Open

Join us as we share what we’re learning as we build a company that approaches work from a fresh perspective. We write about workplace culture, our finances, and our business decisions and strategies.

OverflowJul 12, 2024
How We're Preventing Breaking Changes in GraphQL APIs at Buffer — and Why It's Essential for Our Customers

As part of our commitment to transparency and building in public, Buffer engineer Joe Birch shares how we’re doing this for our own GraphQL API via the use of GitHub Actions.

OpenApr 24, 2024
TikTok 'Ban' Bill Signed into Law: What It Means for Buffer and How Creators & Marketers Can Prepare

TikTok's parent company must divest the app or face a ban in the U.S. Here's everything we know, plus how to plan ahead.

OpenMar 29, 2024
Lessons from Unreasonable Hospitality: A Favorite Read From Our Customer Advocacy Team

How the Buffer Customer Advocacy Team set up their book club, plus their key takeaways from their first read: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.

OpenMar 14, 2024
How Buffer’s Content Team Uses AI

In this article, the Buffer Content team shares exactly how and where we use AI in our work.

OpenMar 1, 2024
How to Handle a Retreat: 16 Tips from Bufferoos as We Head to Cancún

The Buffer team is heading out on our first retreat since 2019! I asked the retreat veterans for advice on making the most of the trip as a newbie.

OpenFeb 9, 2024
Hospitality in Software: Buffer’s Approach to Customer Support

How can we keep creating a unique customer support experience even as we get an increasing number of messages from customers? This is a question that is always on my mind.  Delivering exceptional customer support has always been at the core of Buffer’s mission. Over the years, we've taken pride in our unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction and our dedicated support team's ability to go the extra mile.  What we have found is that as your volume and team size scale, it can be trickier to

OpenFeb 1, 2024
Why I’ve Stayed at Buffer for 8 Years, an Open Reflection

When I tell people how long I’ve been at Buffer — eight years today — people generally have a lot of questions. But one of the most common is, “Why have you stayed so long?” Eight years is an unusually long time to be at one company in tech. It’s also an unusually long time among most of my friend group except those who work in more traditional jobs, say in teaching or in government. So why have I stayed? My short answer is usually the same — it’s the people and the product. I truly enjoy wor

OpenJan 25, 2024
Introducing our Open Salary System: Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer

Buffer has been in business for 13 years now, and we’ve had transparent salaries for 10 of those. This means that for over a decade, all Buffer salaries have been publicly viewable, and we’ve shared our approach to salaries and the formula we based them upon openly. We’ve maintained transparent salaries through significant market (and world) changes and through ups and downs in our performance as a business. I’m proud of the fact that we never took away that transparency, internally or external

OpenJan 16, 2024
Our First Fixathon: How We Squashed 44 Bugs in One Week

Buffer, as a company, closes the last week of the year every year, and historically, as an engineering team, we’d do a code freeze for the week before we’re closed so nothing broke heading into the holidays. (Pretty smart of us.)  This year, we did something different, and it still worked out. We used the last week of the year as a “fixathon” for our whole engineering team.  Fixathon = a week where our 29-person engineering team spent a whole week focused on fixing bugs.  By the end of the we

OpenDec 1, 2023
I Asked 13 Buffer Leaders for Advice on Succeeding in My New Role

As a new Bufferoo, I asked my teammates how to thrive at the company. Their guidance will stay with me for the rest of my career — and it might help you, too.

OpenNov 9, 2023
Buffer is Remote but not Async-First, Here's Why

With so many years of being remote, we’ve experimented with communication a lot. One conversation that often comes up for remote companies is asynchronous (async) communication. Async just means that a discussion happens when it is convenient for participants. For example, if I record a Loom video for a teammate in another time zone, they can watch it when they’re online — this is async communication at its best. Some remote companies are async first. A few are even fully async with no live ca

Z - PopularSep 29, 2023
How to Send Better Email: 7 Ways To Level Up Your Email Skills Today

Like many others, I read and reply to hundreds of emails every week and I have for years. And as with anything — some emails are so much better than others. Some emails truly stand out because the person took time to research, or they shared their request quickly. There are a lot of things that can take an email from good to great, and in this post, we’re going to get into them. What’s in this post: * The best tools for email * What to say instead of “Let me know if you have any questions” a

22 Side Projects From the Buffer Team

At Buffer, we’ve long had teammates who have side projects in addition to working at Buffer. It’s pretty common for our team to run their own blog, we have several published authors on the team, and many of our engineers run apps that have nothing to do with their regular work. Though some companies prefer that anyone on their team not have side projects and actively discourage it, that has never been our way at Buffer. In fact, working at Buffer means you get a free Buffer account, making it e

OpenSep 27, 2023
My First 30 Days at Buffer: What It’s Like To Join the Company in 2023

How I was onboarded to the fully distributed, remote team, along with a couple of things that have really surprised me about life at Buffer.

OpenSep 8, 2023
How Volunteering Supports My Role at Buffer

I’ve been a Customer Advocate at Buffer for nearly five years. Throughout that time, I've worked hard to find the best way to guide customers to unlock the full potential of our platform to help them achieve their goals. I found a specific passion for our customers in the onboarding part of their journey by helping them look for the right plan to meet their needs, ensuring they have the necessary documentation to allow their company to move forward with our platform, and empowering them through

OpenAug 16, 2023
Our New Transparent Pricing Dashboard: Where Your Money Goes When You Buy a Buffer Subscription

We’ve shared a number of parts of Buffer’s business transparently over the years — and one piece we’ve always wanted to expand on is where your money goes when you pay for a Buffer subscription. We shared a post about where your money went when buying a $10 Buffer plan back in 2014 — but it was well time for an update. A lot has changed over the last nine years, and we want to share some of the learnings and insights gained from looking back at our numbers. We’re also happy to share a more su

OpenAug 10, 2023
How We Run Performance Reviews At Buffer And Why I Have Mixed Feelings About Them

For many years, as a small startup, we did not do any sort of formal performance reviews. Instead, we did regular one-to-one meetings between managers and teammates, usually on a weekly basis. We also gave feedback to each other openly and regularly. (We even experimented with doing feedback transparently, but we went away from that practice — one of the few times we’ve scaled back a transparency experiment!) And lastly, every teammate had a regular mastermind with another team member, which oft

OpenAug 4, 2023
How We’re Reorganizing 216 Articles in Our Help Center

Nobody wants to hear they’re outdated… stale… or old. That’s exactly what we had to face, though. Throughout the days, months, and years, our Help Center, where we keep up to date articles about Buffer for our customers, had become just that. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of great content in there. That’s the problem, though. There’s just too much, and the content has started to become less and less reflective of Buffer: the product it is meant to support. There are four of us on the team w

OpenAug 3, 2023
We’re Opening A Talent Pool — Here’s What To Do If You’re Interested

We’re opening up a Talent Pool! In this post, we outline why and what you'll need to know to join.

OpenJun 15, 2023
How We Connect Our Engineers Directly To Buffer Customers with Customer Engineering Days

While connecting the team to our customers has always been a priority for us at Buffer, how the team has connected with customers has changed quite a bit over the years. When I first joined Buffer in 2015, the team would have a dedicated time when everyone would spend an hour answering customer support emails at our annual company retreat. During these sessions, our Customer Advocates would provide support for the entire Buffer team as they answered customer emails. It was an awesome bonding ex

OpenJun 9, 2023
The Content Writer Role at Buffer: What We Looked For In Applications

Here are six reasons we didn't move some Content Writer applications forward and more about our application process.

The Document of All Documents: How Our Customer Advocacy Team Works With Information Overwhelm

We’re firmly in the Information Age, which means we can have 25 synonyms for a word within seconds and get a boatload of facts about anything else we can think of with the tap of a touchscreen. But along with being able to access all of it comes the challenge of organizing, finessing, and presenting it. Composing a new marketing email for your small business, drafting slides for a presentation to your grad students, and drafting an iconic Twitter thread? You’ve got an ocean of info that you’ve g

OpenJun 2, 2023
Embodying “Work From Anywhere”: Sophie Gil's Digital Nomad Life

Meet Sophie, a Senior Growth Marketing Manager and digital nomad. Her story is a riveting blend of professional growth, remote work challenges, and an infectious zest for life. Strap in as we journey through time zones, and share marketing insights all from Sophie's 'office'—the world.

OpenMay 26, 2023
Work-Life Harmony: Karinna Briseno Shares Her Experience at Buffer

Meet Karinna Briseno, a Technical Advocate at Buffer who redefines success by balancing personal growth, mental health, and career accomplishments.