Fourteen years It's a little hard to believe. Fourteen years ago today, I launched Buffer from my apartment in Birmingham, in the UK. The launch came seven weeks after I started working on the project on the side as a contract web developer. For a few weeks, I called it bfffr until I realized that no one knew how to pronounce it. Sometimes it's better to be clear than clever. So it became bufferapp.com. Even then, people thought we were called Buffer App for a while! Eventually we were able to acquire buffer.com and clear up the confusion altogether. When I started Buffer, I had no idea how far it could come. This was a case where the dream formed over time, rather than being fully formed on day one. There's a dogma that you need to have complete clarity of the vision and outcome before you even start (and go all-in and full-time, which I also disagree with). I think there's a beauty in starting with a small dream. It just so happens that every big thing started small. Early on, my dream was just to create a tool that made it easy to Tweet consistently, build it for myself and others, and make enough money to cover my living expenses and go full-time on it. The number for me to be able to work on it full-time was £1,200 per month, and that felt almost out of reach in the beginning. Today, Buffer generates $1.65 million per month, serves 59,000 customers, and enables fulfilling work for 72 people. I've had many dreams with Buffer, each one progressively becoming more ambitious. To me it's always felt like I can just about see the horizon, and once I get there, I see a new horizon to strive for. I've tried to embrace that Buffer can continue to evolve as I, the team, and customers do. A lot happens as a founder and as a business in fourteen years. I started the company when I was 23. I was young, ambitious, and had so much to learn. My naivety served me well in so many ways. At the same time, I like to think that the years have given me a more intentional, decisive approach to business. Broadly, it feels like we've had three eras to the company so far. In our first era, we found traction, we built swiftly and with fervor, we grew a special community of users and customers, and we did it all in our own way. We were a remote company before almost anyone else, and were part of the earliest days of building in public. There's so much we did right in that first era, though we also had wind in our sails which masked our errors and immaturity. The second era of Buffer was marked by growing pains, a struggle to understand who we really are, missteps and through that, transformation, clarity, and new beginnings. These years were very much the messy middle of Buffer. They were also where I experienced my lowest lows in the journey so far. As hard as this experience was, I am grateful as it was the path I needed to walk in order to grow as a leader, cement our independence and long-term ambitions, rediscover Buffer's purpose, and start to operate with greater conviction. We're a couple of chapters into our current era. With a renewed focus on entrepreneurs, creators, and small businesses, we started making bolder moves to serve them and create a more unique offering in what had become a very crowded and commoditized space. Through a clearer strategy, strengthening our culture, and improving how we work as a team, we emerged from a multi-year decline. Last year, we turned the ship around and had a flat year. This year, we're on track for over 10% growth and a profitable year. It doesn't feel like a coincidence to me that this final era has also been the phase where I've experienced one of the most joyful and demanding experiences as a human: becoming a parent. I have a wife and I have two young boys, and they mean the world to me. I also started prioritizing my community of family and friends, as well as cultivating hobbies again. I spend time on my health and fitness, try to keep up my skiing, and recently picked up playing the piano again. Time has become a lot more precious, and with that, clarity and conviction are more vital than ever. As much as it sometimes feels hard to fit everything in, to me, it's the whole package that makes life fulfilling. When I really stop to take a step back, I feel very lucky that I've been able to do this for fourteen years. It's a long time in any sense. In tech and social media it feels like almost a lifetime already. And yet, just like those early days when I could barely imagine reaching £1,200 per month, I'm still looking toward that next horizon. I see a clear opportunity to help entrepreneurs, creators and small businesses get off the ground, grow, and thrive long-term. Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash.

The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media I'm delighted to share that we have introduced support for Bluesky in Buffer. This is an important moment for us as a company, and there are a number of reasons that adding Bluesky is personally meaningful for me. With Bluesky, we now support the three major social networks pushing forward a new era of decentralized social media: Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. We have been intentional about moving fast to add these channels to our tool. Supporting independence and ownership in social media Buffer has now existed for almost 14 years, and throughout that time I've seen a lot change in social media, and in our space of tools to support people and businesses with social. We're an outlier as a product and company that has existed for that kind of timeframe with leadership and values left in tact. We've had to work hard at times to maintain control over our destiny. In 2018, we made the decision to spend $3.3M to buy out the majority of our VC investors and be able to go our long-term path. We have continued to carry out buybacks each year since 2018, and at this stage we are majority founder and team owned. One of the things I'm proudest of is that we still wholeheartedly serve individuals and creators, and have not gone up-market as many other long-running companies in our space have done. We've been fortunate to be able to scale to 56,000 paying customers and over $18M in annual revenue while taking our own unique path. Through intentional choices over the years, we have maintained a level of optionality over our future that most do not have. This independence is something I don't take for granted. Keeping ownership of our company, and through that ownership having an ability to boldly go in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team, is very important to me. This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky and Mastodon. These networks have been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to. The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term. At Buffer, we will be doing everything we can to support the growth of new decentralized social media options, because we believe that individuals and small businesses should maintain control over their content and the connection to their audience. The resurgence of the open web with social media protocols I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon as the prominent implementation), and AT Protocol from Bluesky. Open standards in social media could be as powerful as open standards have been for direct and private communication (email). What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web. The Internet was built upon open standards — HTTP, URL, TCP/IP, DNS, HTML. A vast many valuable internet businesses have built on these "shoulders of giants." ActivityPub and AT Protocol are built with open standards philosophies, and could similarly enable a new playground of innovation, with openness, ownership and interoperability at their core. I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in third-party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space. Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do. Bluesky is bringing innovation back to social media If you haven't had a chance to take a look at some of Bluesky's recent product and platform announcements, I highly recommend that you go and read them. In particular, what they've done with introducing custom feeds as well as starter packs gets me very excited about some real innovation from a social network. When I saw starter packs introduced, it immediately felt like a no-brainer feature for a social network, and such a powerful thing, especially for an emerging social network, to offer. Starter packs allow anyone to create a "getting started pack" for a new Bluesky user. This can include a set of recommended follows, and up to three recommended custom feeds (more on those below). This enables their passionate users to be able to personalize an introduction for people not yet on Bluesky. It's a smart way to activate users to play a meaningful role in onboarding new people to the network and grounding them with an existing community to interact with. Of course, Bluesky benefits by likely getting more people onto their new network than they would otherwise. Custom feeds are an incredible innovation that put the choice of algorithm for the social network in the hands of the wide range of users and different niche communities that exist on the network. The way that the Bluesky team have built custom feeds enables a ton of flexibility for the types of content alogrithms can serve up, and creates a marketplace for browsing and enabling different custom feeds you can choose to view. Something I've observed from the Bluesky team is their commitment to, and intentionality around, building tools for the governance of the network itself. It's very meaningful that on Bluesky you can choose your own algorithm and you can adopt an algorithm that someone else has written, or create your own algorithm for what content shows up in your feed. And I think it's very smart that Bluesky has done this — because it's both innovation and it's strong strategy because it's a highly defensible move which many of the other networks would not be able offer. It would be very unlikely for the commercial social networks to move away from the company, the network themselves, holding on to ownership of the algorithm and what is served up to you. I had a wonderful conversation with Rose Wang from the Bluesky team a couple of weeks ago and one of the topics we got into was around the values that are embedded in the Bluesky team and the work they're trying to do. It was clear to me how thoughtful and intentional they are being around the governance of the network and the flexibility they're building in to allow users to really shape the community and what is important to them. Something I appreciate about Bluesky is that their goal is to create a social network not controlled by a single company, while also ensuring that it comes together as a cohesive and easy-to-use experience. Decentralized social media can be daunting and feel complex and inaccessible to people initially, and so I think intentional work going into the simplicity of the experience is paramount. With great innovation from the Bluesky team such as starter packs and custom feeds, along with their focus on simplicity, I strongly encourage you to go and take a look at this new social network. This is a platform and community that's worth taking a deeper look at, participating in and investing time into. Join us in participating in a new era of decentralized social media By supporting Bluesky, along with Mastodon and Threads, we are playing our part in moving forward this promising new era of social media. Many of us in the team have been personally drawn to these networks for their special and supportive communities. We're here to see decentralized social media grow and become more meaningful for more people across the world. That's why we've put our scale, brand and resources into building awareness and providing tools to make participating on these new social networks more streamlined. I encourage you to add Bluesky to your channels in Buffer, and start participating in the social network today. Learn more and get started by visiting our Bluesky page. Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash.

Build Week at Buffer: What it is and how we’re approaching it Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. We’ve dedicated the week of August 22nd to a brand new internal initiative called Build Week. We’ll all be putting aside our regular work for a single week to come together in small groups and work on ideas that can benefit customers or us as a company, ideally with something of value shipped or in place by the end. The inspiration for Build Week Before building Buffer, I had several formative experiences attending “build a startup in a weekend”-type events. Two I attended were run by Launch48, and another was Startup Weekend. Anyone could sign up to attend no matter what skill set or experience level they would bring. As long as you were willing to roll up your sleeves, build something, and contribute in any way, you’d be very welcome. The focus was on building something rapidly from end to end, within the space of a weekend. Teams would be capped to a small number, around three to five people per team, so the groups could move quickly with decision making. Once the teams were formed, you’d get to work and start doing research, building, and marketing (often all in parallel) to move as fast as possible in building a minimum viable product and achieving a level of validation. At the end of the weekend, teams would present what they achieved, what they validated, and what they learned. Through these events, I met people, formed strong bonds, and stayed in contact for years with them afterward. Some teams even became startups. It felt like highly accelerated learning, and it was intense but fun, very energizing and inspiring. I’ve been thinking about how this could translate to Buffer and why it would be so powerful for us in our current season, which is where Build Week comes in. What is Build Week? Build Week is a week at Buffer where we’ll form teams, work with people we don’t typically work with, and work together on an idea we feel called towards. The highest level goals of Build Week are to inject into the company and team a spirit of shipping, creativity, and innovation, making progress and decisions rapidly, comfort with uncertainty, and ultimately going from idea to usable value out in the world in the space of a week. When it comes to the type of projects we’ll work on and the skill sets required to accomplish them, the goal is for those to be far-reaching. While it may seem like Build Week would be more suited to engineers specifically, our goal is to achieve the outcome that everyone realizes they are and can be a Builder. Ultimately, being a Builder in Buffer Build Week will mean that you are part of a team that successfully makes a change that brings value, and it happens in the short period of a week. Everyone on the team has something to bring to this goal, and I'm excited by the various projects that will be worked on. How we’re approaching Build Week With our high-level vision and ideas for Build Week, several months ago we got to work to bring this concept to life and make it happen. The first thing we did was form a team to plan and design Build Week itself. Staying true to our vision for Build Week itself, where we want to have small teams of people who don’t normally work together, this is also how we approached forming the Build Week Planning team. With this team in place, we started meeting weekly. Overall, it has been a small time commitment of 45 minutes per week to plan and design Build Week. As we got closer to the actual week, we started meeting for longer and having real working sessions. Our final design for Build Week consisted of three key stages: Idea Gathering, Team Formation and Build Week. For the Idea Gathering stage, we created a Trello board where anyone in the team could contribute an idea. We used voting and commenting on the cards, which helped narrow the ideas to those that would be worked on during Build Week. We gave people a few days to submit ideas and received 78 total contributions. This was a big win and a clear indication of a big appetite for Build Week within the company. The Team Formation stage was a trickier problem to solve and determine the process for. Initially, we had hoped that this could be entirely organic, with people gravitating towards an idea and joining up with people who are also excited to work on that idea. Ultimately, we realized that if we approached it this way, we would likely struggle with our goal of having people work with folks they don’t normally work with, and we wouldn’t have enough control over other aspects, such as the time zones within each team. All of this could jeopardize the success of Build Week itself. So we arrived at a hybrid, where we created a Google Form for people to submit their top 3 choices of ideas they’d like to work on. With that information, we determined the teams and made every effort to put people in a team they had put down as a choice. And the final stage is, of course, Build Week itself! The teams have now been formed, and we created a Slack channel for each team to start organizing themselves. We are providing some very lightweight guidance, and we will have a few required deliverables, but other than that, we are leaving it to each team to determine the best way to work together to create value during the week. If you're a Buffer customer, one small note that as we embrace this company-wide event and time together, we will be shifting our focus slightly away from the support inbox. We will still be responding to your questions and problems with Buffer; however, we may be slightly slower than usual. We also won't be publishing any new content on the blog. We’re confident that this time for the team to bond and build various projects of value will ultimately benefit all Buffer customers. Why right now is the time for Build Week at Buffer 2022 has been a different year for Buffer. We’re in a position of flatter to declining revenue, and we’ve been working hard to find our path back to healthy, sustainable growth. One key element of this effort has been actively embracing being a smaller company. We’re still a small company, and we serve small businesses. Unless we lean into this, we will lose many of our advantages. We want to drive more connection across the team in a time where we’ve felt it lacking for the past couple of years. While we’ve been remote for most of our 11+ years of existence, we’ve always found a ton of value from company retreats where we all meet in person, and we’ve suffered during the pandemic where we’ve not been able to have these events. Build Week is an opportunity for us to do that with a whole new concept and event rather than trying to do it with something like a virtual retreat which would likely never be able to live up to our previous retreat experiences. There’s a big opportunity for exchanging context and ideas of current Buffer challenges within teams where the teams are cross-functional and with people who don’t normally work together. This could help us for months afterward. Build Week can also be a time where strong bonds, both in work and personally, are formed. My dream would be that after Build Week, people within their teams hit each other up in Slack and jump on a spontaneous catch-up call once in a while because they’ve become close during the week. We’ve had engineering hack weeks for a long time now. Those have been awesome in their way, but they have been very contained to engineering. And while those events created a lot of value, they often lacked perspectives that would have enhanced the work, such as customer advocacy, design, culture, or operational perspectives. As a company, we want to challenge some of the processes we have built up over the past few years. Build Week is like a blank canvas – we clear out a whole week and then diligently decide what we need in terms of structure and process to make this concept thrive and no more. This can act as inspiration for us going forward, where we can use the week as an example of rethinking process and questioning the ways we do things. The opportunity that comes with Build Week If we are successful with Build Week, I am confident that we will surprise ourselves with just how much value is created by the whole company in that one week alone. In embracing being a small company, we’re currently striving to challenge ourselves by moving at a faster pace without over-working. I think this is possible, and the completely different nature of how we work together in Build Week could give us ideas for what we can adjust to work more effectively and productively together in our regular flow of work. The opportunity for value creation within Build Week goes far beyond product features or improvements. Build Week will be a time for us to build anything that serves either customers or the team in pursuit of our vision and mission, or strengthens and upholds our values. We can stretch ourselves in the possibilities – there could be a marketing campaign, a data report, improving an existing process in the company, rethinking our tools, creating a new element of transparency, bringing our customers together, etc. Wish us luck! I believe Build Week can be one of the most fun, high-energy weeks we’ve had in years. I expect we can come out of the week on a high that can fuel us with motivation and enjoyment of our work for months. That is a worthy goal and something I think we can achieve with a little creativity and the right group of people designing and planning the event. Of course, part of the beauty of Build Week itself is that just like all the ideas and the freedom to choose how you work in a team, we don’t know everything we’ll learn as a company by doing this. It could be chaotic, there could be challenges, and there will undoubtedly be many insights, but we will be better off for having gone through the process. Please wish us all luck as we head into next week. There’s a lot of excitement in the company to create value. We hope to have new features to share with you in the coming weeks, and we’ll be back soon with a post sharing how it went. Have you tried something like Build Week before? If so, how did it go? I’d love to hear from you on Twitter. Photo by C Dustin on Unsplash.