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.

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.

Our vision for location-independent salaries at Buffer Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. I’m happy to share that we’ve established a long-term goal that salaries at Buffer will not be based on location. We made our first step towards this last year, when we moved from four cost-of-living based location bands for salaries to two bands. We did this by eliminating the lower two location bands The change we made resulted in salary increases for 55 of 85 team members, with the increase being on average $10,265. When the time is right, we will be eliminating the concept of cost-of-living based location bands entirely, which will lead to a simpler approach to providing generous, fair and transparent salaries at Buffer. In this post I’m sharing my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall. Location and Salaries It’s been interesting to see the conversation about location and salaries unfold both within Buffer and beyond. We’ve heard from many teammates over the years about the pros and cons of the location factor, and of course we’ve watched with interest as this became a regular topic of conversation within the larger remote work community. I've had many healthy debates with other remote leaders, and there are arguments for eliminating a location component which I haven’t agreed with. I don’t believe pay differences across locations is unethical, and it has made a lot of sense for us in the past. However, the last few years have seen a lot of change for remote teams. A change like this isn't to be made lightly, and at our scale comes with considerations. Our Compensation Philosophy Compensation is always slowly evolving as companies and markets mature and change. We’ve been through several major iterations of our salary formula, and myriad small tweaks throughout the last 8 or so years since we launched the initial version. Part of the fun of having a salary formula is knowing that it’s never going to be “done.” Knowing that the iterations would continue, Caryn, our VP of Finance, and I worked together to establish our compensation philosophy and document our principles on compensation to help us determine what should always be true even as the salary formula changes over time. We arrived at four principles that guide our decisions around compensation. We strive for Buffer’s approach to salary, equity, and benefits to be: Transparent Simple Fair Generous These are the tenets that have guided us through compensation decisions over the years. After we articulated them as our compensation principles, we were able to look at the location factor of our formula with new clarity. There are a few key considerations that were part of our discussions and my decision to put Buffer on a path towards removing our location factor from salaries that I'll go into more detail about next. Transparency, Simplicity, and Trust Our salary formula is one of the fundamental reasons that we can share our salaries transparently. Having a spreadsheet of team salaries is a huge step toward transparency, but true transparency is reached when the formula is simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and importantly, easy to use. In one of our earlier versions of the salary formula, we calculated the cost-of-living multiplier for every new location when we made an offer. That was cumbersome, and it meant that a candidate couldn’t truly know their salary range until we calculated that. This was improved greatly when we moved to the concept of “cost-of-living bands.”. After that, different cities and towns could more easily be classified into each band. This massively increased the transparency of the formula, and I think it helped create a lot more trust in this system. Anyone could relatively easily understand which band their location fit into, and with that knowledge understand the exact salary they'd receive at Buffer. This type of immediate understanding of the salary formula, and ability to run calculations yourself, is where transparency really gains an extra level of impact and drives trust within and beyond the team. However, with our four cost-of-living bands, there were still decisions to be made around where locations fall, and this has been the topic of much healthy and productive debate over the years. The conversations around locations falling between the Average and High bands is what led us to introduce the Intermediate band. And with four choices of location, it has meant there is some disparity in salaries across the team. With the benefits that come from the powerful combination of transparency and simplicity, alongside the increased trust that is fostered with more parity across the team, I’m choosing to drive Buffer’s salary formula in the direction of eventually having no cost-of-living factor. Freedom and Flexibility We’ve long taken approaches to work which have been grounded in the ideal of an increased level of freedom and flexibility as a team member. When I started Buffer, I wanted greater freedom and a better quality of life than I felt would be possible by working at a company. That came in various forms, including location freedom, flexibility of working hours, and financial freedom. And as we’ve built the company, I’ve been proud that we’ve built a culture where every single team member can experience an unusual and refreshing level of freedom and flexibility. Since the earliest days, one of our most fondly held values has been to Improve Consistently, and in particular this line: “We choose to be where we are the happiest and most productive”. This is a value that has supported and encouraged teammates to travel and try living in different cities, in search of that “happiest and most productive” place. It has enabled people to find work they love and great co-workers, from a hometown near family where it would be hard to find a local company that can offer that same experience and challenge. It has also enabled people to travel in order to support their partner in an important career change involving a move, something which allows an often stressful change to happen much more smoothly, since you can keep working at Buffer from anywhere in the world. Having a culture that has supported moving freely across the globe has been a powerful level of freedom and flexibility. That freedom has been matched with a salary system which adjusts compensation to accommodate those changes in a fair and appropriate way. However, knowing that your salary will fluctuate and can decrease due to a choice to be somewhere else, does limit that freedom and the ability to make a decision to move. Moving towards a salary formula with parity across all locations, will enable an even greater level of freedom and flexibility. It feels clear to me that choosing to move is a personal or a family decision, and it is ideal if Buffer salaries are structured in a way that honor and support that reality. I’m excited that working towards removing our cost-of-living differences will help significantly reduce the friction involved in making a potentially positively life-changing decision to live in a different city or country. Results, Independence, and Reward At Buffer, we are not on the typical hyper-growth VC path. This comes with some constraints: we don’t have tens of millions in funding and unlimited capital to deploy in an attempt to find a rapid path to $100m and going public (thankfully, that’s not our goal). This path also means that our experiences as teammates in a variety of ways are directly tied to whether we are successfully serving existing and new customers. For example, the level of benefits, ability to travel (in normal times), and competitiveness of compensation, are very much driven by our revenue growth and profitability. But, this is independence too. The thing we often need to remind ourselves of, is that while we may feel more constrained at times, we have full freedom of what we do with the success we achieve. Making a choice like this is one example of that. It is my intention as founder / CEO that as we succeed together as a company, we all benefit from that success and see adjustments that improve our quality of life and create wealth. We are in a position of profitability which allows us to take a significant step towards removing the cost-of-living factor from our salary framework, which I believe serves those goals. And removing it entirely will be determined by us successfully executing on our strategy and serving customers well. Reducing Cost-of-Living Bands The way our salary formula works is that we benchmark a teammate’s role based on market data at the 50th percentile for the software industry in San Francisco and then multiply that by the cost-of-living band. So, a Product Marketer benchmark at the 50th percentile of the San Francisco market data is $108,838. Depending on the teammate’s location this would be multiplied by a cost-of-living band (Low, Average, Intermediate or High). For example, if they lived Boulder, Colorado, a city with Average cost-of-living, the benchmark would be multiplied by 0.85 for a salary of $92,512. To best reflect our compensation philosophy, company values, and the path we want for Buffer, we have eliminated the Low and Average cost-of-living bands. What we’ve done is brought all Low (.75 multiplier) and Average (.85 multiplier) salaries up to Intermediate (.9 multiplier), which we now call our Global band. This is what resulted in 55 teammates seeing on average an increase to their salary of $10,265. Our two bands are now Global (.9 multiplier) and High (1.0 multiplier). This change is based on my vision for Buffer and how being a part of this team affects each of us as individually, as well as the direction I believe the world is going. I’m excited about the change first and foremost because it supports our goal of having a transparent, simple, fair, and generous approach to compensation. This is also a move that raised salaries right away for more than half of the team. This point in particular gives me a lot of joy because I want compensation to be one of the incredible parts of working at Buffer. Money isn’t everything, and we all need kind and smart colleagues, a psychologically safe environment, and to work on challenging and interesting problems, in order to be fulfilled at work. Beyond that, however, money really impacts life choices, and that’s ultimately what I want for every Bufferoo; the freedom to choose their own lifestyle and make choices for themselves and their families’ long-term health and happiness. It’s important to me that people who choose to spend their years at Buffer will have the freedom to make their own choices to have a great life. And, for our teammates who live in much lower cost-of-living areas, a Buffer salary could end up being truly life changing. I’m really happy with that outcome. The decision was also impacted by the direction that I believe the world is going (and, the direction we want to help it go). Remote is in full swing, and it’s increasingly breaking down geographical borders. I believe this is a great thing. Looking ahead 10 or even 5 years, it seems to me that we’re going to see a big rebalancing, or correction, that’s going to happen. I believe it’s important to be ahead of these types of shifts, and be proactively choosing the path that’s appropriate and energizing for us. What next? Our plan is to eventually get to one single location band, essentially eliminating the cost-of-living factor from the salary formula altogether. This will be possible once we can afford to make this change and sustain our commitment to profitability. So, this will be driven by the long-term results we create from our hard work, creativity in the market, and commitment to customers. What questions does this spark for you? Send me a tweet with your thoughts. Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash.