joelgascoigne

The best thing we've learned here is to enable a setting Facebook has called "Require AppSecret Proof for Server API calls". They actually have a lot of great security features which we've not been making use of.

Sorry about this everyone, I know we messed up a lot of peoples' weekends.

We're working pretty hard to get to the bottom of everything.

Let me know if you have questions, I'll try and answer them all.

Got it, in that case it's because we generally spend some time before responding. You should hear from us soon :-)

Sorry about that awful experience we caused there. We definitely had a period where we simply struggled to respond to everyone. We honestly get about 100 emails from this HN listing. When we were just a few people, it was hard to keep on top of. It's a poor excuse, and we're fixing it now (we genuinely get back to everyone now). We didn't handle this well for quite some time, though.

Thanks Danno, I think it's important.

Sorry about that. Can you let me know when you emailed? I'd like to dig into this further.

Hi! We're mostly looking for people who could join us full-time, however we'd still love to hear from you :-)

Sorry this has happened, that's not good at all. I know that a lot of effort goes into getting in touch with us (or anyone else). There was a time when I was personally handling all the hiring, and I struggled to get back to everyone on top of everything else I was doing. We have a much better hiring process now and we've committed to responding to every email. Sorry again that you had a bad experience here.

To be clear, we are agreeing with each other. I think that is an incorrect assumption, too. We consider each case very carefully, and often don't cut the salary (it has happened more that we didn't cut salary).

That said, it is very easy here in the comments to argue how bad it is to cut the salary when someone moves to a cheaper location. However, the flip-side of the same coin is what about when someone moves to a more expensive location? Should we then say "this is the fixed salary and you choose where to live, and if you move somewhere more expensive that is your choice"? I don't think that is fair. So the other side of the coin of "salary goes down if you move somewhere less expensive" is that we increase salary if you move somewhere more expensive. We've done this for people and it is highly appreciated.

Our overall philosophy is that we want to help people to be wherever in the world they can be happiest and most productive. We encourage traveling and we have set ourselves up as a distributed team based around this value.

Glad you asked this, it's something we're constantly pondering. Right now the answer is yes, though we don't do it ruthlessly and our overall philosophy is to show that we truly care about everyone involved. We ask the team member if they feel it's appropriate, rather than forcing it. We've actually not lowered someone's salary in this way yet, though it seems sensible that it would happen.

The fact is that the living costs (largest chunk being accommodation) varies so drastically, that it feels hard to justify having the same salary and basing salary purely on skill, with the assumption that location truly is a choice and people have chosen to live somewhere cheaper. We have people who end up paying $2,500/mo rent and others where it is more like $800/mo or even less.

In addition, we always want to pay people more if they choose to move somewhere more expensive, it seems unfair if someone gets used to a salary in one place and suddenly they move somewhere much more expensive, and we don't help them out.

I'd love any more thoughts you have on this :)

$3,750 in 3 months is not bad at all. It is super difficult to get something off the ground. Once you're in motion, it can grow pretty fast.

Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - Anywhere in the world (we're a distributed team of 8 people across the US, UK, Hong Kong and Sydney).

I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 700,000 users and are on a $1.5m+ annual revenue run rate. There are some super interesting challenges ahead, as we are looking to pass a million users in 2013. We are expecting even faster growth in the coming months through our mobile efforts.

We need help on 2 areas right now:

1. Android:

    - Android is our second highest source of signups for Buffer, only
      trailing behind Web which was our original platform.
    - our users love the app, which has a 4.3 rating on Google Play.
    - the app has 100k+ total downloads and 3k daily active users.
    - we work with Google Play, Kindle and Blackberry stores.

2. Full stack:

    - we get 1,500-2,000 signups per day on the web
    - we have 170,000 weekly active users for our Chrome extension
    - 4,500 API clients. Most popular: Feedly, IFTTT, Pocket, Instapaper
    - we ship to production multiple times a day
    - we have a data-driven process, with Einstein, our custom
      built a/b testing framework
    - ideally, experience in: PHP (Codeigniter)/Python, MongoDB,
      Backbone.js Javascript, CSS, HTML

We're a small team of driven hackers and happiness heroes (our support people). Just like you, we're excited and passionate about engineering challenges and have some interesting architecture and scaling problems we work on.

If you're interested in coming on board, you will:

    - work closely myself on Product and Sunil on technical
      architecture
    - ship to thousands of users and iterate quickly
    - work with our metrics team to make smart changes
    - be friendly and comfortable talking directly to customers
      on issues and features
    - be a happy, positive-minded and kind person who has a great
      approach in dealing with others
    - be a Buffer user (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
    - be anywhere in the world, and if you'd like, you have help and
      support from us to move to where you want to be
    - have experience working with another startup before (would
      be awesome, it’s cool if not)

Some aspects of Buffer culture that makes us a little different:

    - we are totally transparent. We raised $450k, we currently
      have 700k users and generate $125k/mo. Ask me anything else!
    - within the company, all salaries and equity are open and we
      have a formula for the distribution.
    - we're all very focused on self improvement - we have daily
      standups where we discuss our current improvements. This
      could be waking up earlier, starting public speaking, blogging,
      exercise, learning a language, etc.
    - culture deck: http://www.slideshare.net/bufferapp/buffer-culture-02

Salary: 88k-110k depending on location (living costs) and experience.

Equity: 0.5-1%

If this sounds fun, let's chat. Send a note to Sunil (our CTO) about yourself, why you’re interested in Buffer, and any relevant links (Github profile, Android Apps, projects and background): thenexthacker@bufferapp.com

- Joel (Founder/CEO)

Great question. We have actually only ever raised the $450k seed. Our revenues are helping with our ability to grow the team and have salaries where people can feel that money is not a factor, and we can focus on the great opportunities we have. For example, our April revenue was $115k and we're essentially cash-flow positive (we're hiring aggressively and aren't aiming for profit right now). To answer your initial question, we didn't take any salary for the first year, then we took $60k for a number of months before gradually increasing further. We increased to the $118k figure just a few couple months ago, which was over 2 years after we had started.

Awesome. Thanks for the insight :) I'm definitely keeping an eye on you guys, all the best!

I tend to agree with this. I'm genuinely on the lookout for a service to replace Feedburner.

Buffer is often called "just a cron job" and I can assure you much of the work is in scaling up "just a crob job" to hundreds of thousands of users (alongside all the other aspects of the product). So I know first hand that "building a replacement" is not the hard part of the task. I certainly want to trust that you guys can scale this up and be a reliable host of my feed.

We went through AngelPad (accelerator in SF) just before we raised, and through the program we received our initial $20k funding from AngelPad and $100k convertible debt funding from two VC firms associated with AngelPad (so a total of $120k as soon as we got into AngelPad). We then raised a further $50k from another firm (Inspiration) during the program before demo day and before we started pitching. So that is the 4 logos you see as previous investors. We also were lucky to get Guy and Hiten on board as advisors during our time at AngelPad. This social proof certainly helped us a lot, however it all happened very close to our pitching and so it is not too comparable to a true "previous financing". Hope that helps - let me know if you have any more Qs.

Originally it was simply an 'every minute' cron job. That only scales so far ;)

Yep, exactly. April revenue was $115k.

We're still not too "smart" about our scheduling. We have a few things planned down the line in our roadmap though.

What we found was that if we can help someone go from sharing once a day to 5 times a day, that would help them much more than if we were to assist them in sharing that 1 post at exactly the right time. That's why we've kept much more on the side of pushing forward with integrations and simply making it easier to add content to Buffer rather than working too much on the intelligent sharing.

This is correct, we had a $150k run rate when we raised (and pitched with this deck) and the $3.6M figure was a projection (and clearly one which was rather ambitious!).

For Buffer, the first $10k came from approximately our first 1,000 paying customers. That said, we've changed our pricing a few times so the number may not be exact.

The great part about getting $10k from recurring payments is that it can grow beyond $10k pretty quickly (now $100k+/mo).

As for the real "how", I think the key is to first find out something you can solve which is truly a problem for some number of people, and then to provide it and market to people the fact it exists.

My co-founder Leo wrote a great guest post (could you have guessed?) on how to get started with guest blogging :-) Here it is - http://askaaronlee.com/bufferapp/

Also he wrote an article for OnStartups about getting press, which might also be useful - http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-...

Hope that helps :-) Good luck.

You have some fantastic traction and revenues already, that's awesome.

My recommendation, which worked very well for us, was to focus less on articles about the startup, and more on articles about the Pinterest, about all the challenges people face using it and growing their following. What types of images should you pin? How frequently should you pin things? So many people have no idea about these things. Then, often your product will naturally fit into some of these articles. You can write these articles on your own blog, or offer them to other blogs.

We did a lot of guest posting to get the first 100,000 users for Buffer.

Sleep is certainly a challenge as a founder, or I would say "overworking" in general. It can be tempting to try and fix things by working more on them, and I've found personally that it rarely helps. With sleep, if I get 7.5 hours of sleep compared to 5 hours of sleep, it makes a huge difference for how much I can achieve, how focused I am. Especially the tasks that take a little more willpower (which are usually the most important ones) are the tasks that get left until tomorrow if I haven't had enough sleep.