Thread by @joelgascoigne

Here are the @buffer August 2018 numbers:

- $18.4m ARR
- $1.53m MRR
- 78,499 paying customers
- 79 people in the team
- $232k revenue per team member
- $4.8m in the bank
- 30.28% EBITDA margin

I'll share a few further thoughts in attached Tweets.

We're working hard to grow out a bundle of products, to solve different jobs for customers. We're expanding from "Buffer" to three separate products: Buffer Publish, Buffer Reply and Buffer Analyze.

We're excited to become a solution that can help small businesses with more.

Monthly Recurring Revenue across Buffer products:

Publish: $1,497,772 (97.8%)
Reply: $32,399 (2.1%)
Analyze: $1,547 (0.1%)

It'll be fun to see these numbers change!

Average revenue per customer continues to grow steadily, up 11.8% from a year ago, now $19.51 per month on average per paying customer. This is still a very low number and represents a huge opportunity for us to help customers with more problems and see more expansion revenue.

Our number of customers is actually dropping right now, and this is expected and planned. We recently increased the price of the Pro plan (from $10 to $15 for new customers), and we're seeing a lower acquisition rate as a result.

Revenue growing while number of customers decreasing is a good situation for us. It means that we can give our customers a higher quality of service, to the bar that we strive for. This has been challenging as a small team with almost 80,000 paying customers.

Customer and revenue churn rate continue to be some of our biggest concerns. The churn rates are high at 5.0% and 6.1% respectively. We know that being in the small business market means higher churn, and we enjoy being in this market and all that comes with it.

Small businesses tend to fail and we see the impact of that. Some customers churn because the businesses literally folded. In addition, small businesses are comfortable with multiple tools, and switch more frequently.

However, we still have a lot we can improve, and it's risky to have a significant portion of our revenue churn out each month, and rely so heavily on new customers. There's value we can add to improve retention, and trigger more expansion revenue, both of which will reduce churn.

CAC and LTV are in a good place, if anything too good. Our payback period is less than two months, and our LTV is 11.5x our CAC. This is a little deceptive, however, since most of our acquisition comes from word of month, not something we can easily dial up.

We're growing the team again, and it's been amazing to welcome many new folks. We've been stretched thin as we increased our profitability over the last year, so we are in need of the help. If you're interested, we will have a couple of roles up soon: journey.buffer.com

$232k revenue per team member is a healthy level that means we're profitable. We'll aim to keep steady for now, in a similar way I'd like to stay around 30% EBITDA margin. Neither of these numbers need to grow soon, as we want to reinvest for growth and opportunity for some time.

Our bank balance has been rebuilding, after our recent stock purchase to buy out investors. It's down from $6.7m in June, prior to the $3.3m spend to repurchase stock. We're seeing around $400-500k per month in net profit currently, so the bank balance should grow back fast.

For all the details on the $3.3m spend for the Series A stock buyback, see this article: open.buffer.com/buying-out-inv…

That's all for this month. Reply if you have questions, I'll keep an eye on this thread and try to respond.

Thanks to the many of you who continue to support @buffer! We're in this for the long haul and excited to continue building great products and sharing our journey.