Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - Anywhere in the world (we're a distributed team of 11 people across the US, UK, Hong Kong and Sydney).
I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 650,000 users and are on a $1.3m+ annual revenue run rate. There are some super interesting challenges ahead, as we are looking to pass a million users in 2013. We are expecting even faster growth in the coming months through our mobile efforts.
We need help on 2 areas right now:
1. Android:
- Android is our second highest source of signups for Buffer, only
trailing behind Web which was our original platform.
- our users love the app, which has a 4.3 rating on Google Play.
- the app has 100k+ total downloads and 3k daily active users.
- we work with Google Play, Kindle and Blackberry stores.
2. Full stack:
- we get 1,500-2,000 signups per day on the web
- we have 160,000 weekly active users for our Chrome extension
- 4,500 API clients. Most popular: Feedly, IFTTT, Pocket, Instapaper
- we ship to production multiple times a day
- we have a data-driven process, with Einstein, our custom
built a/b testing framework
- ideally, experience in: PHP (Codeigniter)/Python, MongoDB,
Backbone.js Javascript, CSS, HTML
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 will:
- work closely myself on Product and Sunil on technical
architecture
- 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 (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
- 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 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 650k users and generate $110k/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.
- culture deck: http://www.slideshare.net/joelg2/buffer-culture-01-16707113
Salary: 88k-110k depending on location (living costs) and experience.
Equity: 0.5-1%
If this sounds fun, let's chat. Send a note to Sunil (our CTO) about yourself, why you’re interested in Buffer, and any relevant links (Github profile, Android Apps, projects and background): thenexthacker@bufferapp.com
What does living cost have to do with the value a developer produces? It doesn't make much sense to me why a developer in a low cost of living area is worth less in terms of what features they develop for the company. I say this as someone who lives in a high cost of living area, so I'd be at the higher end of your scale and this is not a self serving comment.
Right, but if they don't produce more than the "normal Wichita salary" then you probably shouldn't hire them. If they produce enough value to be worth $150,000 per year let's say, then you pay them that. If they don't, you shouldn't pay them that much whether they live in SF or Detroit.
If they do produce enough to be worth $150,000, why pay them less just because they live in Wichita? Supply and demand, sure, but it just seems odd to me to explicitly say that you're paying less if someone lives outside of a major metropolitan area. I prefer to be (or think that I am) paid based on the value I produce (value pricing) rather than what it costs to keep a roof over my head (cost pricing). Whether or not this is the case also influences my understanding of how a company thinks about me.
A lower salary for a developer in low CoL area doesn't indicate that a company values that resource less than another dev in a higher CoL area. It just means that the company has to pay less in order to reward the developer in the low CoL as much as the employer rewards the high CoL dev. The equation looks like this:
Sure, but I still find it interesting to make the following observation:
The CoL modification to the developer's salary has nothing to do with whether the company makes more or less revenue as a result of their work.
My guess is that as companies find good talent increasingly hard to find this problem will resolve itself as the remote workers outside major metropolitan areas get bidded to higher and higher salaries.
Great question, the person on our team in Hong Kong is Michelle Sun. She is leading growth and that's her Twitter account: https://twitter.com/michellelsun
Profitability doesn't matter when you're growing. If they have 11 employees they are presumably spending every penny coming in to grow their business, which is what you would want. The payout will come later.
Great question and cpncrunch is exactly correct. We are at 0 (more or less every month) and if there would be any profit we would hire people so we can invest it back into the company. Let me know if I can help answer anything else!
I would guess you've been through it many times or are lucky enough to have a great intuition with this. I've personally not been so lucky.
I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things. I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times. And it's not a case of "now I've learned my lesson" either. I've had great experiences with sticking to lean, and then afterwards I've slipped up again. For me it seems to be a case of waves of being good, and not so good. Over time I'm definitely getting better.
Intuition? Hell no, before reading TFSTTE, I would have done exactly the same thing. It's only because I was fortunate enough to be exposed to that that I now know better.
I can say that in my experience reading Four Steps or The Lean Startup and actually doing a startup are completely different things.
Absolutely, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Note that I didn't say "OMG, you guys suck, if you'd just read this book you'd all be millionaires and dining with Zuckerberg now". But the whole "Do a big-bang PR launch before you've proven anything" is textbook "how to fail as a startup", if you believe that @sgblank's stuff is valid.
I thought I had the whole lean startup thing down, but I've messed up so many times.
Tell me about it, we learn more everyday. I'm not saying any of this is easy, mind you. It's just that this particular example jumped out at me for being such an egregious example of such a common and well-cited mistake, that it's a little hard to believe.
And hey, I haven't proven anything yet, so nobody should feel any particular reason to care about my opinion. I'm just a guy who's a bit drunk, sitting in front of the computer a little bit bored before bedtime, and blabbing about stuff.
In the whole first month of Buffer, we had less than 100 signups. For comparison, we now have 560,000 users (2.5 years later). We now sign up 100 people within a couple hours. It amazes me to think about it.
I had a previous startup that also started slow, but never really changed. The key difference between the two, was retention. So I would highly recommend anyone who's getting started to closely watch retention. Does anyone keep using the product into their second week after sign up? That's the first thing I'd focus on with what I know now.
I think what really helped you guys is that you've always been earnest and have done a good job becoming thought leaders as bloggers. People could learn a lot from the way the Buffer team grew out its product.
You guys created a really good template for slow-growth. Props.
Just had a look at our cohort analysis. Happy to let you know that 16% of the December 2010 cohort (those 100 people) are still using Buffer today (27 months later). It's actually fairly representative of what our retention stabilizes to after 4-5 months for almost every cohort, though 100 is not an ideal sample size!
We've certainly worked to improve retention over time, but in addition I think with Buffer I finally had hit upon a problem that was a real pain point. So, there was good retention right from the start.
Hey Charlie! We've been back and forth on this in the lifetime of the startup, but we're now doing all metrics ourselves, so it is internally built. I built an early version of the cohort analysis (which didn't scale, but that didn't matter) just a few months in and it was massively valuable. It's not too hard to knock something together.
Thanks for the answer Joel!
By the way - I'm curious why you guys had to built this internally - I always get the feeling people prefer using a 3rd party service like kissmetrics than building something.
I custom-built my own cohort reports but as number of users grow in my own app, I'm planning to replace it with MixPanel. You don't really want to put stress on your own database servers which are meant for production, not for analysis.
You should not be doing analysis (OLAP) on your main transactional database (OLTP). Moving from transaction-processing system (TPS) to analysis is done through a process call ETL (Extract, Transform, Load.) You will want to transform your data into facts and dimensions -- this is going from a relational model to a multidemensional model (using a star schema.)
but that would be another system to maintain. I'm happy to outsource this to MixPanel or some other company. My needs are pretty generic. I appreciate your response though.
Yes, I 100% believe in focusing on your core competencies. If the OLAP is self-hosted or external, the key takeaway is to not do analysis against production (once your data set is larger than RAM ;) before that, who cares?)
I recently hacked together a product that aligns with buffer's philosophy, but is inherently different. I have about 70 users, but zero paid users and not much activity. I've been ignoring it from a development standpoint in favor of other projects. Meanwhile I still use the site daily. I hope I can put some more time into it, but for now I'm just letting it scratch a personal itch. If anyone is interested: https://tweezer.io
I was wondering why no one was tackling the issue of posting to multiple social networks, and instead all we saw were services that clone posts from one network to the next, services that usually get shut down from the networks. So I made my own a while back that can post to Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc in customized ways depending if I have a URL or not, automatically shortening it, etc. Otherwise I would give yours a try.
This is neat. It's a key problem we've spent a lot of time thinking about (that posting the same thing in the exact same way to different networks is not the right thing to do). Good job, and good luck!
As I was right this the main question I had was how do I know the difference between "Nobody wants what your selling" and "You need to do a better job marketing"? Retention is a great answer to the question.
I think for us, as soon as we saw that people were sticking around we knew we had to switch to "do a better job marketing". With retention, that was validation that there must be many more people out there who would find Buffer super useful, just like the people who were staying active. In essence, we needed to make more people aware of the value we were providing.
That's really awesome to hear. At what point did you start worrying about referrals? Was there a point in time when that naturally started to grow as more users, used it? Or was it something that didn't change unless you were focused on it?
Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - Anywhere in the world (we're a distributed team of 10 people in the US, UK, Hong Kong and Sydney).
I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 500,000 users and are on a $1M+ annual revenue run rate. There are some super interesting challenges ahead, as we are looking to hit the millions of users in 2013.
We've consistently grown 15% MoM for the last year and are expecting even faster growth in the coming months through our mobile efforts. That's where we are in need of some help.
So, we're looking for an Android Developer to work on our app.
This includes taking over most of the work of the app which has
70,000 downloads and more in the Kindle and Blackberry stores too.
If you've worked with Android before, that's great. If you're a great
hacker and have developed in Java or other mobile platforms that's
awesome also.
If you're interested in coming on board, you will:
- work primarily with myself and Sunil, who has lead development
so far and is now taking a more general tech role
- be a happy, positive-minded and kind person who has a great
approach in dealing with others
- be a Buffer user (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
- be friendly and comfortable helping our users
- 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 before (would
be awesome, it’s cool if not)
One of our core values at Buffer is to "Default to transparency". I've told you above how many users we have, and our revenues. We raised $450k from awesome investors, and we are cash-flow positive. Within the team, there is even more transparency. We have an Open Salary policy where everyone knows how much everyone else makes.
Another key value we have is to "Have a focus on self improvement". The thing that we do which I don't know that any other startups do, is that we have a daily 'standup' Google Hangout between pairs of people in the team (the pairs cycle each 2 weeks). As part of the call we share a daily improvement. Something we're working on to improve ourselves. It can be related to Buffer, but usually it isn't. Some examples of improvements people have worked on: start blogging every 2 weeks, speak at first event, speak to a new person every day, wake up an hour earlier. We all encourage each other with our improvements, and this helps us push forward much faster than otherwise. It's a really positive environment and there is built in accountability. Everyone here seems to progress at an incredible pace, we want to do everything to make that happen for you as well. Whether you want to start speaking, blogging, learning marketing or have other areas of personal growth, you’ll have my personal support and the whole team as a resource too.
Since we have Open Salaries at Buffer, I can tell you right now that your salary will be between $88k and $110k depending on your location (living costs) and experience. You will also get equity in the 0.5-1.5% range.
If this sounds fun, let's have a chat. I'm looking forward to it! I'm Joel, drop me an email directly - joel@bufferapp.com.
I think this a great point. If you're in the habit of writing a TLDR for articles, maybe you can try writing the TLDR and then afterwards removing the 4 letters "TLDR" and leaving the sentence there. It's great to summarize in the first sentence.
For the MVP of Buffer, I implemented PayPal (no Stripe back then), but I avoided all the IPN hassles. The IPN is the part that would auto-upgrade people once they paid. The way I did it was to upgrade people manually as soon as I got the email from PayPal that they had paid for the Pro plan.
This turned out to be good for a number of reasons:
1. I had no idea how long it'd be before the first person paid, so why optimize
that flow? Instead I worked on things which would help me get to the first
paying customer.
2. The IPN was the hardest part of PayPal implementation, so it saved me
a lot of time to avoid it. The rest of the implementation can even be done
with their button implementation and no coding experience.
3. Actually people having a slight delay, and my needing to personally email
them, was a great thing. That built a lot of loyalty through the personal contact
and those were some insightful conversations.
Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - Anywhere in the world (we're a distributed team)
I hope you are having a fantastic day. Happy new year :-)
I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We're a small team of 7, we have 450,000 users and are about to hit a $1M annual revenue run rate. There are some super interesting challenges ahead and just around the corner we're expecting even faster growth through our mobile efforts.
2 key areas we're looking for help with:
- JavaScript (+HTML5, CSS, Backbone.js) to lead our webapp
and browser extension development
- DevOps (we're PHP/MongoDB on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and it's
been put together by a couple of full stack hackers so there
will be a lot that could be improved!)
If you're interested in coming on board, you will:
- work primarily with myself and my co-founders Leo and Tom
- be a happy, positive-minded and kind person who has a great
approach in dealing with others
- be a Buffer user (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
- be friendly and comfortable helping our users
- 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 before (would
be awesome, it’s cool if not)
You’ll be amongst people who are striving for success and pushing themselves forward each and every day. Everyone here seems to progress at an incredible pace, we want to do everything to make that happen for you as well. Whether you want to start speaking, blogging, learning marketing or have other areas of personal growth, you’ll have my personal support and the whole team as a resource too.
Great salary and equity - $85k-$140k, 0.5-1.5%.
If this sounds fun, let's have a chat. I'm looking forward to it! I'm Joel, drop me an email directly - joel@bufferapp.com.
+1 for the transparency of the posting. Getting the salary range out there, and the equity range out there makes a lot of sense.
Quick tip: People are somewhat jaded with platitudes like "be amongst people who are striving for success..." Instead, try to bring out examples of the awesome Buffer culture. What makes you quirky and rare? What can you say about yourselves that few other startups would say?
That's great advice Dharmesh, I think I can be much more specific there. Thanks for the heads up.
For anyone reading who's interested, I think this might be the best example of how seriously we take self-improvement at Buffer:
Each day we have a daily standup video call (Google Hangout) with the whole team. Each person has 3 minutes to talk. Like most standups, we talk about what we've done and what we're doing next. The thing that we do which I don't know that any other startups do, is that as part of that 3 minutes we also share a daily improvement. Something we're working on to improve ourselves. It can be related to Buffer, but usually it isn't. Some examples of improvements people have worked on: start blogging every 2 weeks, speak at first event, speak to a new person every day, learn japanese, wake up an hour earlier. We all encourage each other with our improvements, and this helps us push forward much faster than otherwise. It's a really positive environment and there is built in accountability.
That list at the end reads like my personal checklist (even the Japanese, in particular). Let me attest to the value in all those activities.
You pretty much stole my attention for the evening with that explanation. Good thing I've almost finished this short story outline! Look forward to an email from me.
I know there are a lot of people who are very successful in those late quiet hours, rather than the early morning quiet hours. Tim Ferriss is a key person who comes to mind. However, the point I'm trying to make here is that in the case of the early morning risers, I find they are much more consistently doing incredible work in their lives.
To observe that early risers are consistently successful, it doesn't mean that late night workers aren't successful. I've just found anecdotally that if you were to take a sample of early risers vs late night workers, the first group seems to have a higher percentage of successful people.
I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We're a small team of 7, we have over 400,000 users and are about to hit a $1M annual revenue run rate. There are some super interesting challenges ahead and just around the corner we're expecting even faster growth through some interesting things we're launching.
2 key areas we're looking for help with:
- JavaScript (+HTML5, CSS, Backbone.js) to lead our webapp and browser extension development
- DevOps (we're PHP/MongoDB on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and it's been put together by a couple of full stack hackers so there will be a lot that could be improved!)
If you're interested in coming on board, you will:
- work primarily with myself and my co-founders Leo and Tom
- be a happy, positive-minded and kind person who has a great approach in dealing with others
- be a Buffer user (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
- be friendly and comfortable helping our users
- be based in or willing to move to San Francisco
- have experience working with another startup before (would be awesome, it’s cool if not)
You’ll be amongst people who are striving for success and pushing themselves forward each and every day. Everyone here seems to progress at an incredible pace, we want to do everything to make that happen for you as well. Whether you want to start speaking, blogging, learning marketing or have other areas of personal growth, you’ll have my personal support and the whole team as a resource too.
Great salary and equity - $85k-$140k, 0.5-1.5%.
If this sounds fun, let's have a chat. I'm looking forward to it! I'm Joel, drop me an email directly - joel@bufferapp.com.
Doh! You're right. Can't believe I'm getting so heavily down-voted though - honest mistake. I mean, there seems to be no shortage of SF companies named BufferXXX these days. :)
I'd be curious about the decision between freemium (free plan) vs free trial - what was the process for choosing to use freemium? That's something I talk about with lots of founders, and there are specific reasons freemium works well for us at Buffer.
Our motivation with the free plan is to let people who are interested evaluate the service. We tried a 30day free trial, but we heard from some users that they really didn't want to put in a credit card to sign up at first, and some didn't think it was enough time.
By charging more as the number of users grows it ties the cost to the actual value they're getting. With the free tier at 50 users, we think that gives everyone a chance to try it out without giving away the farm.
I'd love for you to come join Buffer for the fun ride. We have over 650,000 users and are on a $1.3m+ annual revenue run rate. There are some super interesting challenges ahead, as we are looking to pass a million users in 2013. We are expecting even faster growth in the coming months through our mobile efforts.
We need help on 2 areas right now:
1. Android:
2. Full stack: 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 will:
Some aspects of Buffer culture that makes us a little different: Salary: 88k-110k depending on location (living costs) and experience.Equity: 0.5-1%
If this sounds fun, let's chat. Send a note to Sunil (our CTO) about yourself, why you’re interested in Buffer, and any relevant links (Github profile, Android Apps, projects and background): thenexthacker@bufferapp.com
- Joel (Founder/CEO)