Thread by @joelgascoigne

It's probably not for everyone, but trying to make Buffer a sustainable, real business, has been perhaps the most challenging but also most fulfilling part of the journey so far.

A few thoughts on this ⬇️

Being profitable and not raising further funding has been a beautiful constraint, and continuing to grow under those circumstances, an invigorating challenge.

I also fundamentally believe that for most companies, your initial success can give you momentum for perhaps 5 or even 10 years, but at a certain point the market changes and you have to adapt in order to last.

We've experienced this at Buffer, and adapting our products to the market changes in the last few years, and continuing to grow each month throughout those shifts, is something I count as a huge achievement.

We've also introduced profit sharing, bought out investors, and made charitable contributions. All things that you can only do as a profitable, sustainable business.

It's exciting to think about what we can do with our profits each year as we push forward further on this path.

I personally love the strategic aspect of choosing when to grow the team, figuring out how long it takes for new folks to have a real impact on revenue, and adjusting our expenses and investments based on ever changing company performance.

It's fascinating to me how raising multiple rounds of funding can mask the necessity to build a real company.

If you sell within 5 years of starting your company, you may never experience that challenge of adapting through market shifts.

On the VC path, you can literally keep raising and then either succeed and sell, or fail and fold. That cycle could be 10 years of your life.

When we were more on the funding path, we were much less disciplined with our finances and a lot of the other details of the business. You don't have to be, at least for a longer amount of time compared to profitable companies who aren't raising.

There's a huge amount to learn and figure out in that middle area where sustainable companies live, that so many founders end up skipping entirely if on the VC path.

Of course, a lot of this is a matter of preference, but with the strong VC narrative in recent years, it's easy to be blind to the real differences in the experience of being on each path.