The Buffer free plan is here to stay 🆓 ✅

For me, this feels like the end of an era. Some thoughts.. 🧵 Back when I launched Buffer in late 2010, Hootsuite was really the only other player in the space. And they were a product and company I really looked up to. I was a Hootsuite user well before I started Buffer.

Great question @trappology:

❓👉🏻 Do I recommend unlimited vacation days?

Here's my take. Thread 🧵 ⬇️

https://twitter.com/trappology/status/1340110249047552002

I do not recommend unlimited vacation. There are problems with it. The most clear, for us, was that with unlimited vacation, the team did not take enough vacation.

I've come to believe something:

The way most businesses operate these days, they try to force it. In life, we all have our ups and downs and our moments of feeling lost, and then moments of feeling clarity.

There are seasons of progress, and seasons of reflection. Forcing ourselves to have linear progression in life is a recipe for loss of meaning and depression.

Today, we released our 2020 State of Remote Work with @AngelList. We had over 3,500 remote worker participants in the questions.

The question the most people said yes to was around working remotely for the rest of their careers, it had some incredible results: The next highest statistic shows how likely remote workers are to recommend remote work to others:

Very insightful thread into the journey as a @Buffer shareholder for @awilkinson / Tiny, and their original thesis for making the investment 4+ years ago.

Thread to add a few of my thoughts to this awesome information:

https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1211440446590734336

Andrew has consistently been one of the most helpful shareholders we have, ever since that investment. I don't say this lightly, as we've had many unhelpful investors over that time period too. Case in point, we've spent $7m+ buying back stock since 2017. open.buffer.com/buying-out-inv…

Here are the @Buffer financials / metrics for October 2019.

- We crossed a key milestone of $22m in ARR 👌
- Our highest monthly growth rate in around 1.5 years 🚀

Thread with more thoughts ⬇️ We had great growth due to a couple of factors in particular:

- We launched Instagram Stories scheduling, which drove around $33k in MRR growth.
- We transitioned some customers from legacy to current pricing, which brought around $15k MRR growth.

(this isn't a typical month)

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.

Wow, we did it!! Delighted to share that @Buffer has officially surpassed $20m in ARR.

May 2019 numbers (see table for more):

MRR: $1.68m
ARR: $20.13m
Customers: 77k
Rev/employee: $234k

⬇️ Thread below with my reflections on this milestone and May numbers. Reaching $20m ARR is a huge milestone for the whole team, I’m so proud of everyone.

It’s been a long time in the making, I started Buffer almost 9 years ago. It really is a long journey. If you’re getting started in SaaS, buckle up!

Here are the April 2019 metrics for @Buffer. Summary:

- MRR: $1,637,323
- ARR: $19,647,876

- Customers: 76,446
- Rev per customer: $21.42

- Team size: 83
- Rev per team member: $236,721

See image for the full numbers + monthly / annual comparison.

Thread with reflections ⬇️ *A note on the EBITDA margin: In April, we had our annual company-wide retreat. Taking that cost into account, our EBITDA margin was reduced to 5.26%. Our EBITDA margin not including retreat costs was 26.99%, and consistent with numbers from previous months.

☀️ So excited to share that we've introduced Sabbaticals in the Buffer team.

It's pretty simple:

🏖 After every 5 years of working at Buffer, we’re inviting teammates to take a 6-week break, fully paid.

Full details from @courtneyseiter: open.buffer.com/sabbaticals/ "The cost of folks taking this much leave is fairly big, but the cost of losing them due to burnout – which has been named as a factor in type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, gastrointestinal issues, high cholesterol and even death – is even bigger." - @courtneyseiter

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.

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.

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.

Here are the @buffer top level numbers for February 2018: I have many updates and reflections to share on these numbers, hopefully they are interesting for people! Keep reading this thread 👇

Our high level metrics for @buffer for December 2017:

- MRR: $1,396,138
- ARR: $16,753,656
- 78,153 paying customers
- 4.94% churn rate
- $239,299 revenue per employee
- $5,293,484 cash in bank
- 87.74% gross margin

I'll thread a few Tweets to share some 2017/2018 reflections. We grew our bank balance by over $3.3m in 2017, starting at around $2m. This was a huge accomplishment for the whole team. In addition, we had net income (profit) of over $2.5m, turning things around completely from a loss in 2016. Couldn't be more proud of this team.