Joel Gascoigne's blog

Work in and on the business

2024-08-23T00:00:00Z

Work in and on the business

Hi there,

I'm starting a regular newsletter! My goal with this newsletter is to give you insight into how I operate while building a long term, independent, profitable business with big ambitions.

I'm Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO of Buffer. Buffer is a freemium SaaS tool which helps creators, entrepreneurs, professionals and small businesses to grow and build community on social media.

Read on for my most-discussed recent social posts, links I saved recently, highlights from a couple of interviews I watched, the latest at Buffer, something that’s been on my mind, and a general personal update.

If anything resonates for you in this newsletter, or you have a specific thought or question on something I've included, don’t hesitate to hit reply and say hello.

And if this isn’t for you, unsubscribe anytime with the link at the bottom of the email.

💬 My most-discussed posts

Something you may not know about Buffer:

We've raised just $4M in total funding over our almost 14-year journey, and generated over $170M in total lifetime revenue. Our last round was almost a decade ago in 2014.

… view full post: LinkedIn • Threads • 𝕏 • Bluesky • Mastodon

My personal opinion: once you see a business offering incentives for customer research (e.g. a starbucks voucher), it's a sign that a few things have gone wrong. And ironically, it likely means they're not very good at genuinely listening to customers.

I've found that there are much better ways to drive engagement and excitement to connect with us as a business, than gift cards or financial rewards. For this reason, at Buffer we have generally not offered any of these sorts of incentives for providing feedback.

… view full post: LinkedIn • Threads • 𝕏 • Bluesky • Mastodon

It’s a good idea to aim to progress in other dimensions of life throughout the duration building a company.

I have a belief that while working on a company, in my case Buffer, you should be progressing in other dimensions of your life. Generally, any sort of progress is not linear. Meaning that sometimes you’re going through a flat patch, sometimes you’re seeing significant growth and progress, and other times you’re even declining or going backwards.

… view full post: LinkedIn • Threads • 𝕏 • Bluesky • Mastodon

🔗 Links I saved recently

1.0 Is the Loneliest Number
→ I recently rediscovered this almost 14 year old article, which had a profound impact for me when I was starting out building Buffer. I've never forgotten the line "Usage is like oxygen for ideas", and often refer to it when talking about the importance of not going too long building before releasing and getting input.

Changing My Approach to Meetings to Take Back Control of My Attention
→ I've been reflecting on how I can approach meetings with my direct reports, various teams and groups at Buffer, and individuals with snowmelt meetings. These thoughts and conclusions from Albert Wenger were helpful for me as I consider how to balance synchronous time alongside reflection and writing time.

Worse, but unique
→ We're in the midst of strategy discussions and putting together our roadmap for the rest of 2024 and into 2025. This article cemented my conviction to play on our own terms and focus on being unique rather than trying to do everything.

📚 What I’ve highlighted recently

The culture I’m trying to create is one where every year when we celebrate another record result, I get up on the beer box and I say, “Thank you for doing all of the things I never asked you to do.” I don’t want to control. I want to create context. I want to create clarity of culture and strategic choice, but then I want people to surprise me. I don’t want a place where people are doing what they’ve been told to do, because that stifles, that creates bureaucracy, that creates fear.

– Jørgen Vig Knudstorp in At LEGO, Growth and Culture Are Not Kid Stuff

If you're going to do something that's weird, and potentially disadvantageous in some ways, then find the inverse way to leverage it and make it an advantage

– Tom Preston-Werner in an interview with Bryce Roberts (29:00)

👨🏻‍💻 New and noteworthy at Buffer

We added Bluesky to Buffer! Bluesky is an important new social network pushing forward an era of decentralized social media. Bluesky puts a focus on individuals maintaining ownership over their content, the connection to their audience, and control over the algorithm and experience. With Buffer, you can easily add Bluesky to the networks you're participating in. Bluesky is a special place, so I encourage you give it a try.
→ Learn more and get started

🧠 Something that’s been on my mind

I've been reflecting on working in, vs working on the business. Many will advise you to get out of the business, and work "on the business" instead of "in the business".

My experience of achieving the best outcomes has been different. No doubt, you need to ensure you are spending enough time working on the business at a higher level, setting the vision and strategy, and spotting new opportunities. But I've found the best way to do that is to be in the business enough to have the context to arrive at great high level conclusions and decisions.

The times when I fully stepped out of the business and attempted to mostly work "on the business", were the times that I had the worst ideas and the least clear strategy. Those were the times the team felt the most disconnected from me, and I lost a strong institution on the best initiatives to move the company forward. And those were also the times I lost my passion for the work we were doing.

These days, I've arrived at a very blended approach to leading Buffer. I work in, and on, the business. And in fact, in recent years I've really sunk back into the business and work very actively with every team. It's the best way I've found stay connected to the details, have that context to arrive at strong strategic decisions, and maintain my passion for what we're doing.

🙋🏻‍♂️ A general update from me

Our toddler Milo started back at his Montessori school this week. They do a gradual ramp up week especially for the younger kids. On Monday we accompanied him to meet his new teachers 1:1 for 30 minutes. And then he ramped up with 1 hour on Wednesday, a half day on Thursday, and his first full day on Friday. I love how thoughtful his school is, and in general the Montessori approach is, in helping kids thrive. He would have certainly struggled with the transition to new teachers and friends if he was abruptly attending for full days. It has made things tricky for us to juggle as parents who both have their own businesses to run too. We're looking forward to having more of a routine again as we get back into the school year flow.

This weekend my wife celebrates one year since she opened her cafe in Boulder. It's been very inspiring to watch her go all-in on a dream and observe her in her element providing wonderful hospitality. She's been putting together some exclusive celebration menu items and decorations. It has also been a time of reflection on the first year of business. If you're in or around Boulder, Colorado, we'd love for you to stop by Creature Comforts Cafe to say hello and enjoy the festivities. See the Instagram account for all the details.

Have a great weekend,

– Joel

The power of minimal clear constraints

2022-08-28T22:42:12Z

The power of minimal clear constraints

Hello!

After some time off and an eventful couple of weeks at Buffer, I’m back with another newsletter.

Read on for links I saved recently, book highlights, the latest at Buffer, something that’s been on my mind, and a general personal update.

I’ve really enjoyed the email conversations I’ve had from the first couple of newsletters. So if anything stands out in this one, or you have a specific thought or question on something I share, don’t hesitate to hit reply and say hello.

If this isn’t for you, unsubscribe anytime with the link at the bottom of the email.

🌍 Links I saved recently

How to motivate employees? Don’t.
→ I agree with Claire Lew’s assertion that motivation is not something we can give people. Instead, we must create the environment for intrinsic motivation to flourish. Great advice on doing that in this piece.

Why is scaling past 50 employees so hard?
→ From first hand experience, things become significantly more complex and challenging when your company grows beyond 50 people. This article resonated and has some great suggestions on managing the transition.

The flipped meeting model
→ I sometimes feel in a minority as a leader of a remote company who also really values meetings. This piece felt like a balanced argument for less and more productive meetings, rather than none at all.

Spend More Time Alone
→ As an introvert, I’ve always had rituals to ensure I have time alone to recharge. Recently I’ve gone a step further, building habits for reflection away from inputs, time to be alone with my mind. I enjoyed this article discussing solitude in these terms.

Crumb Time
→ I really like this concept from David Kadavy for how to set yourself up to make the most of small bits of time you have day-to-day.

📚 What I’ve highlighted recently

Think about your favorite athlete, musician, or actor. Behind the scenes of their public persona, there is a process they follow for regularly turning new ideas into creative output. The same goes for inventors, engineers, and effective leaders. Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process.

From Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

There’s a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. With the latter, you’re constructing at the same time that you’re criticizing. You’re building as you’re breaking down, making new pieces to work with out of the stuff you’ve just ripped apart. That’s an art form in itself.

Quote by Andrew Stanton in Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

👨🏻‍💻 New and noteworthy at Buffer

This past week was Build Week at Buffer, an idea I had near the beginning of the year to tap back into our startup and entrepreneurial nature as individuals and a company. We invited ideas from the whole company and asked people to pick their top 3 to work on. From there, we formed small cross-functional 3-5 person teams, connecting people who don’t usually work together. With a cleared out schedule from regular work for the week, everyone totally embraced the concept and created a ton of value for customers and the company.
→ Read more about Build Week

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Katelin Holloway on the Lattice All Hands podcast about how we approach the 4-day workweek at Buffer. She’s a fantastic interviewer and we had a great conversation hopping into a variety of aspects of the 4-day workweek at Buffer, including how we decided to try it, how it needs to work with your culture and strategy, and how other companies could approach adopting a 4-day workweek.
→ Listen to my interview with Katelin

🧠 Something that’s been on my mind

With the past week dedicated to Build Week at Buffer, it’s something that’s very fresh in my mind, and I have a number of reflections that have been forming over the weekend:

First of all, Build Week has been a massive success for Buffer. This is what someone in the team shared about the experience:
“Build Week has been truly phenomenal and probably my favourite week in the 347 weeks I’ve spent at Buffer!”
We designed Build Week to be different from a typical hack week (we’ve done many of these in the past, and found them super valuable):
The entire goal of Build Week was framed as: creating (and shipping in some form) value, in the space of a week.
With a traditional hack week, it was more of a time for engineers to work on what they desire, outside of the regular roadmap.
The work in traditional hack weeks was usually focused on refactoring, bugs or small features that people didn’t feel like they had time to fit in, or just a very raw prototype of some future functionality.
In contrast, Build Week projects were super varied, and many of them were ambitious.
We didn’t put very much process in place. The high level guidance of “creating and shipping value”, combined with the constraint of “within a week” led to a ton of creativity and drive.
In retrospect, I think we created great, simple “rules of the game”, but left a ton of freedom in the how.
This is one of my biggest takeaways of what we achieved with Build Week: the power of minimal clear constraints
One of the significant successes of Build Week was also that we focused on bringing together people who don’t generally work together. Each team had good representation of different functions.
We only had two required deliverables: a 2 minute video at the end of day 2, and a 4 minute video to wrap up the project on day 4 (we work a 4-day workweek). We also had a new Slack channel called #build-week for everyone to share these videos, and for general chatter and advice requests. This was the right amount of deliverables to drive some whole company connection and celebration, while allowing teams to get deep into their project.
One of my goals was that Build Week instills a new sense of creativity, innovation and comfort with uncertainty in the team, as well as reveals how productive we can be in focused small groups. The energy during Build Week was incredible, I have no doubt Build Week will be talked about regularly for months into the future, and that we will be discussing what learnings we can take from the week into our regular work going forward.
Personally, I had a blast. I worked in a team of 4 and we build a new page on our marketing site to showcase how distributed we are. As part of the project, I jumped back into some coding, learned much more about React and our marketing site architecture and infrastructure (e.g. Lambda functions), as well as how to create a PR and deploy our marketing site. I feel a new level of confidence to make quick fixes and changes to our marketing site and set them up for review and deployment by someone in the team. Check out the new Team Map page we built.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks and months as we share all the projects that were worked on in Build Week and ship some awesome new functionality in Buffer that was built during the week.

🙋🏻‍♂️ A general update from me

For the last two weeks of July and the first week of August, my wife Jess and I took a trip to the UK and France with our son Milo. It was ultimately shaped around my need to go back home to renew my U.S. visa, but we made the most of the visit.

We spent the first week in Oxford with my parents and saw friends and I even had a chance to meet a few folks in the team who live nearby. For the second week, we were in Hayle, Cornwall with my siblings. It was a fun-filled week with three couples and three kids (Milo is 15 months and I have two nephews, 4 and 8). I’m originally from Sheffield and these were two destinations that were new to me.

It was wonderful to be in the UK during the Summer (most of my visits tend to be for Christmas), though we did catch the heatwave which was challenging on many fronts. For the final week, we were in London waiting for my passport to be ready for pickup. This was a little stressful as we didn’t know when I’d be able to pick it up, and were booking our hotel a couple of nights at a time. The day I got my passport back we hopped on the Eurostar and spent the final few days in Paris before flying home. Milo was a big fan of the baguettes and croissants.

It’s great to be home in Boulder, and after two weeks, I’m finally getting back into a great routine. I’ve worked out twice this week, and Milo is sleeping well after a very disrupted first week back.

On the Buffer side of things, while we’re still in a long-trending decline of our key metrics (see this brand new dashboard of all our metrics created by a team in build week), I’ve recently been finding new ways to dig into and look at our data, and see more clarity of our path towards growth again.

With this new perspective, I’ve been feeling a greater conviction and proactiveness about shifting our culture and performance in the necessary ways to transition into a new and exciting chapter of Buffer the journey.

Have a great week ahead,

– Joel

Give flexibility to get flexibility

2022-06-22T23:15:00Z

Give flexibility to get flexibility

Hi 👋🏻

I'm here with my second newsletter and a variety of links I saved in the past week, a couple of my most recent book highlights, something that's been on my mind, and a general personal update.

Thanks to everyone who replied via email to the first newsletter! One of the reasons I'm establishing this habit is as a way to connect more and build community again. Does anything within this newsletter resonate or catch your attention? Hit reply and let's chat about it.

And as always, if this isn’t for you, unsubscribe anytime with the link at the bottom of the email.

– Joel

🌍 Links I saved this week

Beacon is switching to a four-day work week. Here's why.
→ I'm always on the lookout for companies adopting a 4-day workweek. While Beacon are not remote, much of their approach aligns with Buffer. Especially the focus on ambition, being highly productive, and on optimizing and automating.

Optimism Shapes Reality
→ An interesting article suggesting rather persuasively that a focus on optimism can lead to significantly faster timelines and better outcomes, especially if a culture of optimism can be scaled.

Supporting the Modern Family in the Workplace
→ I enjoyed this thought-provoking podcast conversation between Simmone Taitt and Katelin Holloway about how Simmone's company Poppy Seed Health thrived while enabling half the team to take family leave last year.

A guide to curation in community
→ I'm currently reflecting on community and how to re-ignite our focus on it at Buffer. This article got me thinking about the role curation (of articles, quotes, tips, answers, etc.) plays in community, for the value of everyone involved.

📚 What I highlighted this week

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

From Atomic Habits by James Clear

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

From Range by David J. Epstein

🧠 Something that’s been on my mind

I've had a number of different conversations within and outside Buffer about the 4-day workweek, which is something we've been doing for over two years now. The timing has felt right recently to reflect, debate, and ultimately clarify and document what we've found to be the right approach to the 4-day workweek. Here are a few key points:

It's important to think about the 4-day workweek in the context of other key elements of your company: values / culture, strategy, operating principles, business model, market, etc. For Buffer, we're a fully distributed, remote company spread across all the main time zones, and this alters how we need to approach a genuinely successful 4-day workweek, compared to a company where everyone is located in the same city.
We were early with remote work at Buffer, and one of the fundamental concepts that made it work for us was "you give flexibility to get flexibility". The beauty of remote work, and I would argue the 4-day workweek too, is that it enables the individual to craft a work week that is optimal for themselves, based on their personal situation. You get a ton of flexibility at Buffer, but in order for teams to achieve ambitious results, and this whole thing to work and continue long into the future, we need everyone to be willing to give flexibility, too. This was always the case with a remote team where regular hours overlap may be limited, and is even more true when we add the 4-day workweek into the mix and reduce the overall amount of time we each work.
There's a key risk I've started to be aware of with the 4-day workweek for a culture like Buffer with high trust, ambition, flexibility, autonomy, self-motivation and commitment. The risk is that the 4-day workweek brings rigidity and becomes too prescriptive, and actually ends up taking away that act of crafting your own most optimal way of working. Some of this is in the name itself, which brings the concept of time back when we've worked hard to be results and output-focused rather than time and input focused. The other is that the idea of 4 days creates a fear or hesitation to send messages, ship new customer value, or otherwise "work" outside of a specific 4 days. We're starting to surface and talk about some of the really creative ways people lean into flexibility in the way they structure their days and weeks, while achieving great results and outcomes in collaboration with their team.
Philosophically, I believe that the high level idea of a 4-day workweek is a significant step forward. I believe that we can all achieve more in less time if we are diligent about how we spend our precious time. I also believe that with the 5-day workweek, the balance of work to leisure to idle time is off and doesn't allow the reflection time needed to be creative and do your best work. Put simply, it can't be that the traditional 5-day workweek is the best way to work. It was established in a very different time. I love that the concept of a 4-day workweek challenges the status quo, and therefore naturally leads to questions about how to implement it and make it genuinely work long-term. We're starting to lean into that opportunity to answer the questions more clearly for our team and those who follow Buffer, to share how we are striving to make it work and keep it going long-term.

🙋🏻‍♂️ A general update from me

Last time I shared that I was heading to LA for some time in person with my exec team. We had a productive and energizing week getting aligned on current strategy, culture shifts, people, structure, and performance. We also shared anecdotes and life stories, increasing our connection and psychological safety. And as someone living in the land-locked state of Colorado, I took every opportunity to eat seafood.

In other news, this is a big week at Buffer as we just launched TikTok scheduling and direct posting. It's available on all plans, including the free plan. TikTok is a huge opportunity for ambitious individuals and small businesses to tap into to grow their audience and build their brand, so I'm really excited that we now have it in the toolkit we offer. If you have a chance to try it out, please hit reply and let me know how you find it.

Have a great rest of the week,

– Joel

Reflections on freemium

2022-06-05T17:21:41Z

Reflections on freemium

Hi there!

I’m trying something new. I’d like to be in touch with people (that’s you!) on a more regular basis.

So, welcome to my newsletter. My goal is to do this weekly, though I’m not going to hold myself perfectly to that standard.

To start with, my plan is to share the most interesting links I saved this week, a few powerful highlights from books I’m currently reading, and write a few reflections on one topic that’s been on my mind.

I hope you enjoy it! Hit reply to share any thoughts. And if this isn’t for you, unsubscribe anytime with the link at the bottom of the email.

– Joel

🌍 Links I saved this week

Square Defangs Difficult Decisions with this System — Here’s How
→ This article is full of insights on improving decision making within organizations, particularly for difficult decisions. I’ve recently been calibrating which decisions I delegate and which I take on in the company, and this guidance really resonated.

Leave Me Alone Open Startup Page
→ Check out Leave Me Alone’s open page where they share their revenue, customer numbers, expenses, profitability, and much more. I love seeing this kind of transparency from companies, especially early on.

Subvert shitty norms
→ This article got me thinking about the supposed best practices that we sometimes don’t take a moment to reflect on, and feel comfortable about before implementing. It’s a great call for higher standards.

20 years of Atlassian, 20 lessons learned
→ It’s hard to believe Atlassian started over 20 years ago. This is a fun post with some great nuggets of wisdom they’ve learned over the years. Great advice on making freemium work, sustaining innovation, and investing in culture.

Structural transparency vs content-level transparency
→ As a proponent of transparency, I enjoyed the differentiation between structural and content-level transparency. The latter being the act of sharing raw insight into work as it’s happening. I agree that this can garner far more trust.

📚 What I highlighted this week

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

*From *Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at odds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.

From Principles by Ray Dalio

🧠 Something that’s been on my mind

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about freemium. It’s always been core to our strategy at Buffer, and we’ve recently been doubling down on it and challenging ourselves to think how we can embrace freemium even more.

Two thoughts in particular on freemium:

If you don’t get your free limits right in freemium, it just doesn’t work. However, most think about this purely in terms of being too generous, and harming the free to paid conversion rate. I think the opposite is also a big risk: limiting the free plan too much, that you don’t provide enough value to drive genuine consistent free plan usage.
Any company that has success with freemium will always be at risk of the temptation to restrict the free plan more, or even drop freemium completely. The short-term A/B test will always favor dropping freemium, as if you test free plan vs free trial, the free trial variant will always likely win within any timeframe you could do an A/B test. The short-term revenue bump is hard to resist. The longer-term consequences are often not thought about enough.

🙋🏻‍♂️ A general update from me

Tomorrow I’m heading to LA for a Buffer exec team on-site. It’ll be our first one in over 2 years, and it’s been a long time coming. We’re at an exciting yet also challenging time as a company, and being able to align and go deeper on outlook for the rest of the year and strategic focuses, not to mention just having quality time together, is going to be awesome.

On the personal side, this week I completed my third week of my strength exercise routine. I’m working out three days a week (back, chest, legs), and it’s felt really good to get back into my flow after a couple of slower months.

Until next time,

– Joel