leowidrich
Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more
Early Reflections on Buffer’s Switch to Working Without Managers
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.
How to Give and Receive Feedback at Work
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!
This tech startup uses a formula to decide how much stock to give employees
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!
Do you guys think open salaries can help with this?
Actually
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Buffer January Update: $3,900,000 run rate (38.3% growth), 1,320,813 users
How We Increased Buffer's Landing Page Conversion by 16%
Why positive encouragement works better than criticism, according to science
One month after Buffer for Business launch: $56,208 revenue, 650+ users
A Teardown of Buffer's Refreshingly Brief Onboarding Experience
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
Here are some key stats about our technology and scale. - 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/
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’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)
Some aspects of Buffer culture that makes us a little different: - 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
Salary: 88k-110k depending on location (living costs) and experience. (http://99u.com/articles/15527/the-age-of-salary-transparency)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 [email protected]
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Why Transparency is Important to this Startup
- 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