Buffer

“Then he gave the example of Buffer, who in service of their ICP lowered their prices in order to recharge their growth.”

“If you looked at Buffer and Hootsuite, especially back then, they were very much designed for a Twitter-centric world. You know, everything is very tech space. Media is not the first class citizen where our product was very much media is the first class citize…”

“Buffer had something similar but we kind of caught it before any later users were spewing out pro-Russian propaganda through their accounts. Like, Buffer had that problem at the beginning of the Ukraine war.”

“Buffer lives in the same house he bought when he was 26. Yes, but he also flies a private jet and had a beautiful beachfront house in Laguna Beach. These guys are not living like paupers over time.”

“There's this dead zone of like 200 dollars a year or 300 dollars a year or something like that. Like, and it's like, it's incredibly hard to build a big company when shit costs that much. Some people have done it. Mailchimp has done it. Canva has done it. I th…”

“Tiny does also invest in businesses, including the likes of Superhuman, SpaceX, Pitch, and Buffer, to name a few.”

“We almost don't have any AppSumo users at Buffer anymore,”

“And they had raised both seed and Series A rounds, but last summer, they spent 3.3 million dollars to buy out the majority of their Series A investors, making them much more independent.”

“Today, Joel runs Buffer as a profitable business, with two million in profit in 2017, and three million in profit in 2018.”

“I started to schedule using TweetDeck and Hootsuite at the time, but you had to choose a very specific date and time every time you were scheduling something. And all I really cared about was spacing out the tweets there. So that was the aha moment was, oh, I …”

“I think sometimes as leaders, we almost treat our team as children or something, you know, that they can't handle those details or that truth Or something. And I think that's just really a disservice to everyone that you've brought on board. Like everyone is a…”

“We've been doing profit sharing for two years in a row now, and we want to keep going more in those directions and helping investors get liquidity when they're more interested in kind of a short-term horizon so that we can become more self-owned over time and …”

“Like, you're not going to build a whole freaking sales team with, you know, salespeople spending days to close, you know, a customer if the customer is going to bring you 324 dollars in the matter of its lifetime.”

“Buffer just crossed, like, 15 mil recently.”

“It took us, like eight months to get to 30 customers, and at that time, we priced the tool twice as All the, so the buffer was 10 dollars at the time, and we were pricing it at 20 dollars, just because you want to build something for a niche, and we wanted to …”

“And we just hit 50,000 paying customers a few days ago, which I'm really excited about.”

“We're not quite at 10, so you're, we're at about 8.9, or so almost nine, so we're estimating that we'll get to 10 by March”

“We've been doing this for the last five years once a week, and it's totally transformed my relationship with my co-founder.”

“The one tip here, if you experiment with that, is to sort of avoid solving each other's problems, and instead really practice listening and the Socratic method, which is sort of to ask more questions and to, you know, really let that person come up with their …”

“I think, I actually believe that it can be such a huge distraction early on when you're building your company, where you get too focused, too narrowed in, in, in trying to look at charts, look at numbers, when it can actually be much more useful to focus on th…”

“Frankly, in a very hard way is that you always want to keep some, like, at least one copy of your data in-house, and there is a lot of people in a company that sometimes will walk up to you and say you shouldn't do that, right?”

“And at Buffer, one of the things we've done early on, we picked a single, single strategy only, and that was content marketing. Nothing else. No paid, no SEO, no nothing. We just did content, content every day for, at least for the first year.”

“Whenever you have those big conversations, try and get two opposing opinions that you really respect. And in the past I would like talk with someone and be so hooked and now my, Immediate goal is, after I've had one of those conversations, is to immediately go…”

“When we switched from the five dollar to the 10 dollars, We had a zero change in conversion rate, so we literally doubled our revenue from one day to the next without losing a single customer”

“And Buffers for business is now doing 45% of Buffers total revenue, and so this has been really successful for us to take that approach here.”

“We have four people full-time at Buffer now who do nothing but customer development. So all day, every day, they talk with customers. They don't try to sell them anything. They don't try to do customer service. They don't try to market. All they're trying to d…”

“So throughout the five years of Buffer's journey, we had four offers, serious offers, to sell the company.”

“And one thing that's really helped us at Buffer is we did a list that talks about what are the experiences we would be missing out on if we were to sell now. And sort of that change of, like, focusing on personal growth and, like, a sort of Einstein's idea of …”

“Because we are so oblivious to competition at Buffer, Whether we are ignorant, or whether we are arrogant, or whether we are naive, or like, some combination of some of those three things, but truthfully, it's never on my mind. Like, I never think about it”

“And I was one of the very first investors in buffer.”

“They've really pushed this movement around transparency and openness a lot further. And I'm sure there's, they've impacted many more businesses than the countless businesses. Right. And that, that kind of, regardless of what happens with their business, they'v…”