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.

• SaaStock: Building a remote, profitable, transparent and sustainable company with Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer
• 20VC: Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne on The Moment The Founder Is No Longer The Boss, The Questions Founders Must Ask Their VCs and Why We Need A Spectrum of Different Financing Mechanisms Other Than VC
• Product Hunt: Distributed teams, extreme transparency and buying out your investors

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.

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:

And our results from polling parents at Buffer:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Further reading: Steve Blank on the ‘Company Building’ transition phase

It was Julie Zhuo’s article that really resonated with me and somehow as I let it settle over a few days it felt clearer and clearer. I ended up chatting about it in many of my syncs in the last couple of weeks.

I started to sense that we are right between these two approaches, and that in the last year, we’ve started to really see that some of those ‘big company’ characteristics are what we are starting to actually need. At the same time, I felt like we’d moved away from ‘startup’ characteristics we need for some of our innovative projects.

Then it hit me that whilst Julie talks a lot about the two separately, there’s nothing about how you transition from startup to big company. Then I remembered from my past reading that Steve Blank had talked a lot about this, so I started delving into all his articles:

• A Startup is Not a Smaller Version of a Large Company
• The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free
• The Peter Pan Syndrome–The Startup to Company Transition
• What Do I Do Now? The Startup Lifecycle

I also remembered his classic book Four Steps To The Epiphany which has a whole chapter on company building, talking exactly about this transition phase.

A lot of this really resonates. That set of graphs feels to me like it’s describing Pablo/Respond (New Market) vs Awesome/Individual (Existing Market).

Also, the table is super valuable for helping me with the transition I personally need to make as CEO.

This part also felt key:

This evolution requires three actions:

• Build a mainstream customer base beyond the first earlyvangelist customers
• Build the company’s organization, management, and culture to support greater scale
• Create fast-response departments to sustain the climate of learning and discovery that got the company to this stage

A big personal takeaway is how important it is for us to now have clear vision and mission for the scaleup phase, and this is in my personal OKRs for Q1 and I now put this as a very high importance item. It’s something I’ve failed to give the right priority in the last 3–6 months. I have a lot of growing up to do personally to be a great CEO for Buffer as we grow.

Some of what I found in my research, which could be interesting further reading:

• Start-ups versus Big Companies: How they compare in what’s awesome and sucky
• A Startup is Not a Smaller Version of a Large Company
• The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free
• The Peter Pan Syndrome–The Startup to Company Transition
• Design Details podcast with Julie Zhuo
• Scale-up Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned Over 9 Years as HubSpot’s CEO

Coming soon, I’ll share my thoughts in a blog post on the career paths that have emerged from this change from startup to scaleup: generalists and craftpersons.