Flexibility in the product

Up: § 2023 Shareholder Letter Index

To succeed in our down-market shift and our goals to be a much more widespread product, we need to achieve both breadth and comprehensiveness of functionality (to cater to a wide range of use cases), and simplicity (to ensure the product is intuitive and easy to use for individuals). One of our key approaches to achieving this is by creating a much more flexible product.

In 2023, we made a significant upgrade to our existing Campaigns functionality, in the process transforming it into Tags. Whereas Campaigns was very prescriptive as to the use case, Tags are much more flexible. You can use tags for campaigns, but you can also use them for much more, such as for the type of post, for goals, or verticals. We launched Tags for all plans, with a limit of 3 tags on the free plan, adhering to our strategy of freemium across almost all of our functionality.

AI is also a way for us to add flexibility and save customers time. We see AI as one of our biggest opportunities, and also something that could be a threat. If we execute well, we can stay ahead of the ways that AI can transform the social media management space and continue to be a thriving and successful offering. This is why we launched our AI Assistant early in 2023, and made two further iterations to improve it along the way. We have still only scratched the surface with how much we can incorporate AI into the product to streamline usage of Buffer.

One of the investments we’re making in 2024 is to rethink how we approach supporting new and a wider range of channels. We have 13 years of experience adapting to a variety of levels of API access for publishing, analytics and engagement with social networks. We’re planning an upgrade which will enable us to help customers no matter the API limitations, through functionality that gracefully adapts to the access available. This will also allow us to accelerate the number of channels we support, which we have validated correlates with growth.