251 karma · joined April 28, 2013
I blog - http://joel.is I tweet - @joelgascoigne
Thanks, guys!
Out of our total March revenue of $246,000 [1], 79% came from our $10/mo Awesome Plan and the other 21% came from Buffer for Business [2].
Let me know if you have any other questions :-)
[1] http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-update-march-2014/ [2] http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-revenue-growth-report-2/
Happiness Heroes are the people who help customers with queries via Email, Twitter and Live Chat. Weekend Warriors are people in the team who help with those same things during the weekend (though it's a full-time 5 days a week role, so 3 other days too). We have 6 full-time members of this Happiness team, it's something we make a very high priority. In the last month we answered 92% of emails within 6 hours, 65% within 1 hour, with a volume of around 10,000 emails.
I can definitely see how it seems Mary is getting screwed. Our equity number there is misleading, she has 0.3% (column to the right). Key things to note: Mary lives in Spokane, which has a relatively low cost of living and falls into our "C" bracket in the salary formula. If she moves, her salary will go up by either $6K or $16K depending on where she moves to. Also, Mary chose equity over salary (yay) which is a choice to increase equity by taking $10K less salary. I hope that helps explain things there, let me know if you have any more questions!
We're lucky to have a lot of interest and so in some ways I guess it ends up like a lottery. At the same time, we try and share as much as we can around the culture and when it is a good fit. Here's a post about that: http://open.bufferapp.com/how-we-hire/
Let me know if you have any questions :-)
Edit: To answer your question about getting a reply - we reply to every single email, even though it can be tough and can take a couple of weeks or so for us to get to them all.
Like in last month's Who is hiring I wanted to share all our numbers for complete transparency. March just came to a close and Buffer stands at 1.4M total users served by a small 21 person team spread across 14 cities and 5 continents. 130,000 of our users are actively using the product each month. We generated $350,000 in March, and we have $580,000 in the bank. The average salary at the company is $98,000 and our total funding to date is $450,000 which we raised in December 2011, for which we gave up 14% of the company. I'm sharing all of this because one of the highest values we have at Buffer is to be fully transparent, and I'd love for you to be part of the incredible journey we've embarked upon.
At 16% month over month revenue growth on average in the last 6 months, we're seeing increasing demand to build out the product further and help our fast-growing customer base with all their social media problems. To achieve this, we'd love your help with some interesting engineering challenges. Do any of these areas stand out for you? I'd really love to hear from you:
- Reliability Hacker (we're sending 450,000 posts to
social networks every day, our architecture is still
not ideal)
- Android Lead (our Android app has half a million
downloads but currently no full-time developer!)
- iOS Hacker (our favorite people who use Buffer are
all crying out for an iPad app)
- Growth Hacker (our landing page conversion is at 7%,
we'd love your help improving it and many other
metrics)
- Frontend Hacker (last month 130,000 people used
Buffer, we'd love to improve our dashboard interface
and extensions for them)
- We're completely open about salary and equity, in
fact here is a spreadsheet of all individual salaries:
https://docs.google.com/a/bufferapp.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&usp=drive_web#gid=1.
It's most likely you'd fall into a range of
$85,000-$150,000 and 0.1%-1%.
- We're a fully distributed remote team, and we come
together 3 times a year for super fun retreats.
The last one was in Thailand in December, our next
is Cape Town in April!
- We have a big focus on culture, that's the main thing
we think about when someone joins the team. Here is
our slide deck of values:
http://www.slideshare.net/Bufferapp/buffer-culture-03
I'm excited about the chance to work with you. If you have any questions about our culture, product or journey so far, add a reply to this - I'll be checking throughout the day to get back to you :-)
- Joel (Founder/CEO)
I think there's a chance a 16 month internship could work, be sure to get in touch :-) If you're self-driven and can add to the team and help us move forward, we'd definitely take a look!
Our philosophy is that we should all have the opportunity to be in the single place on Earth that makes us the happiest and most productive, and we want to encourage you to find that place and help you be there. We have a fantastic immigration lawyer we work with and 100% success rate obtaining visas.
Hey everyone, hope your weekend is off to a killer start!
February just came to a close and Buffer stands at 1.4M total users served by a small 16 person team spread across 12 cities and 5 continents. 130,000 of our users are actively using the product each month. We generated $333,000 in February, and we have $520,000 in the bank. The average salary at the company is $98,000 and our total funding to date is $450,000 which we raised in December 2011, for which we gave up 14% of the company. I'm sharing all of this because one of the highest values we have at Buffer is to be fully transparent, and I'd love for you to be part of the incredible journey we've embarked upon.
At 16% month over month revenue growth on average in the last 6 months, we're seeing increasing demand to build out the product further and help our fast-growing customer base with all their social media problems. To achieve this, we'd love your help with some interesting engineering challenges.
Do any of these areas stand out for you? I'd really love to hear from you:
- Reliability Hacker (we're sending 400,000 posts to social networks every day,
our architecture is still not ideal)
- Happiness (Support) Hacker (we have a crazy obsession for customer happiness
and want to build our own tools to go beyond what's normal)
- Android Lead (our Android app has half a million downloads but currently no
full-time developer!)
- iOS Hacker (our favorite people who use Buffer are all crying out for an
iPad app)
- Growth Hacker (our landing page conversion is at 7%, we'd love your help
improving it and many other metrics)
- Frontend Hacker (last month 130,000 people used Buffer, we'd love to improve
our dashboard interface and extensions for them)
- We're completely open about salary and equity, in fact here is a spreadsheet
of all individual salaries: https://docs.google.com/a/bufferapp.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&usp=drive_web#gid=1.
It's most likely you'd fall into a range of $85,000-$120,000 and 0.1%-1%.
- We're a fully distributed remote team, and we come together 3 times a year for
super fun retreats. The last one was in Thailand in December, our next is
Cape Town in April!
- We have a big focus on culture, that's the main thing we think about when someone
joins the team. Here is our slide deck of values: http://www.slideshare.net/Bufferapp/buffer-culture-03
I'm excited about the chance to work with you. If you have any questions about our culture, product or journey so far, add a reply to this - I'll be checking throughout the day to get back to you :-)
- Joel (Founder/CEO)
How do you think we could improve that aspect?
From the linked article:
"In Startupland, everybody should be working towards the same goal: that big juicy exit. That’s the only payday any CEO should be worried about (even though more than half of them will never get it)."
I can't agree with that, and this is a key reason I spoke with others in the team and we decided that my salary as well as other c-level salaries should be quite high at this point. We're not planning an exit anytime soon.
Until a day ago, my salary was $118,000. In the first year, my salary was zero and in the second year it ranged from $55,000 to $75,000.
We're at a point with Buffer where there's a massive opportunity, and I'm going into my 4th year now. At $2.3M ARR and being cashflow positive (revenues cover the salaries) we're in growth mode and this isn't investor money we're using to fund these salary levels.
I completely agree that in the early years this would be a big red flag. I think the further you go, the more that notion reverses. I've heard that it can be a red flag if the CEO is not paid enough.
Would love to hear any other thoughts here, it definitely was a tough decision to make and I'm glad that by putting this out there we get all this valuable feedback.
Thanks for the kind words :)
I can understand that MongoHQ wanted to obtain the full picture here and not put other customers at risk by exposing this information before the situation was fully locked down.
Some of you might have heard about our security breach on Saturday. I just wanted to leave a quick note and clarify that this MongoHQ security breach was the method used to obtain our users' access tokens, which led to the wave of spam on Saturday.
This is a key final piece of our investigation which brings it back full circle. I'm very happy that we have been able to gain the full understanding and can be confident there is no backdoor.
I want to be clear that this is still our fault. If access tokens were encrypted (which they are now) then this would have been avoided. In addition, MongoHQ have provided great insights and have much more logging in place than we have ourselves. We’re also increasing logging significantly as a result.
I've updated our security breach blog post with this information. If you want to see the full set of events, take a read here: http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-has-been-hacked-here-is-wha...
Let me know if you have any questions about this. I'll keep an eye on this thread.