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Oct 2011

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What is the Game that Buffer is playing?

Is Buffer Defensible?

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BUFFER IS A WEIRD COMPANY

  • All learning is public – Joel’s blog
  • Investment Deck and Termsheet are public
  • All performance data is public
    • Revenue, Churn, etc
  • All Salary and equity data is public
  • Salaries are based on a public Formula!
  • All code is Open Source
  • All emails are available to all employees
  • Fully remote workforce ~100 people

Why is Buffer such a weird company?

Can you imagine your employer having such policies?

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MONTHLY RECURRING REVENUE (MRR) – SEP 2019

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ANNUAL RECURRING REVENUE (ARR) – SEP 2019

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NO OF ACTIVE SUBSCRIPTIONS – SEP 2019

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AVERAGE REVENUE PER USER (ARPU) – SEP 2019

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CUSTOMER LIFE TIME VALUE (LTV) – SEP 2019

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USER / LOGO / VOLUME CHURN – SEP 2019

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GROSS REVENUE CHURN – SEP 2019

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NET REVENUE CHURN – SEP 2019

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Joel Gascoigne on Strategy

  • The way I see it, is that if you want to monetize through ads you probably need 100M+ users. If you want to build a solid freemium offering you only need a few million users, if that.
  • I’ve observed that as startups grow, they tend to move up market. They introduce more powerful offerings and charge more. They start doing enterprise sales. We're even on this journey now. (Mar 2014)

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