Buffer in March: $5.9M Annual Revenue, Self-Managed Salaries & More

Apr 21, 2015 3 min readReports

The change towards self-management at Buffer is our biggest and most fascinating challenge to work through right now.

March found us evolving in quite a few areas including self-reviews, self-managed salaries and more—all while growing our user base and team throughout the month. Here is the latest update:

The latest Buffer metrics in March

  • 2,171,877 total registered users (+4.5%)
  • 207,035 monthly active users (+9.4%)
  • 50,538 average daily active users (+5.4%)
  • $488,771.05 monthly recurring revenue (+5.7%)
  • $5.87M annual revenue run-rate (+5.7%)
  • $2,084,003.37 cash in bank
  • 31 team members across the world
Buffer stats in March 2015

It’s awesome to see the revenue continue to grow at a solid pace here, making us very much profitable with the current team size.

Beyond metrics, here are some key things that have happened in the last month:

Continuing our journey of self-management

As we continue making the transition to be a fully self-managed company at Buffer, it’s been particularly interesting to get a chance to revisit almost every one of our existing processes and make them more friendly and less hierarchical. Two big attempts in March:

Self-managed salaries

We’ve started to slowly abandon our salary formula. It has helped us go a long way; however it doesn’t feel in line with being truly self-managed.

Instead, we’re now experimenting with a time period once a year where all team members are invited to reflect on their salaries and get advice on changes from their teammates and a dedicated Salary Sounding Board.

We’ve started this in March and are in the middle of wrapping it up now in April. This means every team member can de facto control and change their own salaries.

Self-reviews

Another important topic we started to tackle was the importance of ongoing and regular feedback, even without managers.

We started a pilot program in March where team members could optionally review their own performance and reflect on achievements and challenges. They then invited 3 other team members they worked closely with to offer advice on how they’re doing and how they could improve.

More than half the team joined this pilot and without having fully analyzed the outcome, we’re excited to bring this or a similar process to the whole team going forward.

Overall, some growing pains of being self-managed

Finding our feet in this fairly new environment has brought us some tough conversations. Often we don’t fully know whether the decisions we are making are the right ones.

What we’ve learned in relation to this is fairly simple: Just keep swimming! We plan on doing that! :)

Team growth

We’ve made big strides on growing the team in March, with 2 new people already starting their Buffer bootcamp and 3 more starting in April. This brings the team to 34! We’re especially excited to focus on hiring Product roles—something we’ve failed to identify and focus on for some time, but we feel now we’re really getting on top of.

We’re also keeping our focus on hiring for the Happiness Team to keep our users as happy as possible, since we started to put some strain on people working in those roles with the increased volume of requests through our continuous growth.

Here are the open areas we’d love a hand with right now:

Open roles at Buffer

An ask to you
If you know of any founders of self-managed companies that we could speak with (we know first-hand that there are very few companies that operate in that way, e.g. Medium, Valve, Sounds True), it’d be greatly appreciated to hear about them!

Brought to you by

Try Buffer for free

140,000+ small businesses like yours use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month

Get started now

Related Articles

ReportsAug 13, 2020
Shareholder Update: Q2 2020 and July

Note: This is the quarterly update sent to Buffer shareholders, with a bit of added information for context. We share these updates transparently as a part of our ‘default to transparency ’ value. See all of our revenue on our public revenue dashboard and see all of our reports and updates here . It's been quite the y

OpenApr 10, 2020
Pay Analysis Update: Examining Equal Pay at Buffer in 2020

Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. You can’t improve something if you don’t know that it needs to be improved. That was very true for us four years ago when we first started looking into equal pay at Buffer. We have long used a salary formula to determine all of our salaries – the same role in the same part of the world receives the same salary. That m

Buffer Shareholder Update: COVID-19 Impact and Approach

Ever since the world got turned upside down by COVID-19, it’s been “business as unusual” for everyone – Buffer included. I sent this update out to Buffer’s investors one week ago. I hesitated on whether to share it more widely, as I know a lot of companies have been impacted more severely in these times. That said, I believe it makes sense to lean into our company value of transparency, since there may be some companies this could help, and it shows Buffer customers that we will be around beyon

140,000+ people like you use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month