Thread by @joelgascoigne

Happy to share that to end 2018, Buffer is doing a profit share with our team of $394,997. We're also committing to doing charitable contributions matching 20% of this amount, so $78,999.

Thread with details around our methodology for profit share and charitable contributions 👇

Last year was our first year doing both a profit share and charitable contributions.

We did $300k profit share, and $50k in charitable contributions. So this year is a significant increase in both these numbers.

Last year was also our first year of significant net profit. We see net profit as a vitally important metric for us as a company, since it's our true bottom line number. It's what we have left after expenses, taxes, everything.

Here's a look at our net profit over the years:

2015: $17k
2016: loss
2017: $2.41m
2018: $3.29m (forecasted)

We went from net profit in the low thousands to millions in just a couple of years. And we've grown net profit 36.5% from 2017 to 2018. 👌

With our first significant net profit in 2017, we chose to do our first profit share with the team and charitable contributions as a company. This year, we've decided to formalize and commit to doing this every year we have net profit. We're tying both numbers to net profit.

Going forward, we will share between 8% and 15% of net profit with the team, depending on performance and strategic uses of excess cash.

And every year we have net profit, we will donate an additional 20% of the profit share number to charitable causes.

For 2018, we decided to share 12% of net profit with the team. From our $3,291,645 in net profit, we're sharing $394,997 among the team. We're also donating an additional 20% of the profit share amount to causes the team care about. For 2018, that's a total of $78,999.

How our profit share works: 50% is based on tenure (to celebrate the compounding impact of long-term team members + align with being a sustainable co), 25% based on salary (to account for varying pressure and responsibility), 25% shared evenly (to show how this is a team effort).

I'm really excited that for the second year in a row we've had great profitability (not usual as a tech co!). I feel great that we've made a choice to share these great results with the team, and also that we've tied our own success to giving back.