leowidrich

Love the name "innovation facilitation" - one of the big things we've been working on at Buffer is called "Buffer for Teams" - in short, it's a way where you can suggest content to share on team members social accounts and people can swipe it (http://bufferapp.com/daily) to approve or reject. Especially PR launches, announcements, blogposts, etc, that more people at your company want to share could be helpful - pricing is very early and less of importance to us, (your budget sounds good) - if you're interested in exploring this, please ping me leo@bufferapp.com - we currently have a few people trialling it and they seem to get a lot of fun, value from spreading news more widely about a company.

That's awesome to hear, thanks!

Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - from wherever you want to be in the world (fully remote), we're looking for a Product Designer.

Over 30,000 people pay for a Buffer subscription to help them with their social media efforts, which helps us generate $420k MRR. With that we spend about $223k/mo on salaries, which is about 66% of our total spending (https://open.bufferapp.com/transparent-pricing-buffer/).

We work without managers and are fully self-managing. You pick your own projects, recruit team members from within the company or join task forces that you find interesting ( https://open.bufferapp.com/decision-maker-no-managers-experi...)

Like with everything else, our hiring process is fully transparent (more here https://open.bufferapp.com/how-we-hire/ )

There are so many exciting projects people are working on and it'd be awesome to have you lead the design efforts product experience of some of them. Just email Brian Lovin from this page: http://jobs.bufferapp.com/designer and he'll be in touch.

If you have any questions about how we work, I'd love to answer them.

(to get around paywall: google the title and click through from google)

yup, we will, thanks!

Yup, great questions! We considered a number of things: dividends, loans, buying back shares without raising money, debt. Dividends for a c-corp are taxed super high (big fan of paying taxes, but you end up paying something like 60-70% tax, not a good idea!). So raising extra cash with minimal dilution (2.5% for this round) was most efficient.

Right now, all money raised goes to company, then company buys back shares from early team members - investors still get preferred stock. We're not selling our common stock directly to investors - you're right, that'd be too complicated and not in investors interest.

Would love to answer more questions on this, keen to explain our full thinking!

Great point! We A/B tested a bunch of different ones, we haven't managed to outperform the current one. We'll certainly keep testing it. I like your hypothesis!

Yup, it is! We've filed for general solicitation, which the jobs act made possible last year! Let me know if I can answer any questions about it!

Hey there,

Great point on this. We've recently had a meeting discussing this in detail, I think you're absolutely right, it doesn't make people feel great to get a standard response like the one you've received. We've been trying to come up with a better way to personally respond to people, which has proven quite difficult. There were 2,000+ applicants last month and I think we're still trying to figure out the best work-flow to make each response tailored.

I wanted to assure though that we've read your email (and we do read each and every email, always), even though we sent a standard response (which I totally agree with isn't a great method). Hope that might help and I hope we can come up with a better solution to respond to you and everyone individually in the future. If anyone has had experience on this, would love your thoughts!

This is really interesting, I can see how this must cause a lot of negativity at work. It's one of the reasons we've made salaries completely transparent within Buffer to avoid situations like this: http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffe...

Do you guys think open salaries can help with this?

This is amazing, huge thanks for the analysis of our pricing page Patrick! Will go ahead and work on that for sure, some great pointers, you're right, there's so much power in the new analytics and we're not conveying that very well at all.

Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - REMOTE (We're a small distributed team of 16 people (5 engineers) across the US, UK, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden and Australia)

We'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 1.1 million users and our annual run rate is over $2m. There are some super interesting challenges ahead, as we focus on Buffer for Business. We're looking to expand our engineering team with the following open positions.

    * Reliability Hacker (Devops engineer) 
    * Happiness (Support) Engineer
    * Backend Hacker

    - we have over 150k monthly active users. 
    - 8000+ API clients. Most popular: Feedly, IFTTT, Pocket, Instapaper 
    - we release changes several times a day - we have an entirely data-driven process, 
      with Einstein and Buffer-Metrics, our custom built a/b testing and 
      metrics tracking framework. 
    - Some of the tech we work with: PHP, Python, MongoDB, AWS (Elastic 
      Beanstalk, Elasticache, SQS), Backbone.js, Grunt.js, Android, iOS.
    - More stats and stack details here:
      http://overflow.bufferapp.com/2013/08/01/scaling-buffer-in-2013/

If you're interested in coming on board, you’ll:

    - work closely with Sunil on technical architecture and Joel on product. 
    - 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 
    - 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 or building side projects 
      before (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)

    - we are totally transparent. We raised $450k, we currently have over 1.1 
      million users and generate $195k/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. 
    - here's our culture deck: http://www.slideshare.net/bufferapp/buffer-culture-03

Equity: 0.5-1%

If this sounds fun, let's chat. Send me a note about yourself, why you’re interested in Buffer, and any relevant links (Github profile, projects and background): http://jobs.bufferapp.com

- Email our CTO Sunil thenexthacker@bufferapp.com

I greatly apologize for the mess. Thanks for posting this! We're looking into this right now.

- All FB posts via Buffer are temporarily deleted. They will reappear again once we've enabled the FB app again (which we'll do once we're sure we're not compromised anymore).

- All Tweets are also stopped from sending.

We'll keep you updated from the @Buffer twitter and FB account.

- Leo

Thanks a bunch for the kind heads up Josh, really appreciate that!

Great point and actually, I totally agree. The funny thing is that founders aren't the highest paid people at Buffer - and it's actually just like you say with engineering being on the higher side.

I can't speak highly enough of IDoneThis - we've been using it for months at Buffer and it's absolutely changed the way we work. The reasons IDoneThis is invaluable to us, is that it allows us to track back performance (which easily gets lost in a chat room or an in-person standup). On top of this, if new people come on board, they can look through the previous IDoneThis notes and see what has been worked on. Oh and of course, not to mention that it's amazing to keep in sync with everyone if you are working as a remote team like we do. IDoneThis has changed our productivity for the better.

Great question, here is how we approached this:

    My best advice is not to drop your work for as long as you can
    until you see traction. In our case, Joel only stopped working after
    we hit ~$1k in monthly revenues. 
    (read: http://joel.is/post/6687368692/startup-bootstrapping) and I
    only dropped out of College a lot later after Buffer actually had
    already received funding and was supporting a team of 5.

    I think the key might be to only drop your work once your
    revenues are enough to support you. So I would try and make that
    window almost 0, in our case working nights and weekends is a
    great way to get there.

That's a good one. And it seems you've made the common mistake to email news@. My general advice is: Never, ever email news@. A news site doesn't cover you, a writer does. So go after writers, not publications.

This article should outline all the steps you need to follow: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-...

(It should be easy to get a post based on the traction you have shown above)