Joel Gascoigne is the founder and CEO of Buffer, a software application for the mobile and web, designed to manage accounts in social networks. This is by providing a means for the user to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Also, the user can analyze their results and engage with their community.
Buffer application is designed by a group of European experts in San Francisco, most notably Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich. The team had reached 85 people working from 15 countries in different parts of the globe by August 2021. Also, it had over $16 million in annual revenue and more than 4.5 million registered users.
The Buffer idea came to me after using Twitter for about 1.5 years. I started to share quotes I found aspiring and links to blog posts, and found that my followers seemed to like this kind of tweet. I would end up having a great conversation around the blog post, or often get retweets. That is when I decided I had to share this kind of content more frequently, since the triggered conversation allowed me to be in touch with some interesting and super-smart people.
With my goal of sharing more quotes and blog posts, I started to do it manually. I then realized it would be more efficient to schedule these tweets for the future, so I started using available Twitter clients. All I wanted was to tweet five times a day. So I had to choose the exact date and time for the tweet. I made use of a notepad to keep track of when I had scheduled tweets to tweet five times per day. This became quite cumbersome, and so my idea came up. I needed to make scheduling tweets x times a day.
I established the idea of the social media application while I was in the United Kingdom. We started Buffer’s development in October 2010 in Birmingham. After developing the idea, I created a landing page to see if enough people were interested in making it a profitable venture. After having a critical mass of registration, I built and designed the first version of the application software over seven weeks.
The initial version of Buffer was launched on November 30, 2010. It had limited features, which only allowed access to Twitter. After four days of the software’s launch, Buffer gained its first paying user. The number of users reached 100 after a few weeks, and then it multiplied to 100,000 users within the next nine months.
In July 2011, we decided to move the startup venture from the United Kingdom to San Francisco in the United States. Then Buffer was converted into incorporation. While in San Francisco, we dealt with the San Francisco startup incubator AngelPad. This was because of the increase in cost after moving from Birmingham. We were able to secure 18 investors to our company throughout December. This was after rejects from 88% of the people we met with to offer an investment in the company.
Because of our Visa issues, the company’s base shifted to Hong Kong in January 2012. Then, due to more Visa issues, we migrated again to Tell Aviv, Israel, in August 2012. We had 1.5-2% of users on the paid plan in October 2012, so we had an $800,000 annual run rate. After resolving the visa predicaments, the company’s base then shifted back to the United States in May 2013.
To a young Joel Gascoigne, you should think about how you can transition to working full-time on your startup. The best way for me was to generate revenue early by charging for the product. So you should just start and try to make something that people will pay for.
We have more than 100,000 users, and we have committed to providing fantastic support for every one of them. The key value at Buffer is humility and empathy, and this assists us when we receive criticism.
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