When I started selling candles on Etsy in 2013, I thought it would be a fun hobby on the side of my work as a graphic designer. I could never have imagined where my company, Brooklyn Candle Studio, would be today: producing over 500,000 candles a year in an 11,000 square foot space with 20…
Question: I feel like I’ve waited too long to get started with TikTok because I didn’t originally think it would be a good social network for marketing to customers, it seems that’s not the case any more and now I’m wondering is it too late for me to start from scratch on TikTok? If not,…
We’ve brought in nearly 30 new teammates in the last year, and for each of those hires, we’ve done 15 to 25 values screens. So over the last year, I’ve done at least 400 values screening calls and I always turn the call over to the applicants to ask whatever questions they have for me.…
Update 1: February 26th, 4:15 pm EST We’ve become aware that access was obtained to a number of Buffer accounts which have been used to spread support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is very concerning to us. So far there is no indication of a breach to Buffer. We will update this thread as…
I’m happy to share that we’ve established a long-term goal that salaries at Buffer will not be based on location. We made our first step towards this last year, when we moved from four cost-of-living based location bands for salaries to two bands. We did this by eliminating the lower two location bands. The change…
Hiring generally comes with ebbs and flows. During one six-month stretch in 2021, a particularly busy season, I spent more than 120 working hours in six months asking more than 350 individuals the same seven questions for our Buffer values screen. At the end of each conversation, I’d turn the conversation over to them, and…
In 2014, I began bringing to life an idea for a product and brand that did not yet exist in the market—elevated, everyday, and American-made paper goods to inspire productivity and creativity. I spent nearly a year fleshing out this idea, prototyping, designing, researching manufacturers, and writing a business plan. It was immediately clear that…
TikTok was the most downloaded app of 2021. It now has more than one billion users. Did any of us at Buffer predict such a rapid rise when TikTok first landed on our radar? For fun, I did a quick search of our Slack archives to see if I could find out. The first mention…
Although anytime can be a good time to switch up your marketing strategy, the start of the new calendar is one that resonates with us quite a bit. With that in mind, we talked to 10 small business owners to learn about what they’re changing in their marketing this year. No matter what time of…
When we experimented with a four-day workweek it was initially for one month. As our CEO, Joel Gascoigne, wrote about in May 2020 when we first started the experiment, “This 4-day workweek period is about well-being, mental health, and placing us as humans and our families first.” Joel’s announcement about the four-day workweek in April,…