The CEO of Buffer on Culture, Competition, and Transparency
Joel Gascoigne is the CEO of Buffer, a social media management tool for individuals, marketers, and agencies. Aside from the company’s much-loved product, Buffer is known for maintaining one of the best marketing blogs on the web, as well as being one of the most radically transparent companies you’ll stumble upon today — period. All of the company’s code, revenue, and team salary information is made available to the public. No joke.
Who is the cofounder behind one of the most admired tech companies around (Buffer receives 1,500–2,000 job applications per month)? Joel joined Product Hunt for a LIVE Chat recently and shared some of his insights about building company culture, transparency, and leadership, among other things. Below are highlights from Joel’s LIVE Chat with the community, you can check out the Full Q&A on Product Hunt.
Year after year, you guys have always delivered top notch content and when everyone thought you had reached the limit of your transparency strategy, you managed to take it one step further. What’s your secret? How do you keep challenging yourselves? — Inês Silva
I think the key is to remember that you can change everything. As we grow, it can be harder to remember that, but it’s always true. Earlier this year, we fully embraced experimenting with self-management, and then it didn’t quite work out as we expected. We were completely transparent about it, and it was hard to come back and say, “We’re moving away from some of those ideas,” but I think that’s the key to continuing to grow. It reminds me of this quote from Jeff Bezos, which is kind of ironic since you asked me about consistency: “People who are right a lot of the time, are people who often change their mind. Consistency of thought is not a particularly positive trait.”
How did you come up with the idea of implementing such a culture in the early days of Buffer? How do you help the employees at Buffer understand the culture? — Adhi
I didn’t know what culture and values were when I started Buffer. It’s something that I learned about over time. A lot of things have happened like that for me — I think there’s a right time for everything. There are many books I’ve read and they’ve not sunk in or resonated with me. Many of those same books I read later and they became books that changed my life.
When we hit around 9 or 10 people at Buffer, I started to experience first-hand the impact of team dynamics. It was only then that I started to learn about company culture and tried to read as much as I could and watch presentations about it. By that point, a few parts of the culture had started to become clear: transparency, a focus on self-improvement, etc. But we hadn’t put this in to words. It was right around then that I watched an interview that Tony Hsieh from Zappos did. I can’t remember exactly which one it was, but he was asked by the interviewer, “If you could go back and start Zappos again, what would you do differently?” Hsieh said that they had waited until they were more than 100 people before they put values into words and documented their company culture. If he were to start again, he’d do that from day one. Zappos was the key company we looked up to for having such a strong company culture, so we had no choice: we had to put our values into words as soon as possible. After we did so, it really moved us from the company culture being ad-hoc and left to fate, to us deliberately shaping it.
How would you spend your time if you had one hour to solve a user problem/need? — Junius
My key focus would be on fully understanding the problem/need. I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs jump straight to the solution. It’s hard to actually go out there and ask about the problems people have, and stay focused on the problem rather than jumping to solutions. As soon as you jump to a solution, you’re making assumptions. That’s why my focus would be on customer development, on asking as much about the problem as I can without getting to the solution. Ideally, you want to understand the user’s problems so well that the solution presents itself. This is really difficult, I’m not that great at it; and that’s why within Buffer we’ve made it a key focus and have several people on the team full-time working on customer development.
I would love to hear how you treat the competitive threat of Hootsuite and how you plan to dominate the market in the coming years. — Harry Stebbings
I know Ryan [Holmes, founder and CEO of Hootsuite] personally and think everything he’s doing is incredible and inspiring. I think the key is to stay super focused on the user and the customer. We’re trying our best to do that, to understand what they need.
The funny thing about competition, especially for startups, is that it often isn’t the thing that will kill you. I really love this old article from Zoho: Companies Don’t Get Killed by Competition, They Commit Suicide — and really believe it. Especially in the early days, and we fell into this ourselves, I hear a lot of startup founders coming to me and telling me about this other startup that is also building something similar. But none of it matters — in reality, the problem both startups have is that most people don’t know about either of them! Competition can help to shine light on the market, which is often actually more useful than if you were alone.
What’s been the biggest challenge balancing a positive culture and necessary critical feedback? — Andrew So
I think that itself has been the biggest challenge: to balance the positivity value with being truly honest and giving appropriate feedback. I think for me it comes down to the difference between complaining/criticizing and being honest with necessary feedback. There’s a quote from Eckharte Tolle’s A New Earth that helped me to find the line between these things:
“Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right, and to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There’s no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up, if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. “How dare you serve me cold soup!” — that’s complaining. There’s a “me” here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it. A “me” that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change.”
What surprises you about the experience of leading a successful startup team? — Amanda Tessier
I think one surprise is how big we can grow and still need to grow more. We’re 70 people now and if you’d told me a few years ago we’d be that many people, I would have dismissed it. Every single person on the team is awesome and completely necessary — and not only that, but we have another 20 [open] roles and we’re looking for people to join us to help us do better! Another surprise is how necessary structure is when you grow beyond a certain point, and how hard it is to get structure right. We’ve tried a lot of different things and we keep going with our efforts there.
If I’m not mistaken, before you started Buffer, you were a freelancer with several clients. How did you manage your time to do freelancing while working on the early stage of Buffer? — Wilbert Liu
That’s absolutely right. When I started Buffer, I was working full-time for several clients and I was building Buffer on the side. Here are a few key things I did:
- I originally was working on Buffer in my evenings; I found over time that it was not too effective. I was often tired at the end of the day. So, I switched to sleeping early, rising early and then working on Buffer for several hours before doing client work. It was much, much better and I think might be one of the keys to me actually getting Buffer off the ground.
- When I was a freelancer, I had many friends who were also freelancers or had their own agencies. I saw that path could work for me. The hard part is, when you’re doing a startup you don’t see progress as fast as if you have a service business. There’s a period of learning and trying and failing. That time was tough for me, but the key was that I decided I wanted to try to make a startup work. I sought out freelance opportunities that would make it easy for me to drop freelancing once I had made something work, without disappointing clients. A key part of that was doing work for other agencies, to help them when they had too much work.
- I was lucky enough to end up with a setup where in the first few months of Buffer, as it started to work, I could gradually slow down my freelance work and transition over.
What are some unexpected benefits of tracking your metrics so closely and transparently? — Kingsong Chen
A key one is that we’ve opened ourselves up to getting incredible advice from people. People have literally written 2,000 word critiques on our salary formula, or on how we do product, or being a distributed team. It’s super valuable and holds us to a higher standard.
What will be some of the aspects you’re looking to focus on for the new year to further drive the transparency, culture and product at Buffer? — Andy Yeo
We’re still figuring out OKRs and accountability, I’m excited about the steps we’re making there. I think in terms of transparency, two areas come to mind that we could improve a lot: our product roadmap, and our hiring process. Those are key areas that I think we’re less transparent than we’d like to be. In terms of culture, we’ve noticed that as we’ve doubled in size in less than half a year, some of the focuses we’ve had have become harder to keep up. One example would be our focus on self-improvement, which has slipped away slightly as a core thing. In terms of product: a big one will be to launch Respond, of course: https://buffer.com/respond. Alongside that, we want to keep innovating with our microbusiness / individual Buffer product (free and awesome plan), as well as really building out a solid solution for the medium/large business segment with Buffer for Business.
What’s your average weekday like? — Geoffrey Weg
These days, I generally have a lot of quick meetings with different people on the team. I’m mainly focused on product/engineering, customer service, hiring, and then on the higher level. My calendar is open to people on the team, and it generally gets quite booked up. I have quick 20 minute sessions to give advice on a specific challenge. I also have 1:1s with several people in the team, and so I usually have one of those each day too.
Other than work, I try to exercise several times a week, too (either strength training at the gym, running, or doing a bodyweight workout at an outdoor gym).
What’s something you used to fervently believe that you now see as fundamentally misguided? — Erik Torenberg
About nine months ago when we were right in the middle of our focus on being self-managed, I truly believed that leadership, management, and coaching were not required in organizations. I’ve learned how very wrong I am. I still strive for us to create a unique company structure in Buffer and to challenge the traditional structures, but I’ve come to believe that people need guidance based on their experience level and stage within the company, and we lost a lot when we didn’t have that focus.
Check out the full Q&A with Joel on Product Hunt and sign up to chat with some of the great guests we have coming up!
Later this week Arielle Zuckerberg will be joining us, as well a Chamath Palihapitiya, and Bob Wright (who is the former Vice Chairman of General Electric and CEO of NBC).
