Joel Gascoigne's blog

Post - November 2, 2024 - 1730560340

2024-11-02T15:12:20Z

Here's a reflection on Buffer's Q3 which I recently sent to shareholders:

We ended Q3 2024 with $1,602,052 in MRR or $19,224,628 in ARR. This represents 3.46% growth from Q2, which is our strongest quarterly growth in almost 5 years. We also grew paying customers by 2.89% to 57,666, our strongest growth in over 6 years. We continued our trend from Q2 of profitability in each month of Q3, and achieved a net income of $125,289 for the quarter.

Segmenting out Legacy and New Buffer customers, we can understand the numbers and trajectory in higher definition. New Buffer now represents 83.2% of total MRR, and 80.2% of paying customers. We saw an MRR/ARR growth rate for the New Buffer segment of 7.82% for Q3.

The delta between our 7.82% growth rate for New Buffer vs our overall growth rate of 3.46% shows that we have a strong foundation of growth in our current and majority customer segment. In Q3 we added $83,427 in net MRR growth for New Buffer, with $12,861 (15.4%) of this coming from Legacy customers migrating over to our New Buffer plans, while Legacy Buffer as a segment declined by $30,259 in net MRR. This indicates that we will continue to see strong overall growth rates going forward.

The Legacy segment continues to decline as we are not adding any new customers to it, and it has a natural churn rate. In Q3 the Legacy segment declined by 13.81% to $268,974 in MRR or $3,227,693 in ARR. We are happily tracking the decline without aggressively forcing customers to migrate to New Buffer plans. Eventually we will aim to get this segment to zero, which will enable simplicity in our product, architecture and customer service.

I predicted in my Q2 update that Q3 would be the quarter we see an overall increase in the number of paying customers once again. We are celebrating achieving this, and looking ahead to how we can continue to achieve strong growth in both the number of paying customers and MRR/ARR so that we can see many more strong growth quarters ahead. I expect we will see a strong Q4 despite the usual seasonal dip in usage of our product during the holidays, thanks to a continued strong growth rate of New Buffer and the lessening pull down effect of Legacy as the segment declines.

Post - October 25, 2024 - 1729910925

2024-10-26T02:48:45Z

If I were to rebrand Founder Mode, I would suggest Back To Basics Mode or First Principles Mode.

What strikes me about Founder Mode is that what it's really about, is cutting through the cruft of process and structure in a company, and getting back to the core of what made it exist in the first place.

When you go all the way to first principles, you go to the founding of the company. That's why Founders are so well suited to pull off this shift of priorities and reorganizing of a company. When you reflect on the founding of a company, you realize that there are only a few things that really made it take off in the first place:

Building a great product
Getting the word out there
Taking care of customers

That is, for me, what I would boil down the business to. That's all we focused on at Buffer in the first few years. Down to the fact that the first few roles were engineers, designers, content marketers and customer support folks. The fact that we truly had focus on those things and not much else, is why we gained traction and grew rapidly.

Over time, as a company grows, you have to add structure and processes just in order to manage a larger group of humans in service of the vision and goals. And with more people, management becomes a meaningful aspect of many peoples' roles. The structure and processes can sometimes get in the way of what really matters in making a business successful.

And when you end up with more structure and process than you need for the stage you are at, it can truly become debilitating. That's why part of Founder Mode has been flattening the organization and the Founder really getting back into the details.

That's where I'd add a fourth item to the list:

Designing a great company

At a certain size, you need to be intentional about how the company is designed and structured to achieve great outcomes.

When I reflect on the last few years, I've gone through my own version of Founder Mode. But I'd describe it as Back To Basics Mode or First Principles Mode.

This shift hasn't been about me; it's been about us as an organization reminding ourselves of how we made something out of nothing in the first place. And really getting to work on building a great product, getting the word out there about it, and taking care of our customers.

Post - October 1, 2024 - 1727842805

2024-10-02T04:20:05Z

We recently crossed $19M in ARR at Buffer… for the second time.

It's been a journey, to say the least. We first crossed $19M in ARR in September 2018. It's hard to believe that's six years ago.

The chart tells the story well - it's been a rollercoaster and the hardest thing I've worked through as a Founder CEO. There's a lot of pain represented in that curve. To be declining for multiple years is demoralizing and exhausting. But I always planned to build a long-term business and was determined to lead us back to thriving, so I remained optimistic despite the fact it took some searching to find the path to new growth.

In many ways, this is a failure for me as CEO and for us as a business. It truly is. I fully own that as a fact.

And yet, I see it as a success too. We plateaued, declined, and rediscovered growth as a business in those years. I grew significantly as a leader, and we'll soon cross 14 years since I started the company. We went through this cycle without doing layoffs, thanks to the fact we entered our decline with profitability and a healthy cash balance.

Most importantly, we figured out what we are for as a business; who we're serving. For me, that involved reminding myself why I even started Buffer. I love building for and serving entrepreneurs, and I love helping creators and small businesses get off the ground and thrive.We re-committed to the business model that serves these folks, and drove our early growth, which is a highly generous freemium SaaS offering. I get a kick out of delivering immense value compared to what we charge for the product, and challenging myself to continually improve our tools.

Through the low lows of our multi-year decline, we rediscovered our DNA and the vital components of our culture. We found a way to blend that with what the world and our space looks like today, to arrive at a strategy and way of working that's helping us thrive again and ensure we can exist for another decade and beyond. I found a new level of passion and conviction for what we're doing, for the potential we have as a business, and the ways I can lead and do work that fuels me to help us fulfill those ambitions.

The first time we crossed $19M, the writing was on the wall for our looming decline. Pace of product improvement and innovation had stalled; we were debilitated by tech debt we didn't yet know how to manage. We succumbed to squeezing revenue out of existing customers, and were already seeing a steep decline in new paying customers.

This time around, we are moving faster and more boldly than we have in years, and we've re-centered ourselves around growing by serving more customers and continually adding real value, rather than through price increases and short-term growth hacks.

There's no doubt we will run into challenging cycles again in our future. I'm confident we'll find our way through those too. To me, that's a natural part of building a long-term business.

Onwards to $20M, again.

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Post - October 1, 2024 - 1727795563

2024-10-01T15:12:43Z

We've fallen into a habit at Buffer of collaborating primarily through recurring group and 1:1 meetings. As an organization, we have many docs filled with agenda items for these 1:1 and group status meetings.

It's something I've been reflecting on for a while, and I had a theory that if we could transfer all of those agenda items to be individual discussion topics in an async, transparent collaboration space, we would benefit immensely.

There are a number of problems with prescheduled recurring meetings utilized to discuss multiple agenda items:

Agenda items end up being "saved up" for the upcoming 1:1 or group meeting, which slows down progress and leads to items being discussed later rather than when they arise and the person has the most clarity in their mind
These agenda-filled status meetings often have too many items in the list, and everything feels rushed. If it's the primary way collaboration happens, it means that collaboration is constrained to be shallow rather than really delving into a topic.
Many agenda items can benefit from someone being involved who happens to not be in that 1:1 or group meeting
As a leader I found myself sharing the same current strategic reflection or decision across multiple 1:1 and group meetings, which quickly feels inefficient when a broad group could benefit from knowing that information

So a couple of weeks ago I decided to conduct an experiment at Buffer. I called it Collaboration Week. Here's how it worked:

For the week, we cancelled recurring meetings and had all of our discussions in Campsite, the tool we use for async collaboration and decision making.
Anyone could start a topic, and others would jump in and add their reflections.
The discussions we had were across all areas, and the team didn't shy away from raising significant challenges and bold ideas.
A wide range of folks across different areas participated in very constructive discussion and debate, and we had a number of breakthroughs.
Towards the end of the week I nudged the group to take discussions towards decisions and conclusions.

Overall, the week was a huge success and I'm now reflecting on the week and making decisions as to how it should affect and adjust how we work on an ongoing basis.

We covered many more discussions than we would have been able to synchronously. And they all happened out in the open for the whole company to observe. I found that people regularly took words from another topic and quoted them to help us make the right decisions in other areas. There's something about building the passage of time into a topic naturally by having it in an asynchronous collaboration tool that helped us feel less rushed than we do in our meeting-heavy collaboration style. And perhaps the most exciting outcome was that we reached all the way to fundamentals in many areas, rather than solving micro-issues and remaining at local maxima.

Post - September 26, 2024 - 1727363703

2024-09-26T15:15:03Z

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 intuition 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.

Post - September 22, 2024 - 1727057363

2024-09-23T02:09:23Z

If as a founder of a growing company you’re not working with a coach (even better, a therapist too), you’re most likely not uncovering your own flaws and ingrained issues that will ultimately hold back the business sooner or later.

Post - September 20, 2024 - 1726835167

2024-09-20T12:26:07Z

Here are Buffer's August 2024 results:

MRR: $1,583,115 (+1.07%)
ARR: $18,997,380 (+1.07%)
Customers: 57,205 (+0.91%)
MAU: 150,519 (-1.84%)
ARPU: $27.67 (+0.18%)
Team Size: 71 (-1 person)
Revenue Per Employee: $267,569 (+2.50%)

This is part of the update I sent out yesterday to alumni and investor shareholders of Buffer (80 people on the list).

A few reflections:

We’ve achieved our eighth consecutive month of growth alongside our fifth consecutive month of profitability.
We're very happy with the current pace of growth in MRR/ARR and number of paying customers, while we also have a clear strategy and roadmap to maintain and even increase this pace of growth.
The past few months have been particularly significant as we've achieved the 'holy grail' of growth we've been striving for: increasing both our MRR and our number of paying customers and, in turn, serving more people.
In August, we achieved a significant milestone with 99,084 signups, making it our best month for signup performance in over four years.
We continue our strong pace of adding value and in August we added 𝕏 / Twitter long form posts, and Threaded posts and content warnings for Mastodon.
Growing Monthly Active Users is now something we're putting a lot of focus on. Despite our turnaround and growth across other metrics, MAU has remained relatively flat for the last two years. We have a number of opportunities in mind to start to significantly grow this number, which is an important early indicator to continued growth of paying customers.

Read the August 2024 shareholder update in full: https://buffer.com/shareholders/august-2024

To read the August 2024 shareholder update in full, look for the link in the comments.

Long post for 𝕏 with no images
Long post to LinkedIn with PDF carousel, with first comment

Carousel post to Instagram with full caption

Short post to Threads with carousel, second threaded post with link
Short post to Bluesky, no images, second threaded post with link
Short post to Mastodon, no images, second threaded post with link

[x] Download all the images from Figma

Post - September 6, 2024 - 1725653635

2024-09-06T20:13:55Z

I'm tinkering today with my personal website, and in particular my Posts page. This page is my own implementation of the POSSE concept (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).

The big upgrade I've made for myself today is that it's now bi-directional. In that, I can create a post from my notes (Obsidian) and easily push it out to all networks, or (this is the new part) I can post something natively (e.g. on Threads) and then easily pull it into my notes and publish it to my website. It's semi-manual in that I need to run a script, but it's working nicely!

My goal has been to implement POSSE and gradually make it as streamlined and seamless as possible for myself. This is a big step forward for me, especially in being able to share quick thoughts and still pull them back to my own ownership.

If you want to take a peek at what I've been working on, check out Posts on my website. And let me know if you have any questions or suggestions! https://joel.is/posts/

Post - September 5, 2024 - 1725592984

2024-09-06T03:23:04Z

The web is feeling really fun again right now, in a way I haven't felt in probably over a decade.

It's the resurgence of open standards with the open social web (Fediverse, AT Protocol), and I also feel like I'm seeing a rise in personal blogs and writing again, too. There's a lot more tinkering going on again, it's inspiring.

Anyone else feeling this? Let's keep this energy going, please!

Post - August 23, 2024 - 1724436928

2024-08-23T12:15:28Z

I'm excited to share that I'm starting a regular newsletter 📰 🎉

My goal with a newsletter is to give you insight into how I operate while building a long term, independent, profitable business with big ambitions. You'll be able to tap into what I'm reading, highlighting, and thinking about as I work towards building Buffer to the next level. Every newsletter will be packed with value and I'm sure you'll find one or two nuggets that make you think.

Here's what you'll receive via email (every 1-2 weeks):

💬 My recent most-discussed posts
🌍 Links I've recently saved
📚 What I've highlighted in articles or books
👨🏻‍💻 New and noteworthy at Buffer
🧠 Something that's been on my mind
🙋🏻‍♂️ A general update from me

I'll be sending the first one later today. Subscribe here: https://joel.is/newsletter/

Post - August 20, 2024 - 1724158289

2024-08-20T06:51:29Z

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.

For 8 of our 13 years, we’ve been profitable. And since 2017, we have bought back 21.2% of fully diluted shares.

Despite being in a phase of decline the past few years, we entered that period with a very strong bank balance of over $6M. We did not have to carry out any layoffs, throughout the pandemic or when they were very prevalent in 2022/23.

Not only that, we have been able to continue buying back stock from folks who were seeking liquidity. In 2023, we carried out three stock repurchases, at a collective cost of $889K. Buying back stock during a period of decline has set us up to be in a strong position.

This year, we're back to growth and profitability. We're fast approaching $19M in ARR and it feels like there's a ton of opportunity in our space right now. I enjoy operating with the flexibility to go our own unique path and really build something meaningful for customers and the team.

As with life, there are seasons to a company. I love that we've created a company where we can embrace the various seasons of our industry and business, rather than turn everything upside down after one tough quarter.

Post - August 16, 2024 - 1723871100

2024-08-16T23:05:00Z

After many years of wondering whether I should invest more in video content creation, I've decided that for a while I am going to primarily focus on writing. I like James Gill's comments on writing vs audio or video:

"A wonderful thing about writing is it tends to last a lot longer than audio or video. It’s easier to find via search, and can more easily be edited to bring it up to date." – James Gill

Post - August 16, 2024 - 1723870908

2024-08-16T23:01:48Z

I love this approach to leadership and sharing the culture and strategy from Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, the CEO of Lego:

"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."

Post - August 16, 2024 - 1723865368

2024-08-16T21:29:28Z

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.

The types of dimensions this could be applied to are those such as friendships, family / relationships, exercise and fitness level, investment and financial freedom, hobbies or skills, experiences, mindfulness and self work, etc. These are a lot of things to work on alongside building a company.

Personally, no matter what the outcome of Buffer, and no matter the phase it is in, I want to have several other dimensions of my life in which I’m progressing. If I approach things in this way, then whichever moment in time I pick, whether 1 year in, 5 years in or 15 years in, I will have progressed in life in terms of my overall goals and dreams.

Alongside trying to make Buffer successful, I also work to become more fit through strength training, I'm trying to become a better Dad, a better partner to my wife, and I want to progress in hobbies; which right now include playing piano, writing and growing my network, and tinkering with code, automation and AI. I’m also trying to build a new cardio habit and doing it by trying out cycling with an indoor bike trainer. I've been building Buffer for almost 14 years now, and I've had a wide variety of hobbies, goals, and self-improvements I've focused on over time.

This approach is in contrast to the "deferred life plan", where you go all-in on your startup and sacrifice everything else, with the hope that one day it will all work out. I see people do this a lot, but it could be potentially devastating if the startup doesn't work out. And regardless of the outcome, startups come with so many lows amongst the highs that it's really worthwhile to have something else that's going well in life on those tough days, weeks or months.

Post - August 16, 2024 - 1723863956

2024-08-16T21:05:56Z

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.

That said, to say we offer “no incentive” is really short-changing ourselves. What I mean by that is, if we show that we are an engaged, nimble, actively developed product and we have a team that connects with customers, acts on feedback and circles back to present those improvements we’ve made, then really, we have already built a significant incentive for anyone to connect with us.

This is the ongoing work we must keep up (this work exists everywhere, but especially in Marketing, Advocacy, Product, Social / Community and anywhere we have opportunities to connect directly with customers). To be clear, this isn't easy work. This is the hard work to create a brand and business where people are excited to share their feedback, rather than one where you have to beg for feedback.

And this is what we're fortunate to experience. People who use Buffer are awesome, and generally love to connect with us and share their feedback to improve the product. Many team members who have joined Buffer, especially product designers and product managers who seek customer feedback to do their work, have shared how pleasantly surprised they've been about Buffer customers being responsive and generous with their time in sharing their experience with the product.

If we keep this work up of genuinely engaging, listening and then improving, then it is evident to customers and observers that we care and will act on feedback. As a result they will already have an incentive to connect and contribute, because they have seen evidence that doing so actually can make a difference to the product that they’re using.

In other words, the hack to easily getting great customer research, for free, is to really work with your customers, listen to them, respond to them, make them feel heard and genuinely improve the product based on their input. This is what we strive for every day at Buffer.

We've dabbled with incentives a few times. Each time we did it, I never felt great about it. It took me a while to put a finger on it, but I eventually realized that it felt off because if we have to offer those incentives, then we are falling short in providing the type of experience we strive for (which would obviate the need for those incentives). Offering incentives is now one of those things that I feel like I have to fight for us to avoid as a company, because it's so prevalent and it can be thought of as a best (or at least a normal) practice.

Post - August 3, 2024 - 1722714092

2024-08-03T13:41:32Z

Buffer has now existed for almost 14 years, and throughout that time I've seen a lot change in social media, and in our space of tools to support people and businesses with social. We're an outlier as a product and company that has existed for that kind of timeframe with our mission and values left in tact. We've been fortunate to be able to scale to 56,000 paying customers and over $18M in annual revenue while taking our own unique path. We've maintained control of the company and our ability to go boldly in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team.

This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. These networks have been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to.

The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term.

I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon) as the prominent implementation, and AT Protocol from Bluesky. What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web.

I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in third-party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space.

Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do.

We recently added Bluesky to Buffer, and you can now use Buffer to seamlessly post to the top 3 new decentralized social networks: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

I encourage you to add these decentralized social networks to your channels in Buffer, and start participating in this new era of social today.

This is an excerpt from my recent article on Bluesky and the significance of decentralized social networks. Read it in full here: https://joel.is/bluesky

Get started with Buffer for decentralized social: https://buffer.com

Post - August 2, 2024 - 1722623996

2024-08-02T12:39:56Z

I just sent the monthly shareholder update for June 2024. This goes to all of our investor and alumni shareholders (75 people on the list) and I share it publicly as part of our value of transparency. Here are the highlights:

Buffer's metrics for June 2024:

MRR: $1,548,844 (+0.82%)
ARR: $18,586,128 (+0.82%)
Customers: 56,046 (+0.22%)
Revenue Per Employee: $261,776 (+0.82%)
Net Income: $86,538 (+22.90%)

In June, we:

Launched our Meta Threads integration
Launched the Duplicate action
Hit our 3rd consecutive month of profitability

Read the June shareholder update in full (includes a Q2 2024 reflection from me) at https://buffer.com/shareholders/june-2024

Post - July 30, 2024 - 1722341882

2024-07-30T06:18:02Z

Today, 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: https://buffer.com/bluesky

Bluesky brings a new era of decentralized social media, focused on ownership and control. It is also contributing to a resurgence of the open web with social media protocols. Adding Bluesky to Buffer is personally very meaningful for me. I put together a deeper reflection here: joel.is/bluesky/

Post - June 25, 2024 - 1719330542

2024-06-25T09:49:00Z

It's here - Buffer now supports Threads! 🆕

Head to your account or sign up for a new one to connect your Meta Threads profile and enable planning, scheduling, posting and analytics. ✨

We hope this can supercharge your productivity and make it a little easier to participate in this special new social network. 🎉

Get set up with Buffer for Threads:

→ See all the functionality we support for Threads: https://buffer.com/threads
→ Read more about why we're excited to add Threads to Buffer: https://buffer.com/resources/buffers-threads-integration/
→ If you have a Buffer account, add Threads here: https://account.buffer.com/channels/connect
→ If you're new to Buffer, sign up directly here to use Threads right away: https://buff.ly/threads

Post - June 24, 2024 - 1719244571

2024-06-24T09:56:00Z

This week I'm starting to ease back into working on Buffer after 12 weeks of family leave. It's been wonderful to be able to focus on mama, our baby boy and his big brother, and I'm also feeling mentally energized to dive back in. 2024 is a big year for Buffer and we have some significant announcements on the way, starting with one very soon today 🎉

Post - June 18, 2024 - 1718743710

2024-06-18T20:48:30Z

Are you in or near Boulder, Colorado? My wife is hosting Outer Range Brewing at her cafe, Creature Comforts this Friday, 4-7pm. Great beer in a great setting.

Would be fun to see you there!

🍻 What? Beer tasting with Outer Range Brewing
📍 Where? Creature Comforts: 1647 Pearl St, Boulder, CO 80302
📅 When? Friday, June 21 · 4-7pm
🎟️ Price: $5 ticket includes 5 beer samples and complimentary bites

Details and tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/621-beer-tasting-with-outer-range-brewing-swag-raffle-tickets-921979404217?utm_experiment=test_share_listing&aff=ebdsshios

Post - February 27, 2024 - 1709098596

2024-02-28T05:36:36Z

How should CEO salary be determined?

I recently reflected on this from first principles, and this is what I arrived at:

→ First of all, I believe that the methodology for CEO pay should be simple and logical, and completely transparent to the team.

I don’t think this is common, but I believe the team deserves to know what the CEO salary is, and how we arrive at the number. The more open and transparent I can be about that, the more trust I will gain from the team that I’m being thoughtful, intentional and fair in my decisions.

I believe it’s vital that CEO pay is transparent since, in many companies, this is not the case and is a key source of distrust. CEOs are often excessively overpaid, and the gap between the lowest and highest salaries in companies can be extreme.

→ Secondly, I believe CEO pay should be the most tied to company performance of any salary in team.

The CEO salary should be closely aligned with the success of the company and the positive impact the results have on customers and the team. If the CEO is successful in their role, then the company will grow, and it will have the ability to pay higher salaries across the board.

A CEO grows over time, but that growth should translate to company performance. More so than any other role, the success of the business is the CEO’s responsibility. Whereas every other role has the concept of levels, progression, and seniority, there isn't really the concept of a junior or senior CEO or a level six, eight, or ten CEO. Of course, CEOs grow and learn over time and become more experienced. However, it doesn’t make sense to translate that into a level, when the results of the company are essentially the level you’re operating at.

→ The question then is, how should this approach be translated into a salary calculation?

What we do at Buffer, is take the market rate CEO salary at equivalent company size band, and choose a percentile that is in line with how we’re paying other roles across the team. It’s really that simple. We just look up the number, and that’s what I’m paid. Currently it's $298,958. It’s the same data we use to determine all of our salaries, and I share the methodology and my salary with the team.

In this way, the CEO salary becomes open and tied to performance. We use the same company size band for all salaries at Buffer, so the only way this factor will result in my salary to go up, is if we move up to the next company size band, apply that across the board and raise all salaries in the process.

And the percentile will always be aligned with other roles too. In essence, the system we have created means that a rising tide will lift all boats (salaries).

I shared how I approach CEO pay in my recent write up of our Salary System. If you want to read comprehensively about how our Open Salary System works, check out my comment below.

What else would you like to know about CEO pay at Buffer, or compensation in general?

Post - February 26, 2024 - 1708971138

2024-02-26T18:12:18Z

We’ve been working to turn around a decline for a few years now at Buffer.

Last year everything finally came together, in 2023 we had our least decline in the past 4 years, and we’re now growing in 2024.

How did we do it? Here are some of our learnings.

First, the details of top level 2023 results and turnaround vs prior years:

– We declined 1.75%, whereas in the prior two years we declined 6-8%
– We grew 7 of 12 months in 2023, vs only 1 of 12 months in 2022
– We saw a 2.21% increase in Monthly Active Users to 139,377
– We we welcomed 946,614 new user signups to Buffer, a 28.95% increase compared to 2022
– We had 39,463 new paying customers in 2023, a 9.97% increase from the prior year

What has been driving the turnaround? This was the big shift:

– In 2021, we committed to a clear strategy of going down-market and truly serving entrepreneurs, creators, and small businesses.
– Going in this direction is relatively unheard of in SaaS, but for Buffer I determined that it was the right path forward for us. It can often be seen as an unattractive segment, but for us, this segment is about dreams and possibility, and we love being the product that helps folks go from zero to one and beyond.
– This forced us to get really clear on our strategy, the why, and our target customer. That work paid off; in the past 2 years we’ve heard consistently from the team that this is the clearest they’ve ever felt about what we’re trying to do and where we’re going with Buffer

Tangibly, this led to us making these changes in 2023:

– We significantly increased our shipping pace, and our diligence for higher quality. This led to a step-change improvement in what we’re putting out there for new customers.
– Almost everything we’ve shipped, we’ve rolled out across free and paid plans, which captures the highest number of users to market to.
– We made our primary flow for new users go straight into the free plan. This alongside other efforts led to 28.95% higher signups in 2023 vs 2022.
– We’ve lined up everything with this down-market focus. We increased production of content marketing, invested in SEO and taking domain authority and keyword ranking to a new level. We focused on rebuilding a thriving community. We’ve made it easier to be connected with customers, pushed our customer support to better response times and higher quality answers. We combed through the product to plug UX issues and dead-ends in various user flows. And everyone in the team is dogfooding Buffer again.

This is just scratching the surface of our results, strategy, and the work we did to create a turnaround 2023 for Buffer.

Read our 2023 shareholder letter with in depth insights into how we’re growing a long-term and independent SaaS business: https://buffer.com/shareholders/2023

What else would you like to know about how we achieved a turnaround in our numbers?

Post - February 27, 2024 - 1708713261

2024-02-23T18:34:21Z

I spent this week reflecting on 2023 to write Buffer’s first annual shareholder letter, and I’ve decided to share it publicly.

We ended the year with $17,950,440 in ARR and 55,975 paying customers. 2023 was a turnaround year for Buffer by a variety of measures, and we are set up for growth and profitability in 2024.

It was a fulfilling process to do some deeper reflection on the business and try to put the year into words. What questions do you have on how we’re building Buffer?

Read the full letter: https://buffer.com/shareholders/2023

Post - January 25, 2024 - 1706239064

2024-01-26T03:17:44Z

For over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been transparent.

That said, over the years, our salary formula has been stretched and needed to adapt. At times, we have fallen short of our true level of commitment to transparency.

Today, we’re introducing the Open Salary System — a project we took on to reimagine how we approach salaries, resolve issues we identified, and set ourselves up for another decade of salary transparency.

Read all the details and see the Buffer team’s new salaries:

https://buffer.com/resources/salary-system/

Post - January 24, 2024 - 1706116863

2024-01-24T17:21:03Z

Do you need to put the link in the comments instead of the post on LinkedIn?

→ It’s critical
→ It depends on your goal
→ It doesn’t matter at all

We’ve heard all of the above.

Now, you can do either with Buffer. Schedule your link in a first comment on LinkedIn, or put it directly in your post.

You can use the first comment in other ways too, such as for an extra detail, to encourage a discussion, or to share an answer to a question.

Our goal with Buffer is to give you flexibility, choice, and control.

See how easily you can add a first comment for LinkedIn using Buffer:

Post - January 19, 2024 - 1705719950

2024-01-20T03:05:50Z

I just finished a super valuable and fun Buffer marketing leadership meetup here in Boulder with Hailley and Simon. We were also fortunate to have Maria join us for a day to discuss product strategy overlap and go to market.

I’m always reminded of the intangible impact of the casual conversations and getting to know each other as humans that mostly happens over lunches, dinners and walking between places.

We’re coming away with a ton of clarity on how the year is going to play out with some significant product and company launches, as well as a variety of ways we’re going to level up marketing overall across content, growth, website, emails, and our pitches and narratives. We’re feeling confident that we can have a better year than ever on the marketing side.

The in person time gets me very excited to see the whole Buffer team for real at our company retreat in Cancún, Mexico less than two months 🎉 💚

Post - January 12, 2024 - 1705079244

2024-01-12T17:07:24Z

2023 was a transformative year for the Buffer product. We launched countless improvements and have made commitments to modernize the product, add flexibility, and always be on top of new networks to help you navigate fluidly and win in the shifting landscape of social media.

Here are the 11 most popular improvements we shipped last year:

Buffer AI Assistant 🤖
→ Generate new posts, repurpose existing posts, and come up with endless new ideas.

Mastodon Support 🐘
→ Buffer supports Mastodon scheduling!

Schedule Instagram Stories 📽
→ Full automatic scheduling for Instagram Stories.

Improved Emoji Picker ✌️
→ Autocomplete functionality and rich-text editing.

Manage and schedule YouTube Shorts ▶️
→ Schedule all your videos to YouTube Shorts with Buffer.

Connect your Instagram Creator account 🔌
→ Now connect your Instagram Creator account in Buffer.

Open Beta Program 🔓
→ Get early access to our new features and help us improve them.

Facebook Reels Scheduling📱
→ Buffer supports full scheduling for Facebook Reels.

Add Notes to your Content 📝
→ Add notes and start discussions with your team.

Keep Content Organized with Tags 🏷️
→ Tags unlock a whole new level of content organization and workflows.

Revamped Zapier Integration ⚡️
→ Support for adding Ideas and Drafts to Buffer, Pinterest, publishing multiple images and video, and support for alt text.

We have even bigger plans for 2024. What would you like to see us add or improve in Buffer?

Post - November 30, 2023 - 1701384280

2023-11-30T22:44:40Z

13 years ago today, I launched Buffer.

It’s hard to believe my little side project turned startup turned business is now a teenager. In recent years, I’ve reflected a lot on how to build Buffer to exist and thrive long-term.

With that in mind, I thought it could be interesting to share 13 fun facts which demonstrate our longevity mindset and the impact it has on both the product and the team.

Here we go:

Over Buffer’s lifetime, our total revenue has been $159.16M.
We’ve raised only $4M, so we’ve made close to 40X our funding so far in revenue.
For 8 of our 13 years, we’ve been profitable.
49% of the team have been at Buffer for over 5 years; that’s 39 of 79 teammates! 31 people (39%) have been at Buffer for over 7 years, and 5 people (6%) have been on the team for more than a decade.
34 teammates have taken a 6+ week sabbatical since the program started in 2019.
49 babies have been born to teammates in Buffer’s lifetime.
4,955 active users started using Buffer over a decade ago, and 2,321 of those are paying customers.
We initially supported just 1 social network, now we have 11 channels you can connect with Buffer.
Over the last 6 years, we’ve spent $4.5M buying back the majority of our VC investors to build a long-term company with no exit plan.
Teammates have collectively received $1,395,923 through annual profit sharing distributions we’ve issued on 5 of our 13 years.
We’ve donated $269,185 to 28 different charitable organizations since our first contribution in 2017.
For 11 years, we’ve been a fully remote and distributed company. Today, we’re spread across 51 cities in 19 countries.
Finally, I’ve built and led Buffer working from 25 different countries over the last 13 years.

Here’s to many more years 🥂

Post - October 31, 2023 - 1698777841

2023-10-31T18:44:01Z

Today we’ve launched Tags 🏷️ in Buffer!

→ Use Tags for Posts, Sent Posts and Ideas
→ Filter Ideas in the Create space by Tag
→ Add Tags in workflows, e.g. content added via Zapier
→ Available on all plans, limit of 3 on the Free plan

Try out Tags: https://buffer.com/organize

Post - October 22, 2023 - 1698008330

2023-10-22T20:58:50Z

A great strategy should lead to strong differentiation and lasting results. Ensuring the strategy and culture are aligned can enhance execution and enable you to create something really special.

I think about strategy as, what are the key puzzle pieces that describe approaches or actions you can take in pursuit of the mission, that are uniquely yours to take. What are the things that you can do, that others cannot do?

These puzzle pieces should start to connect together, so that when you combine them, the results are greater than the outcomes of the individual actions alone.

This is where culture comes in. If you can cultivate a culture that is specific to the values of the company and aligns with all the individuals involved, and also supports the execution of those puzzle pieces, that's where you start to experience magic.

Post - October 5, 2023 - 1696527600

2023-10-05T17:40:00Z

🌶️ Spicy comment from a recent NPS promoter (score 10) customer:

"Amazing! I hope that you continue to have free plan which is great for small businesses (and don't stab us in the back in a few years like Hootsuite)."

➡️ Not on my watch. We're fully committed to serving creators, entrepreneurs and individuals and maintaining (and improving!) our free plan long into the future. I'll be doing all in my power (as majority owner of Buffer) to keep us on that path.

Post - September 27, 2023 - 1695864825

2023-09-28T01:33:45Z

Hi everyone - we’re looking for Senior Product Designer to join Buffer and be part of taking our UX to the next level. This is a fun opportunity, here are a few details:

On the role:
→ You’ll jump into a team with a focus on delivering world-class user experiences
→ Buffer has always been known for being simple and intuitive whilst having a ton of power baked in too, and we’ve recently made an investment in paying down our tech and UX debt to maintain this position
→ Work on a product used by 150K monthly active users and 57K paying customers
→ Earn an annual salary between $140K - 172K USD based on experience and location

On the team:
→ Join a group of designers scattered across Europe, Africa and the U.S.
→ Work in a team that has been remote for over a decade, and has had a 4-day workweek for 3.5 years
→ We’re an ambitious bunch of people who also care about working sustainably, having fulfilling lives and being great friends, partners and parents

On the company:
→ Work at a company that controls its destiny and has a long-term view – we’ve been around since 2010, are currently doing $18M ARR and only raised $4M
→ We haven’t raised a round of funding since 2014 and bought out our main VC investors in 2018
→ We’re an open company with full transparency around compensation and metrics

If you have any questions, let me know! If you think this might be a great opportunity for someone you know, please pass it along. Thanks!

Learn more and apply:
https://buffer1.homerun.co/senior-product-designer

Post - September 23, 2023 - 1695475332

2023-09-23T13:22:12Z

For many years, I felt that work on maintenance, organizing or tending to the garden of a system, was not a great use of my time. I always felt I’d rather be working on the actual project, product, initiative, whatever it might be.

Recently, however, I have felt the immense value of doing regular maintenance activities, such as ‘digital gardening’; the act of perusing notes and finding connections between them to add as backlinks, expanding upon points, reading and saving quotes and insights. Another example is maintenance of my project and todo list and ensuring I have clear next actions in place. Energy I put into this pays dividends as it helps me be more productive on the projects themselves. I easily win back more time than I put in on these types of activities.

Do you have other examples like this? I’d love to hear how you approach your productivity in terms of getting the tasks done vs organizing yourself to be more effective.

Post - September 22, 2023 - 1695413958

2023-09-22T20:19:18Z

“People remember the exciting moments. People get excited for the shiniest things. But often, success comes from the boring: being consistent, executing relentlessly, not letting things slip.” – James Gill

I agree with this, and in recent years have found myself being very motivated by diligent consistency and execution. To me, Apple are inspiring in that they don’t drastically change their products in terms of form factor or functionality, but chisel away over the long-term towards a clear vision they’ve thought hard about. Small improvements made regularly, and maintaining pace over a long time horizon can really start to add up to great results.

https://www.jamesgill.co/consistency-is-boring/

Post - September 12, 2023 - 1694534266

2023-09-12T15:57:46Z

Context is crucial when it comes to whether advice is right for you or not. There’s so much dogmatic advice floating around these days, it’s easy to be sent down the wrong path.

Here are a couple of great quotes that can serve as a reminder to be mindful and do your own thinking when taking on advice:

“Any advice that’s targeted to large established companies is irrelevant, distracting and potentially damaging in growing and managing a startup” - Steve Blank

“Every piece of business advice should have a label that includes what stage and type of startups it’s applicable for. Since this doesn't exist, it’s your job to filter advice based on what’s relevant to you.” - Hiten Shah

Post - September 8, 2023 - 1694197600

2023-09-08T18:26:40Z

My admiration for long-term companies has grown significantly. I find myself fascinated by companies that exist for decades and even more so by founders who find a way to keep evolving, increasing their ambition, and remaining energized.

I wrote that almost 3 years ago, and only feel it more today.
https://joel.is/10-years/

Post - September 8, 2023 - 1694195828

2023-09-08T17:57:08Z

“One of my lessons relearned is the profound problem-solving power of the walk. I used to be world-class. I’d get stuck on some writing question, feel the subtlest hitch in my flow, and, SPROING, I’d be up out of my chair, spring-loaded, already halfway around the block.” – Robin Sloan
https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/what-would-a-wizard-read/

Regular walks have been a key part the way I work for the best part of a decade now, though I’ve also had periods of time where I’ve let the habit slide. These days, I have a similar response to my mind feeling clouded, or feeling stuck on a problem or a deliverable: I get up and go for a walk, and usually I’ve resolved it by the time I’m back at my desk.

Post - September 4, 2023 - 1693869769

2023-09-04T23:22:49Z

As an $18M ARR business, I found the latest SaaS Growth Report from ChartMogul on how SaaS businesses grow from Zero to $30M ARR interesting and useful.

My favorite insight: “After even 10 years in existence, only 13% of startups are able to reach the $10M ARR mark. It’s hard.”
https://chartmogul.com/reports/saas-growth-report/2023/

Post - September 4, 2023 - 1693863602

2023-09-04T21:40:02Z

“Imagine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew.” – Mike Caulfield
https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

Post - September 4, 2023 - 1693863509

2023-09-04T21:38:29Z

“Increasingly, founders are seeking freedom from the risk and control of the perpetual pursuit of venture capital. Instead, they’re ready to reroute their time, efforts, and attention to building enduring companies on their own terms.” – Terrence Rohan
https://trohan.com/2023/08/20/raise-less-build-more/

Post - September 4, 2023 - 1693862870

2023-09-04T21:27:50Z

Managers are individual contributors too. They contribute process changes, documentation, strategic plans, lead by example, and jump in as a partner when it’s necessary.

I have a bit of an issue with the term individual contributor. It can make managers feel like they shouldn’t be “doing” anything. But being a great manager means making stuff happen.

Post - September 4, 2023 - 1693862735

2023-09-04T21:25:35Z

We recently strengthened the concept of an Alpha phase at Buffer. Alpha is our internal testing phase, where we make new functionality available very early, exclusively to the Buffer team.

Here are some of the details and benefits:

We’re putting functionality in Alpha as soon as it’s working in some form. It will still be rough around the edges, in particular the UX will likely be going through further iterations, and there may be some bugs and edge cases that are being worked out.

We have an Alpha page within the product, only accessible by the Buffer team. On this page we have a link to more information on our Alpha phase. We also have a list of all features in Alpha, with a short description and a button that takes you straight to the Slack channel for the project team working on that functionality. This streamlines and enhances the feedback loop.

It’s very valuable to have the whole team playing with new functionality and finding any issues before we start to roll out to customers. This doesn’t replace our own QA process, but it can definitely enhance it.

Even more importantly, the team can help us to hone the UX and give feedback on anything that feels confusing about the decisions we’re making around user flows and interactions.

For customer-facing areas of the company, in particular Customer Advocacy and Marketing, it is extremely useful to get a head start on testing out new functionality, and starting to reflect on the materials that those teams put together for product changes.

On the Customer Advocacy side, they are the team who hear from customers directly the most, and have a strong intuition build through those experiences as to what will be clear or confusing for customers.

Having the Marketing team use new functionality early, where we still have the ability to shape it and make adjustments, allows them to start to think about the naming of new features, and what our launch strategy will be. This can feed directly into the product and design team in the form of renaming or reorienting functionality in ways that can give us the most impactful marketing outcomes.

Finally, one of our goals is for the whole company to be Buffer users themselves. There are countless benefits that come from this, and having the team receive new functionality early and consistently enhances our ability to all be active users of the product.

Post - September 4, 2023 - 1693862471

2023-09-04T21:21:11Z

“If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come.” – Rick Rubin

I’ve observed and experienced this. Generally, when you have an idea, if it’s a good idea then others are having it at the same time. For me, this leads to two conclusions:

Time is of the essence when you know that you’re onto something with a new idea
Don’t worry about others having the same idea, worry much more about your execution on the idea

Post - August 25, 2023 - 1693003794

2023-08-25T22:49:54Z

Hi everyone - I’ve just updated my /now page with what I’m currently up to, including being a toddler parent, my wife opening her cafe, current strategy for Buffer, and my journey with note taking systems and digital gardens: https://joel.is/now/

Post - July 14, 2023 - 1689392340

2023-07-15T03:39:16Z

"Our vision is that Threads will enable you to communicate with people on other fediverse platforms we don’t own or control."

I find this a very interesting aspect of the new Meta social network. I'm looking forward to hearing more about their steps to incorporate open standards.
https://thenewstack.io/threads-adopting-activitypub-makes-sense-but-wont-be-easy/

Post - June 17, 2023 - 1686960000

2023-06-17T22:00:00Z

"Good businesses have margin. Profit margin? Yes. But also margin for your time, your emotional and physical health, your relationships, your sanity, and your integrity. You're a human, and humans need breathing room." – Justin Jackson
https://justinjackson.ca/margin

Post - June 9, 2023 - 1686348360

2023-06-09T22:06:00Z

Around a year and a half ago, I established a broader leadership group beyond our executive team at Buffer, including anyone who is a manager or a senior individual contributor. It's been helpful in a number of ways.

In the early stages of a company, until around 50 people, a leadership team of adequate size can handle the most important decisions and have enough context into the organization.

But as you scale beyond 50, I've found that there's a lot of value in establishing a "leadership group" as a second layer of leadership beyond the executive team, consisting of managers and senior individual contributors.

At @buffer, we're currently 80 people and we have 22 in our leadership group. There's something quite powerful about having a quarter of the team in this group where we can discuss challenges, share knowledge and get help in rolling out strategy and culture shifts.

By setting up this "leadership group", you can activate those growing leaders to participate in some of the larger decisions and more difficult situations that you need to navigate as a company.

Without explicitly setting up a leadership group, I found that more of the burden and challenges fell on a small group. This is both more weight to carry than necessary and a missed opportunity to have a larger group positively affecting the company.

Additionally, it's a gift to those who have reached that level of seniority and leadership in the company, to explicitly ask them to step up even more. This can provide a lot of growth that helps the individual and the company.

A few of the things we've done to help this group connect and to have them meaningfully contribute beyond their specific role and area:

1️⃣ I host a monthly "Leadership Roundtable" with folks in this group. It's an hour long meeting where I choose two current topics to discuss, debate and align around as a group.

2️⃣ We set up Slack and Threads (our tool for longer form comms) channels to give this group a space to share ideas and challenges asynchronously with each other.

3️⃣ We set up regular (weekly) "Leadership Lounges" for this group to connect in a much more casual setting. These are optional, and the idea is to create a sort of "Teacher's Lounge" environment for catching up on anything in or outside work.

An important note: the goal isn't to have important decisions become consensus-based among this larger group, I don't believe that is an effective way to arrive at the best or most timely outcomes.

Instead, the goal is to help people understand and start to experience a broader set of challenges and more difficult calls to make. In that process, you create valuable alignment and awareness, and also help those leaders continue to grow.

The leadership group is a way to create useful connections and knowledge sharing between leaders of different areas who may not necessarily interact week to week. There are many similar and transferable challenges across areas where it can be useful to tap into the knowledge of another leader.

Do you have anything similar in place at your company? How do you approach driving connections between leaders, helping them grow further, and inviting them to take part in the important company-level decisions? I'd love to hear questions, suggestions or comments on this topic!

Based on this note: The importance of developing a broader leadership group as you scale