’s all about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and gathers my learnings from people I admire such as Seth Godin, Ben Yoskovitz and Tim Ferriss. The key takeaways are that there is no growth to be made in staying comfortable, but there are ways to grow without being uncomfortable all the time. My key question to you: “What are you doing to feel uncomfortable?”
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5. Learn to fear not shipping

![](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3203/2738812700_d00c6e7731_t.jpg) Seth Godin attributes much of his success not to producing better than others, but to shipping more than others. I’ve learned that the main reason we don’t ship as much as they could or should, is that we fear shipping for so many reasons. In this post I attempt to turn the fear on its head and highlight why we should really fear not shipping instead of shipping.
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6. Enjoying every moment is a choice we all have

![](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3132/2385084598_86ea99e36a_t.jpg) Perhaps the most profound lesson in the last year for me, and one that I consistently struggle with, is that enjoying every moment is a choice we all have. This is all related to living in the present and valuing day-to-day happiness over ambition. There is enjoyment to be found in doing customer support, and there is enjoyment to be found in washing the dishes. When you’re in this place, you have so much energy for everything and can achieve anything you want.
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7. First time founder? Beware of the social ideas

![](http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4143/4868206996_57b9d396cb_t.jpg) This particular lesson is one of the ones which took me almost two full years to learn. My premise with this is that if you’re a first time founder, you’ll struggle to raise funding for your startup, especially if you are at the idea stage with no traction. With that situation, you’ll struggle to build a startup which requires a long pre-revenue runway period. The conclusion is that you are far better off working on building a “tool” with immediate value you can charge for and no difficult network effects.
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8. Think carefully about your “coming soon” page

![](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2748/4200003029_c7ee64414b_t.jpg) All startups begin somewhere, and more often than not it is with a “coming soon” page. I think it’s a very intuitive action to take when you’re building your startup, but with this article I question the idea of the “coming soon” page. My thoughts revolve around the lessons I’ve learned from Eric Ries’ lean startup concept and how I launched Buffer. I believe that in many cases, the “coming soon” page is a lost opportunity to validate your idea and avoid wasted time building something people may not want.
Read the full article

9. Consider the different ways to bootstrap your startup

![](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3560/3580748194_1152cbecd6_t.jpg) With some luck along the way and many mistakes made, I’ve managed to take Buffer from an idea to a cashflow-positive business with over 80,000 users, great investors and inspiring co-workers. To reach this point, I bootstrapped Buffer for 9 months until hit ramen profitability. I’ve learned a lot about bootstrapping, and in this post I share my experiences.
Read the full article

10. 4 key steps to kickstart your startup

![](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/235/527502812_bfcc6ca551_t.jpg) I’ve found that often the hardest part of creating a startup is actually starting. In this post, I try to distill what I’ve learned from many not so successful ventures and one somewhat successful one into 4 simple steps which to get onto the right path. It’s not that easy, of course, but I truly believe these steps are the key ones. The challenge is in having discipline and executing the steps. I include links in the article to help with that aspect.
Read the full article

It has been an amazing journey so far, and I’m really thankful to all of you who have supported me over the last year. I’ve been lucky to be in touch with so many of you and I’ve had some incredibly useful comments here on the blog. I’m planning many more posts in 2012 about more of the lessons I’m learning and experiences I’m having, and I look forward to your company.

Photo credit: scott_48074

Achieving scale by doing things that don't scale

2011-11-14T15:16:00Z

Achieving scale by doing things that don't scale

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 of those more experienced than me.

Startups and large companies

One of the repeated insights I came across which never quite fully sunk in when I read it on Steve Blank’s blog is the idea that a startup is not just a smaller version of a large company, and that you should operate very differently as a startup. One of the key takeaways tied to this idea is the notion of doing things that don’t scale.

Doing things that don’t scale

Airbnb is the most famous high scale company to do this and succeed. Interestingly, however, they didn’t start with this idea:

"We thought that everything that we did here had to someday support hundreds of thousands to millions of users"

This belief is completely understandable, and it was my approach for a long time too.

The turning point for Airbnb was when they got into YCombinator and Paul Graham suggested they do things that don’t scale.

Does this really work for massive scale?

To really dig into this idea, I decided the best thing to do is to take the largest scale Internet business I can think of and investigate their beginnings. What I discovered in an early interview Mark Zuckerberg had about Facebook is truly fascinating. His response to “what comes next” was the following:

"There doesn’t necessarily have to be more. Part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There was a level of service that we could provide when we were just at Harvard that we can’t provide for all the colleges, and there’s a level of service that we can provide when we’re a college network which we couldn’t provide if we went to other types of things."

This means that in the early days the growth of Facebook was largely affected by Zuckerberg deliberately choosing to do things which wouldn’t scale. By taking this approach, he built huge value for his target users.

What does it mean to do things that don’t scale?

This technique is one I read about so many times throughout my journey with OnePage. When I made the decision to take everything I had learned and build Buffer, this was one of the things I disciplined to experiment with.

In the early days and even to this day, I have made an effort to do things that don’t scale. I’ve found that there are two key characteristics of “things that don’t scale”:

They help you avoid development before validating it’s required

This is certainly a key factor, especially in the early stage of a startup. Any time you can save on an activity which you haven’t yet validated as beneficial is worth doing manually until you can no longer do it manually.

Doing it “manually” gets you more benefits than if automated

I think the more important characteristic may be that when you do the task manually to begin with, you actually get more benefits than if it was automated. For example, emailing someone personally and taking care to read a little about their interests and find something to relate to, will give you a much higher response rate and trigger fascinating and useful conversations.

How can we use this approach for our startups?

With my latest startup Buffer I took this concept and used it to my benefit more than I ever did with OnePage. To briefly share real examples, here are two from the course of the journey so far:

Personally email the first 1000 signups

This is something Rob Fitzpatrick’s great article reminded me of. In the early days, I was in touch on my personal email address with almost everyone who signed up for Buffer. With low volume, I could always respond immediately and people loved it.

Charge without fully implementing a payment system

Some of the very early Buffer customers will know that I not only launched the product with paid plans from day 1, but that I also didn’t fully implement the payment system. When someone upgraded to a paid plan, I would email them personally as soon as I received the email from Paypal.

I didn’t do this to avoid the work, I did it because I had no idea whether it would be 4 days or 4 months before the first payment for Buffer. It would be a waste of programming effort to implement a slick payment system without validation with a few paying customers. Luckily, it was only 4 days until the first payment and after about 1.5 months and 6 new customers I implemented the full system.

With Buffer, doing things that don’t scale has brought us a lot of success, and the times when we make the big progress always comes back to doing new things which will provide enormous value but which we will have to adjust as we scale further.

Photo credit: OZinOH

Taking time to reflect

2011-10-15T18:34:00Z

Taking time to reflect

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 regularly blogging, it’s in fact quite the opposite. Since the last post we’ve hit some incredible milestones with Buffer including going through the AngelPad incubator here in San Francisco (and raising a little funding), bringing my great friend Tom Moor on board and hitting 50,000 users.

The key reason I believe I’ve not been blogging is that whilst progressing along at a fast pace with Buffer, I’ve stopped taking the time to reflect.

The benefit of reflection

I started this blog around the same time I started building my latest startup Buffer and in many ways I think they have both hand-in-hand helped me to grow very quickly over the last year.

When we first arrived in San Francisco, I remember meeting new people and often they’d recognise me from my blog. I’ve even been interviewed on CBC radio as a result of a blog post I wrote.

I attribute a lot of this success to taking time to reflect on my current thoughts and whether I’m happy with how things are going. It was only when I was reflecting on things that I’d have thoughts to blog about and that I gained these benefits.

Looking back, I’ve also always felt very relaxed when I’ve made the time for reflection. I think Tim Ferriss puts this very well:

"It is important that you pay as much attention to appreciation as you do to achievement. Achievement without reflection on what you have and the gratitude for that is worthless."

When do you reflect on things?

When I had a consistent sleep ritual involving going for a 20 minute walk before bed every evening to disconnect from the day, these walks were where I did a lot of my reflection. I believe these 20 minute periods of reflection allowed me to clear my mind and ingrain thoughts which would turn into action.

I think that reflection is of varying importance for people, depending on your personality. I’ve personally found it to be very useful, and I’ve found that I like to reflect more than others might.

When I was in Birmingham in the UK, I lived in a single bedroom apartment and I had plenty of time to myself for reflection. I then went to a drastic opposite situation when I moved to San Francisco. I spent a period of time sharing a room and sleeping on an air-bed. Part of the key to having time to reflect is to acknowledge changes to environment like this and making time to reflect.

Making time to reflect

I’ve therefore decided that I can’t continue on without taking a few moments every day or two to get away and reflect on things. I think this will trigger more inspiration for blog posts, and I hope to get back into the same regularity I once had. Besides, I now live in Russian Hill and there are some amazing views for when I go and take a walk.

Photo credit: Fabiana Zonca

Like anything else, we need to practice startups

2011-08-28T15:59:00Z

Like anything else, we need to practice startups

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 in that way, it is completely understandable to think that they were born lucky and that we have some kind of disadvantage.

The story of Tom Preston-Werner

I was recently watching a Mixergy interview where Andrew Warner interviewed Tom Preston-Werner who founded GitHub. Tom is an amazingly talented and eloquent guy who has grown one of the most successful startups that exists today. Even more amazing, is that GitHub is completely bootstrapped. I’ve recently moved from the UK to San Francisco where GitHub is based, and I can say that especially over here a successful company being completely bootstrapped is very unusual.

Genius, or practice?

When you come across people like Tom who have built amazing, profitable companies like GitHub without taking a penny of outside funding, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that he was born destined to achieve this success, born with some kind of advantage over the rest of us.

However, before we assume that to be the case, let’s look a little into what he’s done previously.

What Tom did before GitHub

Tom has been an avid open source developer, and chose to start writing open source software through a desire to participating in the community and gain some recognition. He was one of the first to write a Flash Replacement for text elemtns, though Sean Inman was the one who improved on it and ultimately took the glory with his sIFR. Later, Tom saw a need in the blogging community for a profile picture which would follow you around blogs and the web, especially in the commenting ecosystem, so he created Gravatar.

How Tom’s practice helped him with GitHub

Tom says his motivation to do these projects was to be a part of the community and nothing more. The key thing, however, is that he kept working away on projects.

Tom tried to monetize Gravatar through premium accounts, but he says that nobody really paid for premium accounts. He even took donations to keep Gravatar alive. Reflecting on this experience, Tom says:

"If you have an idea that becomes popular, and you don’t have a way to make money from it, well now you’re in a pickle."

It is now clear why he was able to build GitHub so quickly, and do it with no funding: he had practiced with previous projects. Tom took the experience of Gravatar growing so big without a revenue model and put in place a revenue model from the get-go with GitHub:

"If you’re gonna do a side project, that you think might become popular, you better damn well be able to make money from it, because otherwise you end up with a Gravatar where you just don’t even want it anymore and now you have to do something to get rid of it or otherwise deal with it somehow."

We don’t know when we’re practicing

One thing which seems clear when listening to Tom talking to Andrew about his experiences, is that when he was writing the Flash Replacement script as an open source project, he had no idea he would go on to build Gravatar, and when he did Gravatar he had no idea he would eventually build GitHub. Looking back, however, it is clear how these projects helped him build GitHub.

We won’t always know when we are practicing, but the important thing is that we are. What if that seemingly insignificant bit of open source code you write today is the beginning for you?

"Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good." - Malcolm Gladwell

Photo credit: nichole

Founders: failure comes with the territory

2011-07-31T19:09:00Z

Founders- failure comes with the territory

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 startups Sprouter has announced that it is closing its doors. I’ve been closely following Sprouter for at least a year, and I’ve also been lucky enough to be featured in their weekly newsletter a couple of times. It is sad to see it close, especially since I have seen how much effort Sarah and Erin have put in amongst others. That said, I can see that this will be a launchpad for future success.

Secondly, Nick Barker who’s a great friend of mine and a fellow british startup founder reached out to me to ask if I will go back to Nottingham some time to speak about overcoming failure. We had a brief conversation about how "celebrating failures" is a slightly alien concept in the UK and how the difficult subject must be talked about.

Failure comes with the territory

In the recent TNW Sessions featuring Sarah Prevette of Sprouter, Sarah said that failure comes with the territory. Similarly, Dan Martell said:

"No one I know ever came out of the gate with a win. It usually always got preceded with a failure, or two."

When I graduated from University in 2009, I knew I wanted to create a startup. I had an idea, so I got building straight away and I specifically found work which would allow me to spend a significant amount of time building the startup.

I had a co-founder and over the course of 1.5 years I had 4 other people involved. These are all people who in one way or another I feel I have let down, but we all knew that potential failure came with the territory.

I am not sure whether it helps for people to know that failure is part of the journey, but with hindsight I can see that it is definitely the case.

Learning from failure

Dan Martell recently wrote a post on Maple Butter about the end of Sprouter and the following words really stood out for me:

"we sometimes need to learn those lessons the hard way to lay the foundation for the next venture"

As someone who has a previous startup which didn’t go as well as I had hoped, I can relate to this on many levels.

The startup did not meet expectations, but it was the best 1.5 years of learning I have ever had. I learned the importance of building something people really want, about relationships and about not holding back with shipping a product and charging for it.

Sarah Prevette opened up about things she has learned from running Sprouter. She said that Sprouter was a great example of being a “victim of free”. Some of the things Sarah has taken away from her experience are great learning points:

"I would advise anybody to monetize right from the get-go. Don’t be afraid to charge. It is a much more difficult thing to discover a business model than it is to sell your product."

Failure puts you in a better position to succeed

I can absolutely say that if I hadn’t spent 1.5 years working on a startup which did not succeed, there is no way I could have had some early success with Buffer as quickly as I did.

This is the mindset which Nick and I agreed was severely lacking in the UK. It seems that in the UK and perhaps other places failure is seen as a sign that you will never succeed. A “well done for trying, now quit the band and get a proper job” response doesn’t seem far from the norm. I honestly think the attitude is shifting, but now that I am in Silicon Valley I can see this particular aspect is one of the key differences. This is a reason location could matter for your startup.

Overall, I do not regret trying with my first startup, and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today with Buffer if I hadn’t gone through that learning. Reading about the experiences of other startup founders I think there is great reason to celebrate failures.

Photo credit: hobvias sudoneighm

Does location really matter for your startup?

2011-07-24T19:37:42Z

Does location really matter for your startup-

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 Buffer here for the next two and a half months.

I’ve been immersing myself in startup articles and trying to learn from others more experienced than myself for some time now, and out of anywhere the biggest portion of the articles I read are emerging from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

One of the things I’ve always wondered since I’ve been working on startups is how much of a difference location can make. In the UK, moving from Sheffield to Birmingham certainly helped due to more startup-minded people and easy proximity to London. We’re now in the startup capital of the world and whilst we haven’t visited the true Silicon Valley in terms of Palo Alto and Mountain View yet, I’ve started to form some thoughts about the benefits of being here and more generally the importance of location for startups.

It is much easier to meet like-minded and useful people

Since we arrived in San Francisco, my expectations of how easy it is to meet people and how helpful people are have been surpassed. In pretty much every coffee shop there are plenty of people coding away and who are obviously working on or interested in startups.

There are some fantastic spots such as The Summit in Mission which is a coffee shop crossed with a startup incubator. I’ve never seen so many Macs in a coffee shop in my life, and I’ve met lots of new interesting people there.

In addition, we’ve also had the chance to meet some fantastic startups in our space such as Twylah, and it has been fascinating to learn from Eric and Kelly who are doing a great job. It is much easier for these things to happen since many startups are based out here.

We’ve not even been along to one of the many events happening in SF yet and I’m sure that will emphasise this feeling even more.

People actually “get” what we’re doing

I think this point is actually pretty key for me. In the UK I found that most people didn’t “get” what I was doing or why I was doing it.

In San Francisco, you can skip right over a lot of the initial chit-chat because people “get” startups. The conversation can jump right on to what your startup is about.

For my startup this is even more apparent. In the UK I’d have to actually explain Twitter sometimes when describing what Buffer is about. Whilst even in San Francisco some people don’t use Twitter, pretty much everyone I’ve chatted to understands it and knows how powerful it is.

You don’t magically become productive in the “right” location

However, with all the positive things said, there is one thing which hit me pretty hard when I first arrived. Adjusting to a new environment and finding our way around certainly took up some of my time, but when we found a good spot and got down to work, I realised that location didn’t matter all that much.

We’ve been in bustling coffee shops packed with people working away, and we’ve been in quieter more relaxed places. Whatever the environment, it is still easy to procrastinate. Making meaningful progress is more about self-discipline and knowing what you want than anything else.

Location shouldn’t hold you back

In a recent blog post aimed at those who didn’t get into TechStars, Joe Heitzeberg, a successful serial Internet entrepreneur and TechStars mentor said his response to "what should I do now" is the following:

"programs like TechStars are great, but they shouldn’t be the single enabler. Keep on moving forward on your company."

I feel the same about location. Sure, you might not be in Silicon Valley and you might not be able to just pack your bags and hop on a flight over here for many reasons, but not being in the “right” location shouldn’t stop you making progress with your startup from your current location.

Get into the startup mentality wherever you are

Overall, I believe that for myself, the most important thing has been to get into the startup mentality whilst I was in Sheffield and Birmingham working away on my startups. With the advantage of hindsight, I had a fairly good balance of reading lots about startups in blogs and books in order to learn from the experiences of others, and actually building and marketing my own startups in order to have experiences first-hand.

I think diving in and starting is the most important thing, and to wait for any “perfect” environment, be it location, experience, funds or otherwise, is a mistake to be avoided.

Photo credit: Ron Reiring

I have no idea what I am doing

2011-07-03T14:17:00Z

I have no idea what I am doing

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 post.

In the last few months, and particularly the last few weeks, I’ve had some truly fantastic moments. Particularly, I’ve reached some defining milestones with my latest venture, Buffer, and this blog has been doing well too. New doors have opened for me, and it has been great.

Looking back to last October when I started Buffer, even though I had learned a lot from my past startup experiences, I truly didn’t know what I was doing and I approached everything with that mindset. I was out there to learn and I knew that the only way I was going to progress was to adopt a very open mind.

I’m writing this post because I’ve recently strayed away from this mindset, and I’ve realised that I lost out as a result.

When success can lead you down the wrong path

In the last few weeks, I’ve been lucky enough to receive some great press and praise for Buffer. In addition to this, I’ve had some of my blog posts featured in great newsletters and some blogs I truly admire, and I’ve also had the opportunity to speak a few times about how I’ve achieved some success with Buffer.

This form of others directly or indirectly appreciating what I was doing, and a few reaching out to ask me for advice, set me off on a path which I can now say in hindsight is not where I want to be. I love to help others, and I will always do my best to share my own experience, but as soon as I took appreciation as a signal that I knew what I was doing, I had taken a wrong step.

Believing that I knew what I was doing

The key turning point was when I started to believe that I knew what I was doing. I let the comments, the kind congratulations and the small successes affect my mind. I actually thought I knew what I was doing.

As soon as I believed that I knew what I was doing, without realising it the style of my writing and communication in general started to change slightly. I became naturally drawn to instructive comments and advice where I would have previously communicated simply based on my own experiences.

The biggest mistake: I became less open-minded

It was with this new instructive style which I realised I lost my open-mindedness. After a few people asking for my advice, I was starting to treat everything in a way in which I needed to have a definite answer.

That’s when I looked back to the early days of Buffer and this blog. At that time, the only way I was going to get somewhere was to be completely open-minded, take every opportunity to learn and make the most of every conversation. This was how I progressed, and it really worked. It felt amazing.

A new start: a beginner’s mind

So the truth is: I have no idea what I am doing. I am taking a leaf from Mary Jaksch of Goodlife Zen. I am going to Let go of being an expert:

"We are all experts. Experts in our job, in raising children, in crossing the road, in signing our name. Its difficult to let go of being an expert. Because it means confessing that we really know nothing. What we know belongs to the past. Whereas this moment now is new and offers its unique challenges. If I let go of being an expert, I can listen to others with an open mind. Then I can find that even a beginner has something to teach me.”

The counter point

This is a challenging subject, because I think it is just as easy to be stalled by “I don’t know” as it is to let “I know” cause you to become less open-minded. I now think there is a middle ground I want to strive for, which is having a curious and inquisitive mind whilst still acting when I don’t know what the outcome will be.

Photo credit: Eric Hayes

Why you should start marketing early

2011-06-26T14:24:09Z

Why you should start marketing early

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 get press early. We were always waiting until our product was ‘ready’. I think this is probably quite a common thought process.

With the aim to dispel some of the fears and highlight benefits of marketing early, I want to share some of my reflections on early stage marketing based on what I’m doing with my current startup, Buffer.

Why we hesitate to market at an early stage

As with anything, it is easy to think about reasons not to start marketing a startup.

We think the product isn’t ready for marketing

At an early stage, you know for sure that things such as your signup funnel and onboarding process can be improved a lot. On top of that natural fact, with the lean startup movement so widespread now we’re all encouraged to release our products even earlier. It is easy to think that marketing should come when our product is perfect, but I believe we put ourselves at a disadvantage by waiting.

We think we only get one chance

I think a very valid fear when starting to consider marketing a startup is that you only get one chance with people you reach. The idea that someone will make their final decision based on their first impression is very believable. We’ve found out this is far from the case.

We think we’ll ‘run out’ of people

I’ve found with Buffer that sometimes we reach a kind of plateaux with our rate of signups, and whilst the real solution is to try new ways to market our idea, or to try taking our existing methods to new levels, it is quite easy to feel like we’ve hit some kind of saturation point and won’t be able to reach more people. As you’ll find out below, we now know we’ll never reach a point where we can’t sign up more people.

Why we should market even when it feels too early

I’ve realised over time, that even whilst releasing our products earlier, we should still aim to market our startup very early. I believe that what feels like “too early” is in fact a great time to start marketing. Most people have probably delayed much longer than they should.

The best way to improve the product is to have usage

Matt Mullenweg, the Founder of Wordpress, put it better than I ever will:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something youve created until its out there. That means every moment youre working on something without it being in the public its actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

What we’ve found with Buffer is that by treating the marketing more as a way to trigger conversations than a “broadcast” channel, marketing has been by far the best way to hone our pitch and improve the product too. We had to experiment a lot with our pitch and we had many things to fix in the product, It was much easier to improve quickly due to the fact my co-founder Leo was writing several articles per week about Buffer for a variety of blogs.

People don’t always sign up the first time they hear about your product

Once we started to succeed in getting Buffer featured in quite a number of blogs, we found through the conversations in the comments many people had already come across Buffer. What was happening was that whilst some people would sign up the first time they heard about Buffer, others would wait until they had heard about Buffer a few times.

I now think that quite a large number of people don’t sign up to services the first time they hear about them. For that reason, we should aim to be getting our products mentioned widely and frequently. People have a kind of tipping point where they decide “now I’ll give it a go”. You have to work to get there.

You won’t ‘run out’ of people

I recently realised we will never reach a point where we can’t sign up more people to Buffer. Since we are currently primarily a tool for Twitter users, you just have to consider how fast Twitter is growing to realise we will never have the saturation problem.

To illustrate this further, take a look at the following chart which shows Evernote’s signups stats six months ago:

Six months ago Evernote were signing up around 2000 new users every hour. They’ve also recently announced that it has gone from six million registered users at the time of this chart to over ten million registered users today. I predict Evernote could be signing up around 100,000 new users per day. You only get that kind of growth by continually working at your marketing.

I now believe that when building a startup as much focus should be put on marketing and customer development as on product development.

Photo credit: John Wardell

Reflecting on ways to bootstrap a startup

2011-06-19T12:27:00Z

Reflecting on ways to bootstrap a startup

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 to struggle to find investment for your startup idea. For this reason, you will probably to need to bootstrap your idea. This has been my experience, and with what I know now I would have done things differently.

How it all started

Since graduating in June 2009 I’ve had the great opportunity to experience both working as a contract developer and jumping in the deep end of creating startups and all that comes both. In fact, I’ve kind of been juggling paid work and startups for around two years now. I want to share some of the experiences I’ve had with the various ways I’ve chosen to handle “surviving” whilst trying to get a startup off the ground.

I finished university having worked on a dissertation that felt very much like a startup (a story for another post), and I was definitely ready to jump in at the deep end and do whatever I needed to do in order to work on a startup and make it succeed. So that’s what I did. In order to be able to keep working on the startup, I had to try a few different things:

The first way: on the side

I spent the first 8 months after university working 3 days a week as a web developer and spending most of my other 4 days working on my first real startup. This worked well to a certain extent - the startup was built and launched within 2-3 months, and it got a certain amount of traction throughout that period.

Bootstrapping your startup on the side can be a massive challenge, but there are a number of often overlooked advantages to this method. Read my thoughts.

The second way: work in waves

After 8 months of working on the startup “on the side” and building up a certain amount of funds, my contract work dried up and rather than finding more I decided to use the funds as runway and give the startup a real push by working on it full-time. I see this as a feasible way to bootstrap a startup, and whilst this could be done multiple times whereby you work to build up funds and then have a boost of productivity, I see a number of issues with this way too.

Having tried working in waves, I would not recommend it as a long term strategy. Read my thoughts.

A third way: ramen profitability

There is only so long you can go on working in waves or working on the side. With OnePage, I had tried both of those methods, and I kept the product completely free. I was aiming for the “grow big fast” approach, and I had tried to get onto a few startup accelerator programs and spoken to a few investors without success. I didn’t have enough traction or a good enough track record.

I realised that the only way to be able to work full-time on a startup was to build a product which generated revenue early. I had the option to try and generate revenue from OnePage, or to apply what I’d learned to a new product. I had a small idea in my mind, and I decided I liked the idea of a blank canvas. With Buffer, I was completely focused on hitting “ramen profitability”. I sensed that if I could get there, it would change everything.

"Ramen profitable" is a term which is used a lot in the startup scene, and one you should get acquainted with if you haven’t already. I think Paul Graham does a good job of describing it, and he may have even invented the phrase:

At YC we use the phrase “ramen profitable” to describe the situation where you’re making just enough to pay your living expenses. Once you cross into ramen profitable, everything changes. You may still need investment to make it big, but you don’t need it this month.

We reached ramen profitability a couple of months ago and I can’t emphasise enough the impact it can have. I gradually dropped the number of days of contract development work I was doing as the revenue grew, and now I get to spend all my days on Buffer. We certainly have many new challenges ahead of us, but it is a very nice place to be.

How I would start, if I could go back

I now believe that anyone can reach ramen profitability, as long as there is real focus on the goal. Once you are focused on generating revenue, it is a good idea to consider how the type of idea you choose can affect how easy it is to bootstrap and reach ramen profitability. If I was just starting out now with the knowledge I now have, I would completely focus on reaching ramen profitability, and I would work on the side on a “tool” with paid plans rather than a “social” idea. This is the approach I took with Buffer and it worked surprisingly well.

I feel it is also a much more doable first step than aiming for the million dollar idea from the outset. Avoiding those world-changing thoughts can make you very productive. As Jason Cohen described very succinctly:

Prevailing wisdom is that “small is risky.” It’s just the opposite. When you just need to be Ramen-profitable, you can do so even in a recession.

Photo by NoHoDamon

What is your coming soon page for?

2011-06-12T13:04:00Z

What is your coming soon page for-

"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 important to question assumptions. I think one of these assumptions which needs to be questioned is the initial few steps people normally take when they have an idea. One of these steps is the “coming soon” page.

The concept of a “coming soon” page before you have a product is something that has been on my mind for a while now. On first thought, it seems obvious what the purpose of these pages is: surely it is to collect interest from potential users of your product in order to let them know when you’re ready. I think that is probably a good reason for a “coming soon” page, but recently I have been questioning the purpose of “coming soon” pages and how startups can be much more effective with their first landing page.

Why we create “coming soon” pages

With the websites many of us startup founders check out regularly such as TechCrunch always reporting massive growth numbers for startups, it can be easy to assume that the primary aim for a “coming soon” page should be to collect as many emails as possible. It seems logical that when we launch that is the way we are most likely to succeed. I’ve done it myself countless times in the past.

At the same time, there’s a new idea gaining a lot of traction which I think could be sending startup founders down the wrong track. The idea of the “viral launch page” was popularised by Hipster, and the title of the article on TechCrunch makes me cringe: "How A Startup Named Hipster Got 10K Signups In Two Days, Without Revealing What It Does". These launch pages are now available for any startup thanks to LaunchRock.

What is the goal of a “coming soon” page?

All of the current hype around “viral launch pages” combined with how ingrained the idea of a “coming soon” page seems to be in peoples minds made me question what the purpose of a “coming soon” page is.

I think in many cases, the goal in the mind of a startup founder is to gather as many emails as possible so they can have their big bang launch when the product is finally ready. There is a big flaw with this strategy, and it is that if we take this approach we are assuming that our idea is certain to take off when the product is ready. At the very least, we are putting more focus on the number of emails rather than on whether any of the people whose emails we’ve got will actually use our product. Do we really want to gather hundreds or thousands of emails, like Hipster, without people knowing what our product does? That sounds like a risky strategy to me.

Skip “coming soon”

Quite frequently I hear about other startup founders launching a new idea, and I often hear from them how many emails they’ve collected on their coming soon page. I rarely hear about conversations they’ve had with people. One piece of advice I’m encouraging new startup founders to take on more and more now is to skip the “coming soon” page completely.

By skipping the “coming soon” page, you can really focus on what matters. Instead of a “coming soon” page, put up a landing page for your product. Make it look like the product exists, and then when people try and sign up, show them a page letting them know that you’re not quite ready for them yet. The effort is the same, but this tiny change can give you massive rewards.

Instead, aim for conversations and validated learning

The key benefit of skipping the “coming soon” page is that you can gain validated learning about your startup. Validated learning is the measure of progress Eric Ries defines for the lean startup methodology. The concept here is that every change you make should help you learn more about your customers. By skipping the “coming soon” page, you gain validated learning about the emails you collect: they are people who thought your product existed and showed a real interest by trying to sign up. If you have people hitting the page and no one gives you their email, you know there’s a problem with your idea or the way you’re describing it.

Treat your idea as a hypothesis that needs rigorously testing, and treat the emails as people who are happy for you to get in touch with to discuss your product idea further in order to validate that it would solve a real problem for them and that they might actually pay. I don’t think the idea of having a conversation with the people who give you their email comes into the minds of new startup founders enough.

The benefit of this method is also that you can work on your product in parallel with learning about your customers and about how clearly your landing page is getting across the idea of your product. With a few tweaks, you’re very likely to be able to launch the actual product with the same landing page. Your first landing page can be very simple. This is also how I launched my latest startup, Buffer, and it worked pretty well.

Photo credit: Jason Tester

What are you doing to feel uncomfortable?

2011-06-05T12:34:00Z

What are you doing to feel uncomfortable-

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 up my gym routine and managed to go to the gym every morning at 6:30am, and I spoke at an event in Bulgaria to 160 people over Skype yesterday. Both these things made me uncomfortable, but I’ve realised that “feeling uncomfortable” was just what I needed.

Why is it a good thing to feel uncomfortable?

Seth Godin describes why we should feel uncomfortable using the following chart:

Godin argues that most people reach some comfortable “Local Max” and then stay there, because to jump to new heights almost always involves some discomfort:

"The problem is that to get to Big Max, you need to go through step C, which is a horrible and scary place to be."

In The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, which I’ve mentioned before, the authors say that stress is a crucial part of growth:

"Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand capacity physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually so long as it is followed by adequate recovery"

I think the need to get out of your comfort zone is even more true when you’re building a startup. Ben Yoskovitz puts this well:

"Dont start a company as a tech person if all you want to do is code. If all you want to do is code, then get a job coding. Starting a company means to do a lot of things youve never done, and a lot of things you wont be comfortable doing. Get used to it. Make the uncomfortable comfortable."

Shifting from uncomfortable to comfortable

I’ve found in the past that if I get excited about something and dive in too fast, I will often work for longer than I realise is productive and then burnout. This makes for a bad experience and makes it easy to avoid trying again.

I think a better approach is what Loehr and Schwartz propose: to go beyond our comfortable levels and then step away and renew. Repeating this process can build our capacity to do anything and make us comfortable with new things.

Of course, when something becomes more comfortable we should strive to get out of our comfort zones once again. The compounding effect can be very powerful.

Growth in one area can mean confidence in other areas

A great side effect I’ve found of stepping out of my comfort zone in one area such as speaking at events or stepping up my exercise routine is that growing my skill or capacity on one of these areas can give me a massive amount of confidence in almost every other area of my life. This is a good reason why we should have many areas where we stretch ourselves. Here is a great part of an interview Tim Ferriss had with Matt from 37signals:

"If your entire ego and identity is vested in your startup, where there are certainly factors outside of your control, you can get into a depressive funk that affects your ability to function. So, you should also, lets say, join a rock climbing gym. Try to improve your time in the mile. Something like that. I recommend at least one physical activity. Then even if everything goes south you have some horrible divorce agreement with your co-founder if you had a good week and set a personal record in the gym or on the track or wherever, that can still be a good week."

Some of the things I’m doing to feel uncomfortable

Working on a startup has given me many opportunities to feel uncomfortable and therefore gain skills in many areas I was never comfortable with. Here are some of my top ones:

Speaking: Believe it or not I’m actually an introvert. I squirm on a stage, but I get a kick out of sharing my story and helping others and that’s why I am always pushing myself in this area. I’ve now spoken at quite a few events of various sizes, and I usually say yes to speaking opportunities precisely because I know I find it uncomfortable. It’s definitely getting easier.

Sleep, health and exercise: I’ve always struggled with getting enough sleep and keeping up a gym routine. Over the last few months I’ve managed to put in place a sleep ritual which I’ve kept to almost religiously. I then created a morning gym routine, and for the last two weeks I’ve been to the gym every weekday morning at 6:30am. With the consistency handled, I’m now pushing myself out of my comfort zone further by making my weight training routine harder and keeping track of my progress.

There are many others too: even this blog is something I still find hard to keep up, and since I’m primarily a developer I’ve had to push myself to become a better designer and deal with server admin tasks for Buffer. I’m also about to get rid of my apartment and go travelling for several months with my co-founder Leo.

What are you doing to feel uncomfortable?

Photo credit: Capture Queen

Beware of the social ideas

2011-05-29T09:54:00Z

Beware of the social ideas

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 an idea you’ve had in the back of your mind, or it could mean experimenting with ways to have more ideas. In this post I want to talk about two types of ideas: “social” and “tools”.

Why we all love social ideas

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned serial entrepreneur, I think it is inevitable that we naturally get excited by the social ideas. Things like Twitter and Facebook have taken off big time, and occupy the media and our attention much more than other ideas. We also tend to spend a lot of our time on these kinds of social platforms, and our ideas are likely to come from places we are already familiar with. I think for that reason, it can be quite easy to have these platforms in mind and discover things we’d like to be able to do on them that we can’t already. Thus, a new social idea is born.

The problem with social ideas

The problem with social ideas is that often even though they may be solving a problem in a novel and useful way, they almost always have the following traits:

take longer to validate that the problem is something people want
product/service is not as useful when there are fewer users (network effect)
revenue usually comes after some kind of “tipping point” which is hard to specify

I was recently reading some great new research with data gathered from 650 startups in the Startup Genome Report, and they have some data which seems to confirm these problems. In the following snippet, “The Social Transformer” is their phrase for social ideas, and “The Automizer” is how they describe “tools”:

Type 1N - The Social Transformer

need 50% longer than Type 1 (The Automizer) and Type 2 (The Integrator) to reach scale stage

need more capital than Type 1 (The Automizer) and Type 2 (The Integrator)

Why tools are often the better option

When you’re working on your first real startup venture, you’re often working part-time or even full-time whilst you build your idea on the side. When I had the idea for Buffer six months ago, I was working as a contract web developer for two different clients and as a result I was working five days per week. It is hard to move fast when you have little time, and one of your goals should be to reach a stage where you can work on your idea part-time or full-time.

As a first-time entrepreneur with no track record, if your experience is anything like mine you’re going to struggle to raise funding. Therefore, you’re going to need to bootstrap your idea on the side. Bootstrapping involves generating revenues early and building on top of them. This is where social ideas give you a real disadvantage. Spencer Fry put it very well:

To bootstrap you typically need a single user to be able to benefit from the service without having to connect with anyone else. Thats Carbonmade. A user can sign up and create their own online portfolio without needing other people in the system to benefit from it.

Avoid the “network effect”

I think that’s the key - an idea where a single user can benefit immediately when they sign up. Put simply, “tools”. This is the single biggest difference between the idea of OnePage, my previous startup, and the idea of Buffer. OnePage, with its network effects, constrained me to working part-time for a full year and a half whilst building (little) traction, whereas Buffer, which was useful for people and had payment options from day 1, allowed me to quit my contract work completely within 5 months.

Whilst I think social ideas can be great, my point here is that if you’re starting out and want to be working on your idea full-time in the near future, you are much more likely to achieve that goal by building a tool which people find immediately useful.

Photo credit: Kate Gardiner

How to start your startup in 4 steps

2011-05-15T11:19:00Z

How to start your startup in 4 steps

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 this startup “work” compared to some of my previous attempts. The first and arguably hardest part of a startup is actually starting, and that’s what I’m going to focus on with this post. The Internet is literally littered with the remnants of my many failed attempts (not necessarily a bad thing), so there are things I’d avoid repeating.

If I was to create a new startup, here is what I would do:

1. Have an idea

This is undoubtedly a key part, but don’t give it too much focus. If you have an idea, that’s fantastic. If you don’t, try and raise your awareness of the daily activities you carry out. Particularly pay attention in the areas which you are passionate about, because it’s important that you work on something you love. Pay attention to anything which you think could be more efficient or less painful. The best ideas are ones you will use yourself every day, and would pay for if they existed already.

A side point about ideas is that you will learn far more by being in the process of working on a bad idea than you will by waiting for the perfect idea. Even if you have the tiniest idea in the back of your mind, you will probably benefit more by going for that, even if it doesn’t work out. I certainly attribute much of the success I’ve had with Buffer to my previous experience.

2. Cut it down

This is very important. If you have an idea, break it down until you think it’s too small to be of value. That’s what you should consider your first version, in fact that’s probably too big too.

If you don’t cut out features from your initial vision, you’re much less likely to ever launch it. I’ve been there many times myself. Try to develop a fear of not shipping your idea.

Another thing to note, is that the idea of a big splash launch is worth questioning. Firstly, to link the big splash with the software being ready is very dangerous, and secondly a mindset of a big splash is inevitably going to cause you to delay getting feedback on your idea, which is the next step:

3. Share the idea, get feedback

This is one of the most important steps, and often the one which is missed out almost entirely. A lot of the time, it’s the step that doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people, and that was certainly the case for me. Missing this step could easily kill your startup.

There are, of course, many smart people arguing how important sharing your idea and getting feedback is in order to succeed. I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I believe we should approach our idea as a hypothesis of something we think could work, and we should be striving to validate the hypothesis by rigorously testing it.

However, there is another crucial benefit to getting feedback, and that is motivation. I’ve found myself lose motivation on something when I’ve worked on the development for too long without getting feedback, and I’ve talked to many other people starting up and found that this is key.

Get feedback to validate your idea, but more importantly get feedback so you feel good about what you’re building. One or two people saying “I can’t wait to try this” will do wonders for your motivation.

I can’t stress this point enough. It’s not buggy technology or a faulty marketing plan which will kill your startup, it’s losing motivation. Remember, you can get feedback without the product existing.

4. Go with your gut

If you’ve got this far, then you’re doing very well. In my experience, going forward from here is a matter of going with your gut. In the early stages, it’s not wise to pay too much attention to split testing or other ways to try and be confident about your decisions. Learn to act without complete information. Just be sure to balance building with feedback.

Photo credit: aartj

Creating a sleep ritual

2011-05-08T12:48:56Z

Creating a sleep ritual

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 sleep, and I wrote it in the middle of the night. Since then, I have made a number of adjustments and I now sleep much better, so I’d like to share what I’ve changed.

Why create a sleep ritual?

As an early stage startup founder, I’ve found the emotional ups and downs to be incredible. In my experience so far in building my latest startup, there have been many different events which have caused a huge amount of joyful moments, and there are undeniably times when you wonder how you are going to progress and how you are going to handle the sheer chaos in which you’ve chosen to live. It is easy to work long hours, become very unproductive and find yourself enjoying the moments less.

In my experience, you have enough against you if you’re running a startup that feeling exhausted for the majority of every day is not a wise idea. I’ve realised over the last few months that balance, however elusive it might sound, is very important. A key example is how crucial feedback and communicating with users is at the beginning of a startup. For me, I find that the emails I write are much better, and the energy I can put into responding fast and positively to Tweets is higher when I am well rested.

What is a sleep ritual?

I learned about rituals from The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz. Whilst habits are often seen as activities you have to force yourself to do, rituals are instead activities which you are pulled towards. A good friend introduced me to the book, and also helped me craft a new ritual to help me get to sleep at a good hour and in a good state of mind each night. It takes some time to convert a habit into a ritual, but once you have it becomes something that does not require thought or energy, and instead can provide you with vast amounts of extra energy.

I’ve adjusted this ritual over time, and it can be simplified to two important parts:

Disengage: An activity to allow total disengagement from the day’s work. For me, this is going for a 20 minute walk every evening at 9:30pm. This is a wind down period, and allows me to evaluate the day’s work, think about the greater challenges, gradually stop thinking about work and reach a state of tiredness.

Avoid re-engaging: After the activity, go straight to bed. Be sure that all devices are in a separate room to the one you sleep (and slient). Once in bed, do not read books which are related to your work in any way. For me, this means reading fiction.

Adjusting and improving the ritual

It’s important to start with something simple, so that you can keep to it and allow it to convert from being a habit you struggle with to a ritual you are pulled towards doing. Once you are performing the ritual regularly, you can start to add more good habits and let those become rituals too.

Recently, I have combined early morning exercise with my sleep ritual. The sleep ritual helps me get a good night’s sleep, and allows me to get up very early. I like early mornings, and I like to start the day feeling refreshed and confident. I’ve also been trying to make going to the gym a regular part of my life, and I’ve often struggled to fit it into my day. I now go to the gym as soon as I wake up, and this is perfect since whatever chaos my day brings, I can almost always go to the gym before it starts.

Allow imperfection

Don’t worry if you miss days. It’s important to avoid guilt, and instead learn what is best for yourself and try again. It took some time, but I perform my ritual almost religiously now during the week. However, I don’t usually do it at the weekends. If I miss it one day, it is often due to being overwhelmed by everything that is going on. In those cases, I’ve found becoming consciously aware of the reason I’ve slipped out of my ritual, and then making a definite decision to start it again has allowed me to reduce the impact of stress.

I know that with the ritual, whatever chaos the day has brought, I can feel fresh the next day.

Photo credit: Pedro Ribeiro Simes

Enjoying the moment

2011-05-01T13:42:00Z

Enjoying the moment

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 has also been at times when I have genuinely been enjoying the moment. Steve Jobs suggests that in order to do great work, we should love doing the work:

"Work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

By saying “the only way to do great work is to love what you do”, Jobs implies that how good we are at something is correlated with how much we enjoy doing it. I am sure you can agree this makes sense.

Loving what we do

This need to love what we do has had me thinking for a while about how to maximise the amount of time I’m truly enjoying what I’m doing. We all have parts of our lives which we don’t enjoy, and it is easy to assume that it is inevitable that there are elements of our days which we won’t enjoy. I think that whilst this is very easy to agree with, a lot of the time it may actually be a choice, whether we realise it or not.

Last year I watched a video entitled Tea & the Art of Life Management which is a great discussion featuring two of my favourite authors Tim Ferriss and Leo Babauta. The video is fantastic and I can highly recommend it. I’ve watched it a number of times myself, and I always keep remembering it for one particular thing which Tim Ferriss said. He calls it Gratitude Training:

Lets say that you want to eat a peach for dessert one evening, but you decide to only allow yourself this luxury after washing the dishes. If, while washing the dishes, all you think of is eating the peach, what will you be thinking of when you eat the peach?

The clogged inbox, that difficult conversation youve been putting off, tomorrows to-do list?

The peach is eaten but not enjoyed, and so on we continue through life, victims of a progressively lopsided culture that values achievement over appreciation.

Ambition vs day to day happiness

The final sentence in the quote above from Tim Ferriss is something I find particularly interesting as a startup founder. As a founder, I read many articles, many videos and generally try to stay very up to date on the different techniques out there and try to learn from what has worked for others. This means that a lot of the time I am exposed to articles which show how much people have achieved such as how much a startup has been acquired for. With such a high concentration of this kind of information, it is easy to put a lot of value on ambition. We don’t start companies and aim to make no impact, do we?

However, going back to what Steve Jobs says, if we value ambition too much compared to day to day happiness, we are unlikely to ever achieve the things we are striving for. In a recent interview with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals on Mixergy, Andrew Warner asked David a very interesting question:

When you launch something you say “we just wanted to launch something and see where it went” and on the other hand, “we’re going to build a hundred million dollar company”. How do you balance both those sides?

David responds by saying that the ambition is much less important than day to day happiness. He says that if you care more about the milestones and ambitions, you are much less likely to achieve them.

Choose to enjoy the moments

So next time we’re washing the dishes, why not actually find enjoyment in washing the dishes? It can be a very relaxing activity. When we’re trying to reach inbox zero, why not enjoy the great conversations we are having and have some gratitude for the amazing people we are in touch with and the fact we can communicate so easily. When a customer gets in touch with a question about our product, instead of seeing it as a necessary but unenjoyable task, why not be thankful that they care enough to get in touch, and look for something we can learn from them?

I certainly need to keep reminding myself that it’s a choice.

Photo credit: Dimitris Papazimouris

Giving your startup a point of view

2011-04-17T12:19:00Z

Giving your startup a point of view

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 startups and don’t fully take on board what they meant until some time later. This week, there came a point where I felt like I understood what the following great 37signals quote means for me:

"Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service."

What does it mean to have a point of view?

Gradually over the last four months of working on my latest venture, it has become apparent that the values I had in mind for it have now become a core part of the startup, and not only within the culture of the small two person team but also expressed by the many users who spread the word of the product.

For my startup, Buffer, we’re in the Twitter tool space and there are many other tools out there which offer some form of scheduling. We offer this, and we’re very aware that there is a fine line between a tool which helps you optimise, and a tool which encourages you to Tweet in non-genuine ways. So our point of view is “we encourage people to Tweet in a genuine way, because we believe that is the most effective way to make the most of Twitter”, and it flows throughout our team and our users. It means that all decisions are tied to the point of view, and we are very cautious about acting in ways which would not be in line with the point of view we have adopted which is to encourage people to use Twitter in a more effective but still genuine way. These actions can be simply the communication via email or on platforms like Twitter, or it could be the choice of features and changes to the product.

Why would you want to have a point of view?

I believe having a “point of view” means that you can build a much stronger position in the market, and you can more easily get others on board to help you grow through word of mouth. It can really differentiate you from other products in the market, especially if you are in a market which has “norms” and your values are different from those norms.

Another great thing about having a point of view is that it can really help you with your customer development. I see part of customer development as discovering and validating customers. Another part is listening to those users and deciding whether you should add or remove features based on their feedback. When you have a point of view, the decision of whether to add a feature is much easier, since you can ask yourself whether it is in line with the point of view and values you’re trying to stick to.

A third reason you might have a point of view is that it can reduce the risk from competitors. It is up to you as a startup to differentiate yourself and create a more compelling offering. The great part is that your offering also includes the message around the product. The point of view you adopt can truly affect whether people will choose you over someone else. If you can express the point of view in a way in which others are convinced to share the same point of view, then competitors not only need a stronger product offering but also need to show users that they have a better point of view.

What is the best way to express the point of view?

It is easy to read the 37signals quote above and assume that having a point of view is all about forcing your opinions on your users or audience. I’ve found that doing almost the opposite is the best way to get people on your side and spreading your point of view on your behalf. My thinking with this comes from the great Dale Carnegie and his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. If people ask for a feature which isn’t inline with our point of view, we use some of the techniques Carnegie proposes. Here are a couple:

Start by agreeing with the user - this shows that you are truly on their side. It is easy to agree with them, because in almost every case they have a great point.

Show you are open to them changing your mind - phrases such as “I could be wrong, as I often am, but I feel that perhaps” can really show that you are open to suggestions. Simply showing you are open to change, people often are much more likely to agree with you. It has to be done genuinely, of course.

I’ve been lucky to have a great co-founder who has not only adopted the point of view I tried to instill in my latest startup but has also taken it further and done some fantastic marketing in a way which has created a community of people who are not only spreading the word of our service but also spreading the point of view we have taken.

Update: This post has been cross-posted in Chinese on 36kr.com, you can read it here. A big thank-you to Abe Li.

Photo credit: Matt Katzenberger

Work and rest in a startup

2011-04-10T09:10:00Z

Work and rest in a startup

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 reason I’m building a startup is to gain control over many aspects of my life. I like to hack my productivity, and I’ve found I don’t enjoy normal working hours or offices. If you’re working on a startup or have aspirations to create one, I’m guessing you can relate. By experimenting with these concepts, I’ve found I can get more done.

I find it particularly interesting to relate this to startups because there’s a lot of emphasis on crazy things like 18-hour days in startups.

Time, or energy?

Over the last year, I’ve realised that whilst time is limited and in some ways determines how much I can get done, what really determines my productivity is what I do and how I feel in the time I have. Energy plays a large factor in how we feel and how productive we are. I realised how important energy is in a book I read a short while ago called The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz. The overall message of the book is:

"managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal”

In a similar way to the fact that you need renewal in order to grow muscles, we also need renewal in order to grow our capacity of mental energy. Here is how Loehr and Schwarz put it:

"Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand capacity physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually so long as it is followed by adequate recovery"

This idea that if we shift from trying to manage time to managing our energy we can achieve more and feel better while we do it has lead to me doing quite a lot of experiments with my work and rest.

Experimenting with work and rest

I’ve tried many techniques to squeeze maximum productivity out of myself. When I embarked upon my first venture I was working very long hours, far beyond the point where my productivity dipped. This was a habit I carried over from university as a result of deadlines imposed at university.

One of my weaknesses is that I over-estimate how much I can get done in a period of time, so it is easy for me to go far beyond my optimal levels of energy. I came across a comment in an article on How To Stay Healthy While Hustlin A Startup, and it really rings true for me:

"Skipping sleep for a few extra hours of work destroyed my morale, creativity and attitude."

A startup is chaotic enough, so does it make sense to put ourselves in such a state? Recently I’ve been experimenting with getting a good amount of sleep and regularly going to the gym. I stop working when I feel I’ve gone just beyond the point of my high productivity period. This idea of stopping or “disengaging” is something I’ve found to be very important.

Disengaging from your startup

Disengaging is probably one of the most challenging aspects of running a startup. Whatever I’m doing, I often find myself thinking about my startup. The thoughts can really affect productivity because you don’t get the renewal you need from the startup in order to return to the work with high levels of energy. I can’t put it better than Loehr and Schwarz:

"The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal"

The suggested way to improve our ability to “fully disengage” is by creating rituals. I have a ritual in the evening of going for a short walk and upon returning going straight to bed and reading a fiction book. It helps me disengage from the work I’ve done in the day and get the sleep I need to wake up refreshed and ready for the next exciting day.

Being here in Javea is fantastic because I can experiment with spending a little less time working and intersperse the work with going to the beach, playing some table tennis or taking a swim. Many find it odd that I would do any work at all from here, but I’ve realised over time that I feel the best when I have a balance of work and rest.

Photo credit: rikstill

Treat it as finished

2011-04-03T10:52:00Z

Treat it as finished

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 product at each stage of the process. With ideas such as the Lean Startup, there is a huge amount of pressure for us to ship very early, and rightly so - the sooner we can validate our assumptions and gain more understanding about how our users react to our product the better. However, quotes such as the following can make us feel like we should believe our product is “unfinished”:

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, youve launched too late." - Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

"Build half a product, not a half-ass product" - from Getting Real by 37signals

The problem with “unfinished”

As much as I love the quotes and believe there is a huge amount of truth in both of them, I feel like these ideas can make us focus on having an “unfinished” product for a long time. The issue I see is that there is no mention of when we should stop being embarrassed by our product, or when we should treat it as a “whole product”.

The problem is that if we have in our minds that our product is “unfinished”, it will directly affect how we communicate our product to potential users or customers as well as press. I’ve realised over time that this can have a huge impact on the initial traction you build, and this is a vital aspect of an early stage startup.

Why might we be afraid of treating it as finished?

If you’ve tried to get a startup off the ground or have tried to follow some of the lean startup principles I am sure you will be able to relate to some of my experiences. When you’re just getting started, you have a big vision which has only partly been translated into product, and even the product you have probably has bugs here and there which you know about. Maybe you’re measuring Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates and see there is a strong indication that your retention could be much higher. Perhaps you know people are slipping through your activation funnel. You probably haven’t built in any form of referral into your product. Things could be so much better.

If you let these thoughts take over too much, it will show in the way you talk about your product to people. As soon as that happens I believe you’re putting yourself at a big disadvantage. I did this with the startup I founded previously. We kept telling ourselves “we don’t want to get the big traffic now, because we won’t retain the users we gain” or “if we get users now, we don’t have our referral options in place so the traffic spike will just fall straight away”.

By waiting to have a better product before you tell anyone or try and get any press you’re severely impacting the traction you could build.

Why we should always treat our products as finished

I’ve taken a different approach with my latest startup. Even in the first week it launched I treated it as a finished product. Whilst it didn’t do much and there were a few bugs, I was very happy with it and wanted people to try the product. I even had a way for people to pay for it from day 1. I’ve realised over time that there are many benefits to taking this approach.

If you can shift your thinking and genuinely believe your product is fantastic at every stage, you’ll immediately see the benefits. You will naturally be better at driving that essential early traction. For example, there really is no limit to the amount of blogs you can reach out to. Tap into the long tail of blogs and you have an endless number of places you can try to get your product into. Even the features of your startup in small blogs will build up layer upon layer of traffic to your startup. Believe me, you won’t run out of blogs.

I’m not saying we should deny that our product needs to improve, or that we should not build any additional useful features. The sooner you can get a steady stream of traffic to your startup, the easier it is to continually improve things and get fast feedback on the changes you make. However, we should be communicating in a way which implies that the product is ready for real use and solves a problem well in its current state.

Photo credit: kkirugi

Acting with incomplete information in a startup

2011-03-27T12:12:00Z

Acting with incomplete information in a startup

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 culture for around two years now and I often find myself reflecting on my learning and relating it back to articles I have previously read. Recently this happened again for me in the topic of making decisions based on incomplete information.

Incomplete information

I first came across the phrase “acting with incomplete information” in a blog post Mark Suster wrote over a year ago titled "What makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI". In the article he writes about the importance of moving forward when you don’t have complete information:

Entrepreneurs make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day. They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct.

I’ve only recently realised the true importance of this concept, and what it actually means in reality. It is one of those things which I’ve read and thought I understood, but I’ve realised how different it can be when you’re actually experiencing it.

What about the lean startup?

I’m scientifically minded, so when I first heard about the lean startup concepts pioneered by Eric Ries, I was completely hooked on the idea. The concepts are fantastic, and the way Eric Ries has distilled them is hugely beneficial for anyone trying to build a startup. I’ve used them myself to great effect. However, with descriptions of lean startup such as the one below, it can be easy to assume that you should make decisions only based on facts and never based on opinion or incomplete information.

Build a company-wide culture of decision-making based on real facts, not opinions.

What I have realised over time is that some of the aspects of the lean startup are more useful at certain times than others. For example, when you are just getting started and have only a trickle of traffic, you really can’t gain the volume of data you need for A/B testing. In the early days, talking to customers and gaining validated learning is one of the most useful things to do, but even if you gain a huge amount of feedback you cannot be 100% sure of anything. In the end, you have to take the leap.

Mark Suster is right: almost all of the time you have to make decisions without knowing what the outcome will be. I’ve mentioned that my mind is wired to think about things in logical ways, so “acting without complete information” is one of the things about doing a startup which I have struggled with the most.

Stop fearing acting without complete information

Over time, I have realised there are some ideas which really help me to be better at acting without complete information. Here are a few of the things which have worked well for me:

Create a fear of not shipping

When you think too much about the fact that you have to take the leap and act without complete information, you can start to fear what the consequences might be when you ship. There are all sorts of things that could go wrong, after all. I the past I have really feared shipping, but gradually over time I have started to question what the worst thing to happen could be, and I’ve actually developed a fear of not shipping.

Realise that everyone has to act without complete information

One useful thing to do is remind yourself that whilst history has some rhythms, it never repeats itself. Even the most experienced entrepreneurs have to assess things with a fresh mind when they embark on a new venture. It could even be argued that having less experience is sometimes a good thing. Whatever your experience is, remember that everything you do is new to a certain extent, and your situation is different to any other situation that has ever occurred.

Remember that failure is the best way to learn

In some cultures failure is more accepted than others. I live in the UK, and especially in business it is often seen that if you fail once you should just give up. I have realised over time that failure is not really a binary thing, so it is never as bad as you might think. I have also realised that “failure” or “something not working out as imagined” is one of the best ways to learn something.

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." - Abraham Lincoln

Photo credit: espressoDOM

Healthy naivety

2011-03-20T13:33:00Z

Healthy naivety

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 believe, but could also be a key reason why many don’t even “try”. The myth is that you need to know how to do everything, and you need to do everything perfectly. It’s not surprising when you look at successful startups: it is easy to think that they’ve done all the right things. I believe the reality is far from that, and I am starting to think that it is in fact very healthy to have a good dose of naivety whilst building a startup.

The scale anticipation fallacy

One prime example of something which I think falls into this notion of healthy naivety is avoiding what I have come to call the “scale anticipation fallacy”. The fallacy is that in order to build something which can scale to millions of users you need to build it in a way which can handle that scale right from the start. The idea is that if you don’t get it right at the start, you will never succeed.

When I started my latest venture, I had sub-optimal tables in my database, I was doing multiple queries to get data and I was looping through data and doing extra queries to get everything I needed. I had no idea what a database index was. I basically did all the wrong things. However, at the start, this didn’t matter. I didn’t have any users! As time has gone on, I have encountered some “nice problems to have”, and the server has struggled a little. It has been no problem to improve things as I needed to. I believe the fact I didn’t think about scalability has certainly helped me reach a point where scalability matters. Conversely, I wonder whether if I focused on scalability when it didn’t matter, would I have ever reached the point where it did matter?

You don’t know what you don’t know

When you’re building a startup, one of the most challenging things is that you are in a world full of unknowns and uncertainty. You literally do not know what you do not yet know. This is something I’ve talked about before, and I think the only way to really cope in this kind of environment is to strive for knowledge, information and validated learning through feedback. However, I think that looking back on my startup attempts to date, I would say that one of the reasons I am currently having some success is that I didn’t quite realise just how much I still had to learn in order to succeed. It is this kind of naivety which I think is a good thing. In fact, I may even go as far as to say I fear the fact that in the future I might know how hard something is going to be.

Steve Blank wrote about this in his article "Too Young to Know It Can’t be Done". I particularly like this sentence:

"if theyre really strategic older founders hire engineers in their 20s and 30s who dont know what theyve been asked to do is impossible"

Be proud of your naivety, and fear knowing too much

The scale anticipation fallacy is just one example of where I have been naive and I think it has turned out to be an advantage. The thing about startups is, it doesn’t matter how bad your code or anything else is. All that matters is that you create something people want.

I chose to attempt to create a startup immediately after graduating from University rather than spending some time in industry. It was a tough two years whilst I made lots of mistakes, and I am finally starting to have a little success now. However, the main thing I have learned is not “how to do everything perfectly”. The main thing I have learned is that a balance is required where you do everything “good enough” for the point in time you are at. Some might call this the 80/20 or Pareto principle. I believe that if I had spent some time in industry, I may have brought the skills I had learned to my attempt at a startup some years from now and I may have aimed to do everything perfectly. I think that would have been a big mistake.

I think clinging onto a beginner’s mind is very important. As Steve Jobs said:

"Stay hungry, stay foolish"

Photo credit: Trey Ratcliff

Fear of not shipping

2011-03-13T13:43:14Z

Fear of not shipping

"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 managed a modicum of success is because I just keep shipping." - Seth Godin

"Finishing" or "shipping" things is essential to success. For the longest time, I’ve been very afraid of "shipping" things. There are so many reasons to hesitate to ship something. All sorts of things could go wrong which could have negative consequences.

However, over time I feel I have gradually shifted from not only not fearing shipping, but actually fearing not shipping. I think this is a healthy fear for anyone doing startups and can be applied elsewhere too.

Fear of not shipping my blog posts

Every two weeks, on a Sunday, I wake up and I sit down and write my blog post. As I reach around 700 words, I start to make sure it flows well, and that each section is in the right order and that there are no typos. Then, after I’ve finished, I spend a little time reading it through and wondering whether I have missed anything or whether it could be better.

That is when the fear hits me. I know that if I aim for perfection, I will delay shipping greatly. So I quickly read it through, and then hit publish. This is how I’ve kept blogging consistently, and it’s also how good discussion arises. If it’s perfect, where is the room for discussion. More importantly, is perfect even possible?

The great thing about this is that my blog posts so far have triggered off some absolutely fantastic discussions and I’ve been delighted to have received some fascinating comments which I’ve learned a huge amount from. Therefore, since I am shipping consistently and benefiting from it, it becomes something I want to do more and I feel I could realistically do more.

Fear of not shipping my startups

Another area I have found this “fear of not shipping” really applies for me, is with my startups. I’m passionate about creating my own scalable startup, but a startup is something you can feel very attached to. You don’t want people to see it rough around the edges. You want it to be perfect before you let the world see it.

Over time, I’ve realised that waiting for it to be perfect does not achieve the most success for me. The 80/20 rule really applies here, and I’ve found time and time again that the final 20% of the benefits of working on a product or a feature in a product genuinely can take 80% of the time you work on it if you are not careful. This is very much in line with the lean startup techniques which I’m a huge fan of.

With my previous startup, I took 4 months to launch it before I received any real feedback from users. With my current startup, I was very keen to launch it swiftly. I questioned everything I was building into the first version in order to keep it very minimal. I even sent an email to people saying it would take 1 week, and it eventually took 7. As I approached the end of the 7th week, a fear hit me that I had been working on it for too long without getting feedback. So I “shipped”. It was buggy, and it even let people pay without an automatic upgrade process and without some of the paid features even working. You know what? It worked out very well. I even had my first paying customer 4 days later.

I think getting into this mentality of fearing not shipping more than fearing shipping is a very important mental shift with huge benefits. For me, it has turned out very well.

Creating a fear of not shipping

How can you change your mindset into a fear of not shipping rather than a fear of shipping? I doubt it can happen just by reading a post. I suggest you try shipping a few things before you think they are ready. I am confident you will be pleasantly surprised, and when it happens, keep doing it. Soon you will fear spending too long on things.

Photo credit: Pete Snelling

Creating order from chaos in a startup

2011-03-06T12:50:47Z

Creating order from chaos in a startup

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 chaos again. I wanted to share my experiences and I hope to hear your thoughts.

Chaos in a startup

Since launching my latest venture around 3 months ago, I’ve had some incredible highs and some low points too. It’s been said many times that creating a startup feels like this, and I can now fully understand why - it is not possible to have full confidence about everything you are doing. I had experienced it with my previous startup, but this time it is even more apparent.

So what contributes to the chaotic nature of a startup? I believe there are two fundamental aspects which create a lot of the chaos in startups.

Understanding people

The first is the various activities which users are carrying out on the apps or platforms we have created. How do we make sense of what people are doing? How can we know how useful they are finding our product? How do we know whether they are having problems? There are many unanswered questions, and at times it feels like a huge struggle to make sense of what is going on.

The lizard brain

I believe that the second main contributor to chaos in startups is what Seth Godin calls the Lizard Brain. He sums it up nicely:

"The list of excuses is long and getting longer all the time."

The lizard brain is the part of us which makes us think about everything that could possibly go wrong, and makes us over-analyse everything. It can be overwhelming, and it is a real challenge to quieten it and to ship things without paying much attention to all the factors which could affect the outcome.

Creating order

So how do we create order out of all the chaos going on? How do we understand what users are experiencing and how they feel towards our product? How do we quieten our lizard brain and stop it halting our progress? How do we reach a state of calm and reach a position where we can be confident we are doing the right things?

Feedback

I doubt many of us are asking for feedback as much as we could. In my latest venture, I have done much more customer development than in any of my previous ventures. It is amazing what an email or phone call with a customer can reveal.

Early on, qualitative feedback is potentially more useful than many forms of quantitative feedback. You most likely have collected email addresses, so just get in touch with people - they will be glad to hear from you.

I’ve also found that extracting data from my database and presenting it in different ways can create order from the chaos. Cohort analysis can reveal how many of your users are coming back on a regular basis - something you might have had no idea about.

Ship

The second thing, is to know when to stop getting feedback and when to produce and ship results. We can always think of so many reasons something might not work out, and often the reasons are contradictory. The same can happen with feedback, too - one person will want one thing and someone else will want the opposite. The interesting thing is that shipping when things feel chaotic can actually create order.

Are you more comfortable with chaos or order?

People like Mark Suster who invest in us as entrepreneurs tell us that one of the key traits they look for in us is to be able to act without complete information. I see this as acting when things are still somewhat chaotic. We reveal just enough order and then we must act in order to move forward fast. In doing this, we create yet more chaos.

Some of us may naturally thrive on acting when things are chaotic. However, perhaps we act while things are too chaotic and we would have more success if we created more order from the chaos before we introduce further chaos.

Others of us may tend more towards the order and wait too long, in the hope that we can eliminate the chaos completely. We then have a danger of losing a huge amount of time to analysis paralysis. Perhaps we should act more while things are still chaotic?

Photo credit: Juan Manuel Garcia

Steady yourself, those world-changing thoughts are not productive

2011-02-13T12:52:00Z

Steady yourself, those world-changing thoughts are not productive

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 might be being featured in a big blog, lots of tweets about us in a short space of time, a big influx of signups or a few consecutive people upgrading to a paid plan. When this happens, it is very easy for your thoughts to drift off and to start thinking of the bigger picture possibilities for the startup long into the future. I’ve realised that part of the process of an early stage startup is to steady yourself when those occasions arise, and to stay focused on the immediate tasks such as making sure customers are happy, improving the user experience or working on upcoming features.

Why do we start to “think big”?

I’ve been trying to think about why it is that these thoughts emerge especially at times when some “minor successes” occur. It seems that most of the time, it is a result of a chain of thoughts, each a step further than the previous. Before you know it, you’re thinking about how your startup is going to change the way something is done in a profound way. It often happens when you’re with someone else and neither of you stop the chain of thoughts. It may be healthy to be ambitious, but often these thoughts occupy more time than they should and stop us doing the real work we need to do to get anywhere near to those thoughts becoming reality.

Before conquering the world…

It is easy to look at the success stories of the world and think they started at the top. Let’s try and question that and think how all successful ventures or entrepreneurs started with something small. Facebook started just at Harvard. Google started as something used by just a few at Stanford.

Richard Branson may be trying to bring space travel to the masses with Virgin Galactic, but he started out with a magazine called Student. The spiral of success is what you should focus on - trust that with each achievement you will be more informed and better positioned to tackle the next, slightly bigger challenge. Don’t go for space travel right away. It took Branson 38 years.

My thinking here is reflected by Mark Suster who conveys a similar message very eloquently in his recent post titled Why Entrepreneurs & VCs Should Focus on Basecamp, Not the Summit.

Is it so bad to have ambitious thoughts?

I personally love to think big. It’s something I almost pride myself for - there is a lot I want to do, and I truly believe I will achieve it. I think it can be argued that it is healthy to have ambitious thoughts. Perhaps depending on the type of person you are, you either think big too much or you don’t think big enough. It is those of us who think big too much who need to pay attention to this the most. A certain amount is definitely healthy, but beyond a point it becomes a huge time sink, and could actually stop you reaching your goals.

How to steady yourself and keep moving forward

In the recent months, being able to become aware of when I have these world-changing thoughts and being able to stop them in their tracks before they stop me moving forward has been something I’ve found myself needing to do time and time again. This applies to everything, too - keeping your initial product minimal, going for smaller press before you’ve built up momentum, or even realising you can get started without waiting for perfect conditions.

Working with others can help a lot. I’ve been delighted to have a great pro-active friend join me with my latest venture. However, it is worth noting that if you’re working with someone else, one of you needs to stop those thoughts before they take up a lot of time. Inevitably the discussions start, and they’re fun, but then comes the time to get working again.

In the end though, no one else is going to do it for you - you need to stop thinking about changing the world, and do the nitty-gritty to get one step further. I’ll certainly need to come back to this article to remind myself.

Photo credit: Mr. T in DC

Ways to bootstrap a startup: on the side

2011-01-23T12:34:00Z

Ways to bootstrap a startup- on the side

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, there are more ways than one to get a startup off the ground with no funds. Today I want to share with you my thoughts on building a startup “on the side” and I’d love to hear what you think or any experiences you’ve had.

On the side?

One of the issues with working on a startup is that you are very often moving from a world where you are rewarded immediately for your work to a world where the reward is delayed. The problem, therefore, is having funds in order to get by while you build something up.

One way to have enough funds to get by while you build up your startup is to build your startup “on the side”, in other words whilst you are doing other work. I am currently experiencing this first hand and I have realised that doing things in this way also brings about some other benefits, and of course there are a few challenges if you try doing things this way too.

Great reasons to build your startup “on the side”

Constraints make you focus

When you’re doing 40 hours a week of paid work, you really have to make sure that the few hours you spend moving your startup forward that week count. In my experience this is a very good thing. Now that I am working “on the side” I am much more effective per hour than when I had stretches of multiple full days to work on my startup whilst using the “working in waves” method.

Forced patience

Patience is not often a word which is used to describe what is needed in a startup. However, I have come to the realisation that at the early stages of a startup you need to be obsessively working on getting customer feedback. What has worked for me is adjusting something, and then reaching out for more feedback and then analysing the current situation. Working full-time means that without realising it you are forced to wait long enough to get some feedback before you pivot your idea again too soon.

Questioning what’s necessary for version 1

When you have a long runway of full days and weeks to build your startup, it’s easy to think “we need to launch with that” or “it won’t work without this”. When you’re working on your startup full-time, this might add a few weeks onto how quickly you can get your MVP out. Do the same when you’re working “on the side” and it’ll take you months longer. Working “on the side” really forces you to question what needs to be included in that first version.

Challenges when building your startup “on the side”

Potential burnout

In my experience, your todo list for your startup never ends and even when you think up an idea that you think is so small that it can be done in a week, it takes 7 and after you get it out there you have a flood of other thoughts for what to add to it. It’s easy to work long hours and sleep can really suffer. It’s a constant battle.

Am I going too slow?

When you’re working on paid work you’re often thinking about your startup, and you’re often thinking that you need to be working non-stop. Most of the advice out there says we should be. On top of that, let yourself succumb to the myth that you can be killed by your competition and you’re in for a tough ride. In the early days of my latest venture I got around this by making sure I did at least one thing to move my startup forward a little, no matter how small.

What do you think?

I am now happier working on my startup “on the side” than I was when “working in waves”. I certainly don’t doubt the advantages of an accelerator program such as YCombinator but when you’ve made your decision to bootstrap without funding and you don’t yet have a business making you money in a scalable way, I think the best way is to attempt to build up something to ramen profitability as your first venture. That’s what I’m doing, and then maybe after that I will go for the home run.

Photo credit: Chris Rimmer

Questioning and adjusting our goals

2011-01-09T11:42:00Z

Questioning and adjusting our goals

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 actions. In addition to making things systematic, I also believe greatly in avoiding assumptions, and I think it is possible to embrace both of these ideas.

New Year, new goals?

The start of a new year is a time at which many of us reflect on the past year and set some goals for the next year. This year, I’m doing a little of that, but on the whole I know what I want to achieve and I have become quite comfortable with setting and adjusting goals throughout the year rather than limiting my opportunity for change to a single point each year. It is this idea of adjusting goals which I would like to reflect on and discuss instead.

Adjusting goals

I have found that as time has gone on, the main goal I want to achieve has changed a lot. In other words, my own definition of success has changed. This is a change that has happened as a result of my learning over a year or so of working on startups, but I doubt whether I would have adjusted my goal if it wasn’t for all the learning around “testing hypotheses” which I’ve been embracing.

How my own definition of success changed

I’ll be the first to admit that when I first got hooked on the idea of startups, the goal in my mind was monetary. I wanted to be “financially free” so that I could do all the things I wanted to do but was unable to do due to money. So my first startup was a big idea. It could change the world, at least I thought, and I would be rewarded enormously for what I would do - given time. I then realised that in order to get there, persistence was one of the vital aspects. After trying a few different ways in order to reach the success I had chosen, I realised that I was unhappy more than I was happy, and I saw no reason for this.

My second startup, came to me in order to serve a very different purpose for me. I could have easily oriented the second idea just like the first idea - grow fast by keeping it free, but this time things were different and I wasn’t letting myself go down that route again. It was time for a change. So what triggered the change? I realised that my goal had shifted - I was no longer purely after the money, I was fighting for my time.

My new goal (definition of success) is to be able to do whatever I want with my time.

Goals trigger actions

This change would not be half as interesting if it wasn’t for the fact that this change in what I defined as success has actually affected my actions in a huge way. I wrote an article recently about working in waves in order to bootstrap a startup. With my new goal, I don’t want to be doing things by this method, since it involves me spending time on things I don’t want to be doing. Some amount of time doing things you don’t want to be doing is fine and could be argued necessary, but I think there’s a threshold that has to exist.

So now, due to my new goal, I try to act each day towards reaching that goal. This results in very different actions than with my previous definition of success.

Is it time to question your goals?

This is now my current definition of success and is what I spend my time working towards. It may change again in the short or long term, and it may well not be the goal other people are pursuing. I know that love and happiness are other very worthwhile goals, but they are not very specific, and I think specificity is important. With my goal, I can aim for a certain passive monthly income which frees up my time.

Photo credit: Angie Torres

Is making mistakes a necessity for success?

2010-12-19T13:58:00Z

Is making mistakes a necessity for success-

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 for. I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

A topic revisited

Many, many people have discussed the idea of failing in order to succeed. The reason I’m bringing it up again is that I’ve found writing a blog post forces me to lay out the thoughts in my head in an organised way, and this then means that I think more clearly about the subject I write about. I also love to hear from others and I’ve learned a lot from comments in the past.

Striving for success

I think many of us are desperate to succeed and are striving for answers on how we can reach our goal more quickly. Whether the goal is financial, completing a sense of purpose or achieving freedom, we all want to reach “success”. Therefore, we really should take on board any techniques we can to get there.

Is the answer obvious?

Surely there is empirical evidence that the answer is obvious: making mistakes is not necessary in order to succeed. There are many examples out there of people “getting lucky”. What I’d like to pose is the question of whether making mistakes is in fact the safest way to reach success. Surely doing it any other way is like a lottery?

Characteristics of entrepreneurs

So is venturing out and starting work on something without expecting to make mistakes an unwise move?

Typical characteristics that may come to mind for what makes a successful entrepreneur is things such as not listening, sticking to a vision, knowing they will succeed:

"Entrepreneurs are non-conformists. Being non-conformists, they are innately driven to differentiate from the status quo. They dont listen when someone tells them something cannot be done." - Bill DAlessandro

If this is what we should be doing as fledgling entrepreneurs, does it leave room for learning?

Certainty and passion misplaced?

Maybe there is room for mistakes and learning as well as passion, drive and certainty.

One of the most important lessons I feel I have learned so far on my own journey of startups is what I choose to aim for. When I first started, I was set on making a specific idea succeed. I soon stumbled a couple of times and realised that setting my sights on a specific idea succeeding was a bad strategy. I now put all my effort in succeeding with a startup, not a specific idea. This realisation was really invigorating and has made me much more comfortable with pivoting.

A new type of entrepreneur?

If the reasoning is right so far, then is a new type of entrepreneur required? Perhaps someone who embraces change and treats all their ideas as hypotheses. Someone who goes out there and rigorously tests their hypotheses. This is the idea behind the Lean Startup and Customer Development and support for these ways of thinking is growing fast. Or is this what successful entrepreneurs have always done and we are only now uncovering the methods?

Aim to make mistakes?

So this brings us to my final thought. Should we actively aim to make mistakes? There are many people who say it is wise to embrace making mistakes:

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field." - Neils Bohr

"I embrace losing. It is how I learn." - Mark Suster

The whole idea of failure is also one of the main reasons that I aim to visit Silicon Valley in the future and experience the culture over there:

"I think embracing failure is one of the things that makes this country such a great place to do business in. In many parts of the world, if you fail once, you are done. People won’t touch you with a ten foot pole. But here in the US, it’s almost a badge of honor." - Fred Wilson

Is it even possible to succeed without enduring the experience of not getting something quite right?

Is it more productive to aim to make mistakes, or is it more productive to aim not to make mistakes but handle them and keep moving forward?

Photo credit: Andy Roberts

Ways to bootstrap a startup: 'working in waves'

2010-12-05T13:11:00Z

Ways to bootstrap a startup- working in waves

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 developer. I’d like to share some of my reflections on how to bootstrap a startup from zero funds. This time I’d like to talk about what I’m going to describe as “working in waves”.

Waves?

When you think about launching a startup, it is easy to think about all the reasons why you can’t do it now. Of course, many say that what makes an entrepreneur is having these fears and doing it anyway. One of these may well be funds. You think you need a certain amount before you can start.

One way to have enough funds is to work full-time (or intensely) for a certain period of time, and then work full-time (most likely more than full-time!) on your startup idea. I call this method “working in waves”.

Why work in waves?

Working in waves may be an attractive idea because it allows you to focus fully on your idea for a significant period of time based on how much you decide to save. You can work out your expected burn rate before you jump into the wave, so you know when you’re going to run out of funds. This gives you a significant amount of pressure to deliver during the wave. Full focus combined with pressure to deliver must mean you’ll succeed, right?

If you’re lucky, it takes just one wave

The ideal scenario is that you save up a certain amount of funds and then you get to work on your startup, and everything goes to plan. You start generating revenue to reach ramen profitability or you get investment before your funds run out.

I don’t know about you, but after some experience of startups I’ve learned to make as few assumptions as possible and to test assumptions rigorously. Therefore, I think that it is very unlikely that you will “make it” in just one wave. I’ve been there and failed. Steve Blank often talks about this:

Unless you were incredibly lucky most of your assumptions are wrong. What happens next is painful, predictable, avoidable, yet built into to every startup business plan.

The problem with working in waves

The key issue with working in waves is that when you’re building a startup, in my experience, it inevitably takes longer than you expect and that means that you run out of time.

Running out of funds or even just heading towards running out of funds is very disruptive for a startup. It affects your productivity, your judgement and your motivation. You know that soon you’ll have to find some work in order to save up again for another wave. It also means that you are moving forward with improving your product at a slower pace, and this can affect how your users view your commitment. I therefore wonder whether “working in waves” is perhaps one of the less good ways to bootstrap a startup.

Other ways to fund your startup

Having experienced “working in waves” and also experienced the “on the side” method of funding a startup which I will talk about some other time, I have been pondering whether there are any other methods. This has lead me to think increasingly about ramen profitability, and what a difference it would make to the mindset whilst working on a startup. With the survival aspect taken care of, I assume it would make a huge difference. I hope to be lucky enough to share with you just how much of a difference that makes sometime.

Photo credit: Bill Gracey

Exercise: a requirement for sleep?

2010-11-21T11:52:00Z

Exercise- a requirement for sleep-

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 by 9 it is vital that I wake up refreshed and ready for a challenging day. So why am I having trouble sleeping?

Busy lifestyle pushes exercise aside

In the last few weeks I’ve found myself a lot busier than usual - client projects and multiple side projects of my own.

As a result, I’ve not been exercising as much as I usually do. I am now starting to think that exercise is not something that can take a lower priority when things get busy.

Tired?

I’m mentally drained from the day’s work, but physically I have just been sat at a desk all day and I have too much energy to fall asleep. This distinction is important. In order to sleep well, I am starting to realise I need to be both mentally and physically tired.

Does exercise have an impact?

After around a week and a half away from the gym, one evening I decided enough was enough and I went and swam 50 lengths. The result? I got back, went to bed at 10pm and I was asleep before I knew it, and slept right through. I felt refreshed and ready to get on with things again the next morning.

A simple search on Google reveals many results similar to this one:

Exercise is important for a healthy life. People who are physically fit have a better quality of sleep. A healthy body and a relaxed mind will increase your chances of being able to fall asleep and gain the benefits of a good night’s sleep.

Quality of sleep

That point could easily be overlooked in that last quote. It mentions quality of sleep. So what is quality of sleep? The way I see it, generally quality sleep is sleep when you’re not stressed. So in order to get quality sleep we need to feel we’re happy with what we’ve accomplished in the day - be it work or much needed renewal. Another component could be our environment - I live in central Birmingham and it can get noisy at times, though I don’t feel like this affects my sleep as much as the other factors.

Time to make a few changes

I think I need to get more exercise, otherwise this is going to become a real problem. It should be easier to motivate myself to exercise when I know that sleep, and ultimately my energy levels throughout each and every day as a result depend upon it.

How do I fit it in?

The only thing now is, how do I fit in the crucial exercise I need in order to fall asleep each night? Do I need to exercise every day, or will once every two days give me the chance to stretch myself physically enough in order to be able to put my head to the pillow without being awake for hours? I’m going to start off by trying to exercise every couple of days, alternating between cardio and weights as I have done in the past. I’ll probably write about how it goes soon.

Photo credit: Colton Witt