Making corrections from our previous era

Up: § 2023 Shareholder Letter Index

Over the years, Buffer become fairly slow moving. This was true both in terms of what we built and also how we worked internally. The simplest reason I can point to for that decline in pace is that we became debilitated by debt. At around 10 years old as a company we had accrued significant tech, process and cultural debt. Our market had become very crowded and we had not adapted effectively to maintain our market leadership position. We lost the clear differentiation we had, both in terms of our market position with the product and additionally our culture to a certain extent had become diluted and less bold and unique.

We had been resting on our laurels and continued building layer upon layer on top of what initially got us our growth and success, without real breakthroughs, changes, or reflecting from first principles. Our attempts to find new growth were inconsistent and lacked grounding in a clear overall mission and conviction. The very high quality we once had of both our product and service gradually degraded. All of these issues were reflected in our numbers, which plateaued and then started to decline. The numbers started to feel out of our control, but were the result of our many cumulative actions. We had made changes to the product and our pricing and packaging that moved us away from the very people we initially served. I felt my own passion for what we were doing start to wane and I knew that I needed to do some deeper reflection in order to feel motivated once again.

Personally, I was becoming less and less proud of what Buffer had become, and the ways I had allowed it to slip there. As the CEO, I was too hands off and was too many steps removed from the work and customers. So, at the beginning of 2022, I started to make an increasing number of changes to get us back on track to the nimble, bold, unique brand we’ve become known as.