joelgascoigne

16 ms·

31.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Hi everyone. Joel here from Buffer. Some of you might have heard about our security breach on Saturday. I just wanted to leave a quick note and clarify that this MongoHQ security breach was the method used to obtain our users' access t
32.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
The best thing we've learned here is to enable a setting Facebook has called "Require AppSecret Proof for Server API calls". They actually have a lot of great security features which we've not been making use of.
33.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Sorry about this everyone, I know we messed up a lot of peoples' weekends. We're working pretty hard to get to the bottom of everything. Let me know if you have questions, I'll try and answer them all.
34.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Got it, in that case it's because we generally spend some time before responding. You should hear from us soon :-)
35.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Sorry about that awful experience we caused there. We definitely had a period where we simply struggled to respond to everyone. We honestly get about 100 emails from this HN listing. When we were just a few people, it was hard to keep on to
36.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Thanks Danno, I think it's important.
37.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Sorry about that. Can you let me know when you emailed? I'd like to dig into this further.
38.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Hi! We're mostly looking for people who could join us full-time, however we'd still love to hear from you :-)
39.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Sorry this has happened, that's not good at all. I know that a lot of effort goes into getting in touch with us (or anyone else). There was a time when I was personally handling all the hiring, and I struggled to get back to everyone o
40.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
To be clear, we are agreeing with each other. I think that is an incorrect assumption, too. We consider each case very carefully, and often don't cut the salary (it has happened more that we didn't cut salary). That said, it is ve
41.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Glad you asked this, it's something we're constantly pondering. Right now the answer is yes, though we don't do it ruthlessly and our overall philosophy is to show that we truly care about everyone involved. We ask the team m
42.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
$3,750 in 3 months is not bad at all. It is super difficult to get something off the ground. Once you're in motion, it can grow pretty fast.
43.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Buffer ( http://bufferapp.com ) - Anywhere in the world (we're a distributed team of 8 people across the US, UK, Hong Kong and Sydney). I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 700,000 users and are on a $1.5m+ an
44.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Great question. We have actually only ever raised the $450k seed. Our revenues are helping with our ability to grow the team and have salaries where people can feel that money is not a factor, and we can focus on the great opportunities we
45.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Awesome. Thanks for the insight :) I'm definitely keeping an eye on you guys, all the best!
46.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
I tend to agree with this. I'm genuinely on the lookout for a service to replace Feedburner. Buffer is often called "just a cron job" and I can assure you much of the work is in scaling up "just a crob job" to hundreds of thousands of users
47.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
We went through AngelPad (accelerator in SF) just before we raised, and through the program we received our initial $20k funding from AngelPad and $100k convertible debt funding from two VC firms associated with AngelPad (so a total of $120
48.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Originally it was simply an 'every minute' cron job. That only scales so far ;)
49.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Yep, exactly. April revenue was $115k.
50.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
We're still not too "smart" about our scheduling. We have a few things planned down the line in our roadmap though. What we found was that if we can help someone go from sharing once a day to 5 times a day, that would help them much more th
51.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
This is correct, we had a $150k run rate when we raised (and pitched with this deck) and the $3.6M figure was a projection (and clearly one which was rather ambitious!).
52.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
For Buffer, the first $10k came from approximately our first 1,000 paying customers. That said, we've changed our pricing a few times so the number may not be exact. The great part about getting $10k from recurring payments is that it can g
53.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
My co-founder Leo wrote a great guest post (could you have guessed?) on how to get started with guest blogging :-) Here it is - http://askaaronlee.com/bufferapp/ Also he wrote an article for OnStartups about getting press, which might als
54.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
You have some fantastic traction and revenues already, that's awesome. My recommendation, which worked very well for us, was to focus less on articles about the startup, and more on articles about the Pinterest, about all the challenges peo
55.
by joelgascoigne 13y ago
Sleep is certainly a challenge as a founder, or I would say "overworking" in general. It can be tempting to try and fix things by working more on them, and I've found personally that it rarely helps. With sleep, if I get 7.5 hours of sleep