A focus on efficiency as a team

Up: § 2023 Shareholder Letter Index

A key change we made was to get back into “build mode” as a company. We had slipped into maintenance mode, which is easy to do when growth is consistent and feels like it can be expected. As we started to plateau and decline, it started to feel even more alarming, as we were effectively managing and maintaining our decline rather than taking necessary action to turn it around. This has served as a reminder that no matter the season, we can only keep growing and innovating if we keep building. Embracing “build mode” led to a variety of changes across the organization to shift us back towards being a group of builders.

During 2023 we simplified our communication by significantly reducing the number of slack channels and establishing a clear and intuitive naming convention for all future channels. We also streamlined our organizational structure by reducing layers and choosing not to backfill and replace every manager who moved on. We made the tough decision to say goodbye to a few folks in cases where we had more managers than necessary, or where we were skewed too junior. Through these changes, we have been able to reduce the manager:individual contributor ratio.

We increased the expectations of all leaders and managers being in the details, having on the ground context and truly owning the results of that team or function rather than primarily being concerned about managing people.

Finally, we’ve set our sights on getting back to profitability and believe we can achieve this in late 2024 or early 2025. There are a variety of reasons that profitability is so important to us at Buffer. We're not on a path of raising continual rounds of funding, and we have not raised a round of funding in nine years. We are essentially customer funded, and therefore we must be profitable for that to work long term. Beyond that, profitability allows us to breathe and put some resources into bigger bets and innovations that could lead to more step change outcomes.