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Change at Buffer: The Next Phase, and Why Our Co-Founder and CTO Are Moving On
- minimaxir 10y agoThe cofounder's perspective: https://medium.com/@leowid/after-6-incredible-years-at-buffer-im-moving-on-to-something-else-e06ec40c3f16 https://medium.com/@leowid/after-6-incredible-years-at-buffe...
- wj 10y agooff topic: I took a look at his new project(https://www.matterapp.io/ https://www.matterapp.io/) and wonder what people think about the method of social proof he is using by showing logos of companies that are not customers but that are transparent about their diversity. Seems like a great shortcut but feels slightly misleading to me.
- cdelb 10y agoIt fooled me initially, until I saw the pricing. $299 a month for what the simplest of spreadsheets could track.
- morgante 10y agoYou're not the target customer.
- tomredman 10y agoPeople had the same arguments against Dropbox (just use rsync) and Buffer itself (just use a cronjob).
- minimaxir 10y agoThis argument is inherently a fallacy. Sometimes ideas are inherently bad. (Also, you're an engineer at Buffer)
- tomredman 10y agoYup I am. My point though is that that argument is largely underestimating the value delivered by these products. And the apparent lack of P/M fit for spreadsheets managing diversity at large companies.
- zazpowered 10y agoMight seem expensive but I can easily see some larger companies using this to publicize their diversity numbers if they are good
- minimaxir 10y agoInteresting loophole abuse. The heading to that section implies that the companies are not using the product, but the intent of the section is clear.
- CPLX 10y agoSummary: the cofounders disagreed so two of them left. Maybe I'm an old guy but I don't really understand why this blog post exists, it's like hundreds of words of emotive rambling and vague talk of journeys and values and euphemisms for simple concepts. Would it like have ruined anything to write something like "A couple key early people are moving on but we're doing pretty good, we make social media software and have revenue ok hey thanks for listening I'm going to get back to that now have a great Friday" and then hit save?
- praneshp 10y agoI came to the same conclusion too, but I felt the blogs left a good taste in the end rather than raising questions in my mind. I was surprised at the number of "retreats" the team seems to have had though, maybe that's baked into the compensation, etc.
- jethro_tell 10y agoLike they pay you extra to have to do it?
- maxerickson 10y agoThey really go for the transparency. Like here is what everyone working there earns: https://open.buffer.com/transparent-salaries/ https://open.buffer.com/transparent-salaries/
- mgiannopoulos 10y agoTransparency is part of their marketing / way of operating
- zxcvvcxz 10y agoIt's a "millenial startup", you old timer ;)
- draw_down 10y agoWell, I know what you mean but there are worse things.
- deedubaya 10y agoYou'll likely never get full transparency from a post like this. All parties involved have a shared interest -- to paint the best picture possible to maintain the value of the company. Everyone cordially agrees to disagree, saying this is just a personal growth thing, then everyone hugs and gives high-fives on the way out the door.... Take these posts with a grain of salt. If everything were hunky-dory, there wouldn't be a senior level departure at all.
- ceejayoz 10y agoIf you're going to get transparency from a company, Buffer's gonna be it. Their Baremetrics install is publicly available. Their salaries are published on their website. They run on a "radically open" platform of management.
- jethro_tell 10y agoWhen I read this I wondered it he is being fully transparent with himself. It may be a post full of the truth from one angle but everyone knows the truth doesn't exist in 2 dimensions.
- trjordan 10y agoIt wasn't hunky-dory at all. That's the point. There are a couple of different ways of running a business, and a lot of them can be captured in what kind of growth you expect. Buffer did 50% growth last year. Great for what it is, but it's not the same culture and company as one that can sustain 100% YoY growth. 2 of the 3 founders wanted a 100%+ YoY growth company. The CEO didn't. Notwithstanding the realities of cash and organic growth, the CEO always wins these disagreements, so the other 2 founders left. There are a lot of ways you can grade a business. Against the VC-rocket-ship metric, Buffer is mediocre and small. Against cash and stability, they're rock-solid and large. In the mind of the departing founders, the business was in trouble, because it was failing to achieve the metrics necessary to be graded well against that first yardstick. And they're right, but it doesn't mean Buffer is going to collapse today, tomorrow, or ever.
- jpeg_hero 10y agoMy guess at what happened: the natural hyper growth engine ran out, they tried a bunch of things to jump start it, none of them worked, so now they are on the slow growth path. If they were not remote-only maybe they could have pulled off the CTO's plan of hiring a bunch of traditional managers and "pushing" the company forward (probably enterprise sales), but they'd have restructure the bones of the company at great expense. The great expense part probably doesn't work, because since the sizzle is off the growth, the next VC round would be tough if not impossible to do. It would be very "term-y" and founders are already underwater enough on investor preference. They probably made the right call of not shooting for the moon, and slowing down into a remote-only company that takes its time. Skype and boxer shorts. But now the COO and CTO are faced with the decision of A) sitting around and riding it out at $185,000 and $182,089 per year respectively (healthy money no doubt but not DHH buy-a-racing-team like earn outs) or B) move on to the next thing while the market for vc funding is still hot and they can still get some juice from their association with buffer. Rational decisions all around. Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets.
- chx 10y agoHrm? Scheduled tweets were launched in 2013. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/now-available-scheduled-tweets https://blog.twitter.com/2013/now-available-scheduled-tweets
- minimaxir 10y agoBuffer flat-out admitted the existential concerns last June after layoffs: https://open.buffer.com/layoffs-and-moving-forward/ https://open.buffer.com/layoffs-and-moving-forward/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918553) > We know that we have many untapped opportunities for growth. This time, however, we simply weren’t able to trigger growth fast enough.
- Yabood 10y ago> "Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets." Tools like buffer would still exist even if every single social media network offered scheduling capabilities. The fact is, if you're a digital marketer, you're not going to waste your time jumping between networks and multiple accounts scheduling content manually.
- nnd 10y agoProrating salary based on your location always seemed unfair to me. According to it the value of the work I produce would change if I travel to another location, which doesn't make any sense to me.
- michaelmior 10y agoThat depends on how you measure value. If you're talking about the sheer number of dollars, then obviously this amount is changing. But money is not particularly useful on its own so I believe the idea is to normalize the effective value of money based on location.
- x1798DE 10y agoI think it basically comes down to practicality. If you don't adjust pay for location in a remote company, you either pay the market rate for the most expensive market or you price yourself out of that market. If you pay the rates of the most expensive market everywhere, you are essentially leaving money on the table, since your competitors can potentially hire two people in Nashville, TN for every 1 person you hire (though you obviously get your pick of the litter by paying above-market rates) - or they can afford a bigger advertising buy, or any of the other competitive advantages you get by saving money. Not only that, but if you're not a remote-only company and are actually based in one of the expensive locations, you're basically offering your in-person staff a huge bonus if they leave and become remote. Honestly, anything other than paying market salaries +/- some relatively small error term is probably not sustainable in the long run.
- imsofuture 10y agoAnd like every other time people say this, it just breezes by the fact your remote employees can get other remote jobs. The market is not you-the-one-company-in-the-world-that-hires-remotely vs their-local-market.
- ghaff 10y agoAlthough adjusting pay based on location isn't exactly rare. And I suspect that a lot of companies with remote work are OK with missing out on some talent in Little Rock because they won't pay Silicon Valley rates to someone living there. (And/or they make exceptions for people they really want on a case by case basis.)
- peter_retief 10y agoHey that's my hometown Cape Town :)
- peter_retief 10y agoReally mature to downvote for noticing my town (Not even sure what the points are for anyway?)
- k-mcgrady 10y agoYou're likely being downvoted simply because the comment adds nothing to the discussion. Up/down votes (points) help the most relevant and useful comments rise to the top of the page so users down't need to scroll through to find useful content.
- ZainRiz 10y agoSide question: what does it take to be able to down vote a post? I'm guessing it's some sort of reputation threshold, but whatever the value is it's higher than 140
- grzm 10y agoThere is no downvote for submissions; only flagging. There is a karma threshold for flagging: I think it's 200, but don't hold me to it. Edit to add: Sorry, I misread post to mean submission, not comment. Sibling is correct: downvoting for comments is enabled when you earn your 501st point.
- goodJobWalrus 10y agoI got the privilege to downvote when I passed 500 a few months ago.
- svachalek 10y agoComplaining about downvoting is explicitly against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I'm surprised it's not explicit in the guidelines but HN has a strong tradition of staying on topic compared to some other message boards. It wasn't me who downvoted but while it's perfectly in line for you to notice your town, it doesn't add anything to the topic for you to point it out.
- mladenkovacevic 10y agoI use Buffer as a marketer and I think I can see what keeps them from growing the number of their paid users. I have a free plan and I'm completely OK with keeping it that way. It helps me schedule posts 10 per network at a time and not knowing any better I'm perfectly happy with this little convenience it offers and they are doing very little to break me out of this routine. There is very little messaging to the user in terms of missed opportunities that a paid plan opens up. Actually even with a free plan they could do more messaging to bring me back to their product outside of my "go to schedule some tweets" routine. How about sending me an email when a Twitter account with more than 10K followers re-tweets me. Perhaps it's worth something to me to know that this has in fact happened and suggest some follow-up actions that might maximize this opportunity. That's just a small example but there are tons of other growth tactics that would communicate to marketers that Buffer can help them become not just "more efficient" marketers, but better marketers overall. I think that's where the true value of most marketing technology lies. This stage of their company evolution is notably harder and perhaps arguably more boring so it's not surprising to see people leaving. After working on the core product for a while and squeezing out all the potential growth from that, it takes hundreds if not thousands of tactics adjustments, product optimizations and management changes to fine-tune the company engine for slower but steadier growth from then on. And even then it's not an exciting roller-coaster ride anymore but a slow long-haul freight train journey. It takes a markedly different kind of employee to thrive in that kind of environment and this is what they have to optimize for going forward. ADDENDUM: There's also the added risk of Buffer's success being tied to all the individual social networks, some of which are thriving, others which may not be here tomorrow, so it would be in Buffer's interest to develop their relationships with their users outside of their interaction with those platforms they have no control over. I mean marketers will always have to find the best way to do their job regardless of whether Twitter exists or not. This is probably pretty common sense advice considering how many times we've seen the rug pulled out from under smaller tech companies who built their business around some platform created by Google, Facebook, Microsoft or one of the other big companies.
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- hodgesrm 10y agoMaybe I'm old and cynical but this blog article really seems to be overthinking a basic company change.
- tedmiston 10y agoTo me Buffer has always occupied a very unique space between a SMB in the style of 37signals / Basecamp and a high-growth venture-backed startup. Today I was surprised to look at Crunchbase and see Buffer's total raised is just $3.9M between a Seed and Series A. Very few startups could make that money last 5+ years, but very few startups also occupy this unique space of being profitable so early. I imagine choosing between the two paths was difficult and it's great to see clarity around the decision and future direction.
- erdojo 10y agoMaybe Crunchbase is not up to date? The CEO's post says they have 71 investors, and Crunchbase lists 29. But you're absolutely right. If they've only raised $3.9, it's an impressive run.
- tedmiston 10y agoI agree that it's quite impressive. It's definitely possible that Crunchbase is out of date but companies are also generally pretty incomplete in listing investors past the leads for each round. People don't list so and so's dad that put $50k in, etc. I'm thinking the dollar amount is right since the lead for the A matches what Joel wrote.
- jarcoal 10y agoIf anyone is interested, you can see Buffer's revenue numbers, etc here: https://buffer.baremetrics.com/ https://buffer.baremetrics.com/
- mypalmike 10y agoTL;DR: They want car doors that open like this: | | not like this: - -
- alberth 10y agoPeople here are speculating a lot about what Buffer revenue are and it's growth. No need to speculate. Buffer publically posts their actual revenue. https://buffer.baremetrics.com https://buffer.baremetrics.com You can review their sales performance and come to your own conclusion.
- nickswan 10y agoThese people need to have some kids, and realise not to take themselves so seriously. I've just been in intensive care with my 4 week old son for 3 days while he has been on a ventilator. Watching the doctors and nurses work does make you realise how unimportant all this social media and startup stuff mostly is.
- simplehuman 10y agoSorry about your son but this post has nothing to do with people taking themselves seriously.
- simplehuman 10y agoDownvoters, care to explain yourself?
- grzm 10y agoLikely because your comment, while possibly on accurate, isn't necessary. While keeping comments on-topic is important, in this case, it's probably better to just let it be.
- spking 10y agoI hope your baby is doing better.
- borsisa 10y agoIs it not possible to learn this lesson with a parent, sibling, or some other loved in intensive care?
- kisstheblade 10y agoNot exactly, kids are different. Speaking from experience.
- borsisa 10y ago
- jwildeboer 10y ago"Look at all the good times we kids had burning VC money at wonderful places knowing nobody cares about us running something sustainable."
- bitmadness 10y agoThey had a fucking fight and now they pretend they're "going in different directions". All this PC talk is horseshit, wastes everyone's time. #troll
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively on HN or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Taylor_OD 10y agoThis is a bummer. I'm a buffer user and really enjoy the product. I still think they could gain a huge market by offering their platform to reddit users. I ran a small subreddit for a while that I would have loved to buffer posts for so their would be regular content updates.
- zump 10y agoCan't believe people buy whatever this is.
- debt 10y agoBuffer needs to provide business value beyond post scheduling. Tell me when the best time of day to post is or other analytics around posts. Provide a marketplace where people who want to sell products/brands can connect with influencers etc. I don't know.
- codinghorror 10y agoI think it's AMAZING that a company offering nothing but scheduling posts on social media got to $13 million per year in revenue. Amazing. And kind of weird.
- apricot 10y agoGroup therapy for tech C-suite, in blog form.