Thread by @joelgascoigne

Here are @Buffer's November 2018 results which were emailed to shareholders yesterday. Current metrics:

MRR: $1,599,028
ARR: $19,188,336
MoM growth: 0.74%
YoY growth: 14.79%

Customers: 77,806
Revenue per customer: $20.55

Team size: 83
Revenue per team member: $231,185

We're almost at the end of the year, and there are things to celebrate and things to look back on as big improvement areas.

A few thoughts threaded below 👇 I also plan to write a more comprehensive annual shareholder letter during Q1 and will share this transparently.

On the highest level, we've had our second consecutive year of solid profitability. This is great and affords us freedom to take a long-term approach. Growth rate, shipping frequency, and product quality, especially for our main product Publish, is not where we want it to be.

2018 has been an interesting year for us with a number of ups and downs, some inflicted upon ourselves, some a result of market shifts.

In particular, early in the year Facebook had their Cambridge Analytica data scandal. This resulted in many API changes and deprecations.

Twitter clamped down on automation. In the middle of the year, Facebook revoked 3rd party ability to post to Profiles (only Pages + Groups now). This caused a flat month for us. As a company we support and welcomed these changes. They did have an impact on our growth, however.

We were well set up to handle the turbulence of the year, having set down our vision of a sustainable and long-term company. We took the time to make the changes needed (including GDPR). Since we see this as a decades long journey, we can have years like this.

Our main and most well-known product Publish, has had a couple of breakout months in 2018 but overall has had slow growth. At the start of the year, we made a decision to do an over-haul and rebuild of the foundation of the product. It's been painful and we've learned a lot.

We're almost ready to shift to the new version of Publish. The architecture improvements will enable us to get into a solid cadence of delivering new value to customers again. We expect 2019 to look very different to 2018 in this regard.

We've ended the year feeling happy with the state of the company and the foundation we have for the future. As we look to 2019, we're going to be pushing hard to innovate and bring a lot more clear value to customers, as well as to raise the bar significantly in all areas.

Our two newest products, Reply and Analyze are growing rapidly. We're very pleased with the evolution of these products, and see them as core pieces of our future. Even in the November numbers, you can see they lifted monthly growth rate for Buffer MRR from 0.5% to 0.74%.

Analyze has gone from zero at the start of the year, to $4.4k MRR at the end of November, and is already at $7k MRR as of today. The team is working well together and we expect great growth in 2019 + an even bigger material difference for customers and Buffer's trajectory.

That's all I'll share for now. After we close the year fully, I'll be writing a more comprehensive update (in Jan/Feb).

I hope our numbers and my thoughts are useful to see. If you have any questions, I'm getting on a plane, hopefully with wifi, for the next few hours. AMA 😀