Join us as we share what we’re learning as we build a company that approaches work from a fresh perspective. We write about workplace culture, our finances, and our business decisions and strategies.
Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. At Buffer, we’ve always marched to the beat of our own drum when it comes to how we pay our team. We make our salaries transparent to the whole world. We calculate all salaries with a fully transparent (and publicly available) formula. And we’ve been proud to be part of the Equal Pay Day conversation for the past two years, by sharing our full data in a transparent pay analysis. For Equal Pay D
Making decisions is something we do every day, so I wanted to find out more about how this process works and what affects the choices we make. It turns out, there are some really interesting ways our decisions are affected that I never would have guessed. Luckily, we can take action to improve most of these. What happens in your brain when you make decisions Obviously lots of things take place inside your brain as you make a decision. What I found really interesting were the various thing
We’re a fully remote team and have been since our start. We’ve also known the importance of meeting in person since the team started growing. For that reason, we never go too long without finding a way to get Buffer teammates together. There’s just something about meeting in person that you can’t replace with video chats. (Maybe with VR one day!) To make meeting in person possible, we set aside a budget every year to send the whole Buffer te
We aspire to live by our values at Buffer. This means turning our values into behaviors that positively impact how we treat each other, how we interact with others, and how we see the world. Even still, having values isn’t enough. Especially if we want to create the inclusive organization that we’re striving to become. So to complement our values, we’
Working at Buffer takes many forms. For some, it’s working from home (sometimes surrounded by kids and/or animals), from a coworking space or co-living space or perhaps it’s from a coffee shop. (Psst – we just did a big ol’ survey of more than a thousand remote workers to learn more about these trends in our 2018 State of Remote Work!) When it comes to supporting our teammates, it’s a part of our company values to live and work where you’re happiest and most productive. That means we help fin
Editor’s Note: We are so grateful to Deborah Rippol, Buffer’s former and beloved People Success Manager, for all of her contributions to our hiring processes and this post. She had a key role in creating and refining our hiring process, and her expertise continues to positively impact Buffer. P.S. We’re hiring right now; we’d love to hear from you! At Buffer, we try to keep a beginner’s mind: always experimenting, pushing the boundaries of the future of work and aiming for a “what if” mentality
Note to existing Buffer users: We are bringing back two Free plan features: default profiles and an option to turn off link shortening. More on this decision and the complete “why” behind all changes below. Thank you for your support, and we are sorry if the changes came as a surprise. We strive to offer all Buffer customers a seamless, intuitive experience with the product. Recently, we’ve put that experience under the microscope to see where we can improve and how we can better serve our gro
The end of 2017 brought lots of joy at Buffer. It was the best financial position we’d seen ourselves in in a few years and the team was excited to celebrate. Our CEO, Joel Gascoigne , and Director of Finance, Caryn Hubbard added to the celebrations with the wonderful news that they had managed to set aside money for Buffer to donate to charity. The whole Buffer team [https://buffer.com/abo
Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjustingmy own routine in the hopes of getting more done and wasting less time in-between tasks or activities. While it’s important to understand how your own brain works and what routine [http://blog.bufferapp.com/youve-got-25000-mornings-as-an-adult-8-ways-to-improve-your-mornin
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. What comes to mind when you think of remote work? In our experience, it’s not only one image. Remote work comes in many different shapes and sizes. We are a fully distributed team at Buffer, meaning that we have no office and everyone chooses to work from where they’re happiest: both geographically (we have teammates across the world) and functionally (we hav
Have you ever been in a meeting where you felt the electricity in the room change based on a single sentence? Words are incredibly powerful: even a solitary one can win you over, put you out, set your boundaries, and change how others perceive you. With this kind of power, it’s in our best interest to try to understand the science and psychology of words. I went hunting for some of the top words and phrases that motivate people to be creative, work together and build relationships. These are
This month I celebrated my four-year anniversary of joining the Buffer team – or “Bufferversary,” as we fondly call them. All work makes an impact on you, as you learn new things, make friends, and grow in your confidence at the job. I’ve been lucky enough to have many memorable roles, and I’ve taken something from all of them. But my work at Buffer? That’s something else altogether. It’s mind-boggling to think of the impact Buffer’s culture and values [https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-valu
Bias creeps into almost every area of our lives and decision-making, whether we know it or not. It’s not that we’re bad people, determined to pre-judge others. Rather, it’s our brains taking shortcuts that have been created over centuries. That makes it pretty tricky to undo effectively, but there are ways. When I last talked about performance reviews at Buffer here on the blog, I shared that one practice we’ve tried during the review process is t
In mid-2019, we moved our community from Slack to a new online home! We still run our Community Host program there. Learn more about our customer community here. Over the past two and a half years, our Slack community has become our central hub for Buffer users and fans to meet, learn and grow together. It’s a vibrant place full of incredibly smart, kindhearted, supportive marketers, and we’re constantly looking for ways to better su
MRR $1,396,138 ARR $16,753,656 EBIDTA $854,325 (-10.81%) Paying customers 78,153 (+2.44%) Q4 Revenue $4,123,913.83 (+7.39%) Cash in bank $5,293,484 (+21.21%) The end of the year always brings about a lot of reflection and this year it also marked many milestones for the team at Buffer. One notable financial milestone for us is that we were able to deliver our first profit-sharing bonus with the entire Buffer team. It was heart-warming and uplifting to hear how each teammate planned to spe
Over the last year, my role at Buffer has changed from an individual contributor to a technical leadership role. While the amount of time I spend coding and doing architecture hasn’t changed much, the way I go about the tasks has changed significantly. Instead of being focused on a project from start to finish, I move around projects as needed. Sometimes a team will get blocked on a tricky problem or need to make a decision that could impact oth
If you had asked me a few years ago to picture my future, as much as I’d have liked it to include remote Portuguese Islands, a puppy, a surfboard, and a laptop, I’d probably never have come up with that. It probably would have looked more like business suits and handshakes. I’m really glad it went in the direction of the puppy and the laptop instead. This is the story of how my journey of working remotely led me to traveling the world with my dog, Eca, and what I’ve learned along the way. Ho
2017 was an exciting year for the Buffer team with some big changes, a few firsts, and some major progress forward. We set a new vision for the company and products , went on our 8th company retreat to Madrid , calculated equal pay at Buffer for the first time, and got to a very healthy place financially, among many other
The end of the year is a wonderful time to focus on reflection and self-care. These are things we’ve been very mindful of at Buffer in the past few years. Everything from encouraging more vacation time to having summer hours have been top of mind for us in creating a company focused on healthy and happy employees. Often times the year flies by so quickly that people don’t take enough vacat
bThere are very few moments when a Terms of Service agreement gets the spotlight. They crop up during the signup process then linger in the footer of a web page. On occasion, whenever the terms change, you might receive an email notification to let you know. Many people click through these terms with equal parts automation and trust, believing that the company behind the terms will be doing the right thing by them, the customer. This is exactly the trust we hope to engender at Buffer, and we f
Heads up! We’ve updated our transparent salary formula since this post originally was published. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here . Four years ago we introduced transparent salaries at Buffer. The practice has in many ways come to define us. We’re proud of this, and the positive impact that it has had both within the team and in the wider community. A growing company brings change and new learnings. Over time, our tea
There is a lot of imagery that comes to mind when someone says “working from home.” A quick Google Search yields results that are anything from someone working on the floor surrounded by pets, to people holding babies during calls, to someone working in pajamas. Source: Ray Wenderlich A lot of these things (the pajamas and family at least) are things you can’t always do at a regular office. Sometimes the pets
Until pretty recently, we didn’t have a “product process” at Buffer when it came to how we built the product. Initially, we were proud of our super lean approach with an engineer or two collaborating with a product manager and figuring it out as they went along. This worked well when we were smaller, but as our team grew and we wanted to build more ambitious products , timelines started to get unrealistically long and we were shipping cars all in
I recently had a video call with Buffer’s Director of People, Courtney . She asked me, “How is it feeling to work in your timezone?” That might seem like a rather odd question, but the reason why she asked is illustrated below: That’s me, over on the right. Right now, I’m the only person in Australia working in a company of 70+ people, spanning 12 different timezones. After reflecting on what it’s like to work in a one-person timezone, I thought I’d share
