Courtney Seiter
A collection of posts by Courtney Seiter
A collection of 187 posts by Courtney Seiter - Page 4
Buffer got two incredible notes in our inbox over the weekend: “Hi Buffer/Pablo! I love using Pablo . I hopped on to make some graphics for International Women’s Day for my business and couldn’t find any good graphics. Please can you change this. When I typed in women and girls I got women whispering to each other, girls holding hands, and a woman in cutoff shorts fueling a gas tank. Please upload some inspiring images ahead of international women’s day. Thanks!”
Check out our new podcast! Hey there, podcast fans! We recently launched a new podcast of our very own, Buffer CultureLab! We’d love for you to check it out and share any thoughts, feedback or ideas with us! You can listen on iTunes here or Google Play here. :) OK, now back to the post! We’ve talked a lot about podcasts at Buffer. We’ve shared some top marketing podcasts. We’ve talked about podcasting tools. We’ve even provided a blueprint for starting your own podcast. But one thing we have
“Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open.” — Albert Einstein Einstein was right about a lot of things, but in my mind this sentiment is one of his finest discoveries (OK, the general theory of relativity is pretty good, too). Creating—building something from nothing and sharing it with the world—requires a lot of bravery. In the end, it can feel a bit like breaking yourself free. I’ve chronicled both my own idea prison [https://buffer.com/resources/6-ways-brain-stops-m
How many people know your salary? Your boss, of course. Your partner, perhaps. Maybe a few friends you can trust. What if everyone knew it? And not just everyone at your company; everyone like everyone—Internet commenters. Friends of friends. People you’ve never met. This is the experience of every team member at Buffer, where we’ve been sharing our salaries with the world since 2013. And we’re not alone in breaking the salary taboo: * The startup SumAll shares employee salaries within the
Imagine getting off a plane in a new state or country, heading to a place you’ve never seen, to spend a week with 70-plus coworkers you’ve never met (plus some of their partners and kids). That’s what happened to more than half of the Buffer team over the weekend. This week, our fully distributed team is all in one place—Honolulu, Hawaii—for our 7th all-team retreat . We’ll spend a full we
A lot of people want to help women succeed in the business world lately, which is an awesome trend to see. There are an ever-growing number of programs and initiatives focusing on everything from getting girls interested in coding to getting professional women into leadership roles. One interesting offshoot of this trend has been an emphasis on language and speech—it feels like more and more well-meaning people are giving thought to the words women should say [https://www.washingtonpost.com/b
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. I remember the feeling—the sleepless night beforehand, the nervousness in the pit of my stomach. I was waiting for the results of my annual performance review. Performance reviews—most often yearly—are how many companies provide feedback to their employees. They often involve a numeric rating and maybe
First college graduate from my family. Vegan. Working mom. Cherokee. Mormon. Queer. There are so many beautiful forms of diversity, and we’ve had an amazing crash course. In spring of 2015 we opened up Buffer’s Diversity Dashboard , a passion project for me and many other Buffer teammates focused on creating an inclusive team. The dashboard shares real-time data on the demographic diversity of the Buffer team, as well as thos
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Something a lot of people tend to be surprised about when they join the Buffer team (or even speak to a Buffer teammate for an extended time) is how specific, deliberate, and careful we are with the language we use. There are literally no harsh words at Buffer, or at least none that I’ve ever heard. No brusquely worded requests, no passive aggressive note
One of the coolest perks we have at Buffer team is that all team members (and their family members!) get a free Kindle and all the Kindle books they want to read—any book, anytime, no questions asked. As a result, we end up reading a wide assortment of stuff—from popular and critically-acclaimed fiction to resources that help us build better products or improve ourselves in some way. As a team, we read 1074 books in 2015—a 63.7% increase from last year’s total of 656 books. (Of course, the te
I am quite possibly the world’s biggest fan of being comfortable. The word, to me, conjures up an image of a big comfy couch, a roaring fireplace, and maybe a sleepy puppy to curl up with. What could be better? So it has been a challenging, repeated lesson for me to learn that feeling uncomfortable is pretty much the only way to experience real personal growth. I didn’t want to believe this for much of my life, and I often still rail against it no
I was catching up with our team’s messages on Discourse recently when I came across a unique message thread. It wasn’t about trial numbers, FAQs or monthly recurring revenue . It was about empathy. Empathy feels so crucial to the Buffer culture, and yet the word doesn’t appear anywhere in our values right now. Maybe
At this exact moment, I have 16 tabs open in my browser. How about you? With the full power of the internet at our disposal, it can be pretty easy to waste precious moments navigating to the…let’s say, less-than-productive corners of the web. I’m as guilty of this as anyone—I’ve even shared extensively how often I get sucked into Facebook! So it’s great that there are quite a few folks out there focused on helping us keep track of what really matters as we surf the web. There’s a particularl
I was talking with Leo the other day about plans to launch a new Buffer feature when he said something that totally rearranged my mind. He diplomatically opened the conversation with an “If we can…” type statement and I immediately keyed in on the uncertainty I heard in that “if”, asking about alternative dates and plans, the likelihood of this or that. Leo quickly corrected what I had heard: “It’s going to happen. There is no backup plan.” And immediately, my brain calmed. Shifted. Crystalli
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. What job perk could possibly be better than unlimited paid vacation days? Just picture the perfect work/life balance , the quality time you’d spend with family and friends
Working on making Buffer an inclusive place where all kinds of people feel they belong and thrive is one of my favorite things. It’s a unique time to be working on diversity goals at a tech startup . On the one hand, there is quite a bit of work to do to make the strides we’d all
Of all the things that have been known to keep me awake at night , one of the repeat offenders is thinking of times when I’ve said the totally wrong thing to a person. That embarrassment of putting my foot in my mouth or just rubbing someone the wrong way tends to linger long past the initial moment. Luckily, technology is working on making these sleepless nights a thing of the past! I’m always on the lookout for writing tools [https://blog.buffera
Try to think back to a time when you felt incredibly confident. You instinctively knew you could handle whatever came at you. You were on top of things, making all the right moves. You were in the zone. It’s an amazing feeling, and one that we’d probably all like to have more often. The book The Confidence Code gets right to the point of why this element is so crucial in our lives: “Scholars are co
When people learn about our devotion to transparency at Buffer, there tends to be one big question that looms large. Here’s the gist of it: “Transparency seems like a great policy when things are going great. But what about when they’re not?” Ed Fry summed up this often-asked question quite perfectly during an “Ask Me Anything” session [http://inbound.org/discussion/view/we-make-run-and-grow-buffer-ask-us-anyth
What motivates you to do your best work ? In an ideal world, most of us want more from our jobs than just a paycheck. We want things like work satisfaction, a connection to our coworkers and the opportunity to make a difference. What can give us the kind of feeling
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. How do people work best together? It’s fun to think about. You may know some things about your own work style and productivity preferences—for example, do you prefer solo or team projects? Being in the middle of many tasks or finishing one before going on to the next? Now, take all those unique factors
Self-management was a bold and unique experience that we’re glad to have tried at Buffer. We learned a lot! Here are some of our self-management lessons as well as our current approach with natural hierarchy. When I got my first job, it never occurred to me that there was more than one way to work. You went to an office, followed directions from a boss for 8-ish hours, and then went home. That’s not quite how Buffer does things. During the time I’ve been lucky enough to be on board, we’ve ex
Buffer hit a new milestone recently, but it wasn’t a metric like annual recurring revenue, total users or cash in the bank. In fact, this one is more of a philosophical milestone: We closed down our office. Now, since our startup operates with a fully distributed team, it might seem a bit odd that we ever had an office to begin with. But for a variety of reasons, many distributed startups still have a physical office: Automattic, GitHub and Basecamp are a few examples. Here’s how we came to
One of the first blog posts I ever wrote at Buffer is this beginner’s guide to SEO. When published originally, it had the title “Beginner’s Guide to SEO Even Your Mom Can Understand.” Holy casual sexism! When I think of all the amazing women and moms I know in search optimization and search marketing (here’s a primer on just a few), I am still super embarrassed to have made this giant mistake even nearly 2 years later. I’d like to think I and the whole team at Buffer have come a long way sinc