We recently crossed $19M in ARR at Buffer… for the second time.
It's been a journey, to say the least. We first crossed $19M in ARR in September 2018. It's hard to believe that's six years ago.
The chart tells the story well - it's been a rollercoaster and the hardest thing I've worked through as a Founder CEO. There's a lot of pain represented in that curve. To be declining for multiple years is demoralizing and exhausting. But I always planned to build a long-term business and was determined to lead us back to thriving, so I remained optimistic despite the fact it took some searching to find the path to new growth.
In many ways, this is a failure for me as CEO and for us as a business. It truly is. I fully own that as a fact.
And yet, I see it as a success too. We plateaued, declined, and rediscovered growth as a business in those years. I grew significantly as a leader, and we'll soon cross 14 years since I started the company. We went through this cycle without doing layoffs, thanks to the fact we entered our decline with profitability and a healthy cash balance.
Most importantly, we figured out what we are for as a business; who we're serving. For me, that involved reminding myself why I even started Buffer. I love building for and serving entrepreneurs, and I love helping creators and small businesses get off the ground and thrive.We re-committed to the business model that serves these folks, and drove our early growth, which is a highly generous freemium SaaS offering. I get a kick out of delivering immense value compared to what we charge for the product, and challenging myself to continually improve our tools.
Through the low lows of our multi-year decline, we rediscovered our DNA and the vital components of our culture. We found a way to blend that with what the world and our space looks like today, to arrive at a strategy and way of working that's helping us thrive again and ensure we can exist for another decade and beyond. I found a new level of passion and conviction for what we're doing, for the potential we have as a business, and the ways I can lead and do work that fuels me to help us fulfill those ambitions.
The first time we crossed $19M, the writing was on the wall for our looming decline. Pace of product improvement and innovation had stalled; we were debilitated by tech debt we didn't yet know how to manage. We succumbed to squeezing revenue out of existing customers, and were already seeing a steep decline in new paying customers.
This time around, we are moving faster and more boldly than we have in years, and we've re-centered ourselves around growing by serving more customers and continually adding real value, rather than through price increases and short-term growth hacks.
There's no doubt we will run into challenging cycles again in our future. I'm confident we'll find our way through those too. To me, that's a natural part of building a long-term business.
Onwards to $20M, again.
