BoSUSA25 | Joel Gascoigne | Navigating A Multi-Year Decline to New All-Time-Highs

A story 5 years in the making, Joel will share his journey navigating Buffer’s decline and the monumental effort it took to turn it around.

In this talk, Joel will cover:

- Missteps and early warning signs of an emerging plateau
- What it feels like to be in free fall
- Going inward to rediscover purpose and seek a new path
- Steering in a new direction during a decline
- Strengthening culture in the midst of a turnaround
- Achieving all-time-highs our own way
- Embracing differentiation to thrive long-term

1. Joel Gascoigne • Founder CEO, Buffer
Navigating a
Multi-Year Decline to
New All-Time-Highs
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Business of Software USA • October 2025

2. Buffer’s ARR over time

3. Buffer’s ARR over time
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4. ●Started Buffer in late 2010, based
on a personal need

●Buffer is a social media toolkit for
creators, entrepreneurs and small
businesses

●Today, Buffer has 67K paying
customers and is at $22.7M ARR

●On track for $2.5M profit in 2025,
and we’re growing 22% YoY

●Raised a total of $4M, with our
last round in 2014

●We’ve spent $10M buying out
investors and alumni since 2017
Joel
Gascoigne
HELLO! BUFFER
●Originally from Sheffield,
England

●Now living in Boulder,
Colorado with my wife and our
two sons

●Love to ski, mountain bike, surf

5. 2010
Launched, found first 4
customers
Team: 1 • ARR: $20
2011
Team: 3 • ARR: $200K
Co-founder Leo joined,
raised $450k funding

6. 2012
Grew to 8 people, chose
to be a remote company
Team: 8 • ARR: $730K
2013
Team: 16 • ARR: $2.3M
Formed values, rolled
out salary transparency

7. 2014
Turned down acquisition
offer, raised $3.5m
Team: 29 • ARR: $5.2M
2015
Team: 62 • ARR: $8.4M
Started a hiring surge,
acquired Respondly

8. 2016 & 2017

9. Over-hiring without financial
diligence leads to layoffs

10. Co-founder moves on
Wavering between two paths

11. Stabilizing and rebuilding trust
Hiring freeze and 1:1 conversations
●Implemented a hiring freeze

●Put focus on rebuilding trust with
remaining team

●Following co-founder departure I
spent a week having 1:1 meetings
with every team member

●I hit burnout and took 6 weeks out

12. Co-founder and investor conflict

13. The path to an independent future

●A friendly investor provided
liquidity for Leo

●Leo eventually resigned from the
board

●Clarity that I needed to find the
path to buy out VCs

14. Bank Balance
$5.5M2017
2016
ARR
$12.8M
Net Income
-$110.2K
Bank Balance
$2.1M
ARR
$16.2M
Net Income
$1.4M

15. The Seeds of Decline

16. Feeling
Spread Thin
●80,000 paying customers,
too many different types of
customers

●Defensive mindset following
challenging years

●Believed we were too small
to serve everyone well
STRATEGY

17. Direct to
Consumer
Brands
●To bring focus, we chose
Direct to Consumer brands
as our primary customer

●DTC brands were successful
with social media and
depended on it

●A strategic and intentional
bet to narrow our customer
base
STRATEGY

18. Focus on
growing ARPU
STRATEGY
●Our stated strategy and goal
became to grow our
Average Revenue per User

●Our ARPU was around
$18/mo, very low for SaaS

●We were focused on
growing ARPU even at the
expense of growth of paying
customers

19. Reducing the
Free Plan
PRODUCT
●A variety of changes
reducing functionality on
the free plan

●We believed we had too
many free users, and they
were causing a burden to
the company

●Many users were very
unhappy with the changes

●We reversed some changes,
but kept most

20. ●We increased the price of
our Pro plan from $10/mo to
$15/mo

●We also reduced the number
of social accounts from 10
to 8
Price
Increase
PRODUCT

24. Multi-Product Strategy

●Separate products with their own
pricing options

●Goal to provide flexibility, and grow
average revenue per user

●Following a common SaaS playbook

27. ●I struggled with the
transition to being a solo
founder

●I was too hands off with my
leadership team

●A weak, frankenstein
strategy

●Around this time I started
working with my executive
coach
Reactive
Leadership
LEADERSHIP

28. Buying out VC
investors and
co-founder
OWNERSHIP
●Spent $3.3M (half our cash)
buying out our main VC
investors

●A friendly investor
purchased 40% of Leo’s
remaining shares. The
company repurchased the
rest.

●These transactions
cemented our choice to
take a long-term path

29. Revenue and ARPU growth

30. Customer decline

31. 2019 Results
ARR
$22.2M
↑ 13.6%
Customers
74.6K
↓ 2.9%

32. Freefall

33. Arriving at a plateau

34. Pandemic

35. Immediate churn from pandemic

36. Journal Entry - April 12, 2020
I'm checking the metrics, and they
look a lot worse than they did a week
ago, or even just a few days ago.

37. A Moment to Breathe

38. Rethink focus
on DTC brands
STRATEGY
●The pandemic especially hit
the physical businesses who
were customers of Buffer

●It didn’t sit right to maintain
our focus on DTC brands

●Reconnected with our
original customers and
purpose: small businesses

●We had profitability and a
healthy bank balance, and
felt called to provide relief

39. COVID-19
Customer
Assistance
Program
PRODUCT ●Waived payments

●Paused Buffer subscriptions

●Gifted essential product
features

●Extended 90 day trials for
new customers

40. CULTURE

41. Journal Entry - April 24, 2020
I can make a big impact for the team
by doing quite little. The decision to
try a 4-day workweek was ultimately
not difficult for me, but for the team
it’s almost unfathomable.

42. Multi-Product
to One Buffer
●Multi-product strategy
created friction and
complexity, focused on
extracting value vs.
delivering it

●Decision to consolidate
Publish, Analyze, Engage
into One Buffer
STRATEGY

43. PRODUCT

44. Our vision is a world with more small
businesses that do good while doing well
Our mission is to provide essential tools to
help small businesses get off the ground and
grow. Through exceptional customer service
and uplifting content, we help businesses
believe they can succeed and do good along
the way.

45. It got worse before it
got better

46. Tech debt

47. The Great
Resignation
from Buffer
CULTURE
●24 people chose to leave
Buffer in 2021

●We had historically seen 5%
voluntary turnover, in 2021
the number shot up to 26%

●There were macro factors,
however the Buffer culture
and business was at perhaps
its weakest ever

48. Executive Recruiting

49. 2021 Results
ARR
$19.7M
↓ 6.4%
Customers
63.1K
↓ 8.6%

50. Finding Our Way
(continued)

52. New Buffer
STRATEGY
●Simplified all-in-one product
with a single price point

●Positioned for the low end
of the market

●Freemium and our lowest
ever entry price point

●2 axes - features and social
channels

54. No forced
migrations
STRATEGY
●With New Buffer, we would
have two very different
pricing models

●All new customers went
onto our New Buffer pricing

●We made an intentional
choice not to force legacy
customers to migrate to the
new pricing

55. Goal to grow
customers
STRATEGY
●Our strategy was becoming
clearer

●We committed to small
businesses and embraced
freemium

●By late 2021, we stated our
goal was to grow by serving
significantly more customers

56. Concluding
Executive
Hiring
LEADERSHIP
●After unsuccessful attempts
to find multiple executives, I
made the decision to stop
the process entirely

●Hiring executives would add
distance and layers

●I turned inward to build with
existing team, and treat the
team as complete

57. Build Mode
●Without new leaders coming
in, existing folks needed to
step up

●We were declining, and so
we needed to get away from
maintenance mode, and
embrace build mode

●Building product, building
culture, building up our
marketing again
CULTURE

58. Build Week
●Introduced whole-company
Build Week event

●Inspired by pre-Buffer
"startup in a weekend"
experiences

●Cross-functional teams,
rapid building, high energy

●Challenging process, driving
connection, embracing
smallness
CULTURE

59. ●Confronted my fear of conflict to
give honest, direct feedback that
helped people and the business
grow

●Got involved in all aspects of the
business, driving clarity and
action

●Became more decisive, making
tough decisions when needed

●Started a Leadership Group to
connect and help the leaders of
the company grow
Growing as a
leader
LEADERSHIP

60. August 2022 - our first month of growth!

61. Achieving the
holy grail of growth
STRATEGY

62. The two ways to grow a SaaS business
The simple calculation for MRR gives us the options of how we grow:



1⃣ Enterprise SaaS growth playbook
Grow ARPU, grow through expansion of existing customers

2⃣ Consumer SaaS growth playbook
Grow volume of customers, grow through new customer acquisition
MRR = Number of Paying Customers × Average Revenue Per User

63. The Buffer SaaS growth playbook
A combination of both, primarily following the consumer SaaS playbook

Our strategy is focused on growing MRR primarily by growing Number of Paying
Customers, alongside slowly growing Average Revenue Per User. This is what I
started calling the holy grail of growth for Buffer.

In simple terms, we grow by successfully serving more people and businesses.
The two ways to grow a SaaS business

64. Number of
Paying Customers
×
Average Revenue
Per User
=
Monthly Recurring
Revenue

65. Number of
Paying Customers
×
Average Revenue
Per User
=
Monthly Recurring
Revenue

66. Number of
Paying Customers
×
Average Revenue
Per User
=
Monthly Recurring
Revenue

67. Number of
Paying Customers
×
Average Revenue
Per User
=
Monthly Recurring
Revenue

68. Carrying Capacity
●A new metric we started paying attention to
●The number of customers the business can currently “carry”
●It’s based the number of new paying customers each month,
and the customer churn rate each month

carrying capacity =
number of new paying customers / customer churn rate

69. Max MRR
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70. Max MRR
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71. Doubling Down
on Freemium
PRODUCT
●Committing to increase
value of free plan over time

●Holistically Freemium:
Every feature to have a free
component:
○A useful version available
on the free plan
○Some reasonable usage
limit

●Provide a genuinely useful
free plan
●Have customers upgrade
when it would benefit them

72. Directing
Signups to
Free Plan
PRODUCT
Homepage
Homepage
Pricing Signup
Signup

73. Monthly signups over the last 4 years
Driven by growth marketing and product efforts

74. Signs of Recovery

77. We will grow again soon. Time to start
preparing for that future.
Journal Entry - February 17, 2023

78. March 2023 - flattened the decline

79. Delivering
Value while
Paying down
Tech Debt
●Within engineering, we got
past our fear of touching the
core parts of the codebase

●We found ways to address
tech debt as part of new
value projects, rather than
always feeling the trade-off
CULTURE

80. Increased
Pace
PRODUCT
●AI Assistant
●Tags
●Zapier Integration
●Comments
●Beta Features Program
●Improved Emoji Picker
●Mastodon Support
●Instagram Stories
Scheduling
●YouTube Shorts Scheduling
●Instagram Creator Accounts
●Facebook Reels Scheduling
●LinkedIn Documents (PDF
Carousels)

81. Adding
Channels
●We also started to recognize
the win-win of adding more
channels to Buffer

●We could add more value for
customers, and with our
per-channel pricing see
growth too

●A way to grow ARPU
without raising prices
PRODUCT

82. New channels since 2022

83. 2023 Results
ARR
$17.8M
↓ 2.0%
Customers
55.7K
↓ 5.2%

84. Doubling Down to
Hit New Heights

85. What is Strategy?
“Strategy is creating fit among a
company’s activities. The success of a
strategy depends on doing many things
well—not just a few—and integrating
among them.”
“A company can outperform rivals only if
it can establish a difference that it can
preserve.”

“Strategic fit among many activities is
fundamental not only to competitive
advantage but also to the sustainability
of that advantage.”
?????? go.joel.is/mp-strategy

86. Our journey of strengthening differentiation
●Our turnaround journey was also a journey of strengthening our differentiation
●We reflected on what led to growth previously, and doubled down on activities that
can still apply today
○Freemium and serving entrepreneurs, creators and professionals
○Content marketing - bringing it back in-house and increasing investment in
SEO
○Making an investment to simplify our product and improve UX
○A renewed focus on being connected with the customer
○Strengthening culture and doubling down on the uniqueness of how we work

87. Down and
Wide Strategy
●Down
○as in down-market, to
provide pricing and
functionality that helps
creators, entrepreneurs
and small businesses

●Wide
○be a comprehensive
product to cater to a broad
variety of customer needs
STRATEGY

88. Achieving sustainable growth
“Among all other influences, the desire to grow has perhaps the most perverse effect on
strategy.”

How we’ve aimed to grow without eroding the strength of our strategy:
●What can we uniquely do, that will be very difficult for others to do?
●How can we interconnect and bolster our efforts across teams?
●Strengthen our strategic positions, rather than expanding in ways that weaken or
are at odds with existing

90. CULTURE

91. 2024 Results
ARR
$19.4M
↑ 8.8%
Customers
57.4K
↑ 3.0%

92. PRODUCT

93. The Buffer team in Antalya, Türkiye for our 14th
company retreat

94. Proactively cancelling inactive customers
$13K and $5K drops in MRR

95. Coming soon
to Buffer
PRODUCT
●Public API to allow
others to on top of and
customize Buffer

●Community building
features to allow you to
stay responsive to the
comments you get
across all social channels

96. A long-term
independent
company
OWNERSHIP
●Since 2017, we’ve spent
over $10M to repurchase
30% of shares

●After pausing since 2018,
we’re resuming issuing stock
options

●In 2024 we started an
annual liquidity program for
team members

97. Number of
Paying Customers
×
Average Revenue
Per User
=
Monthly Recurring
Revenue

98. 2025 Results (so far)
ARR
$22.6M
↑ 16.7%
Customers
67.2K
↑ 17.2%

99. How we
achieved a
turnaround
●We went back to our roots of
serving entrepreneurs, and went
down-market to truly cater to
them

●We doubled back down on our
brand by re-igniting our
marketing engine

●We strengthened our culture,
being creators ourselves and
having a bias towards building

●We got back to growth,
profitability and thriving by
re-establishing a differentiated
position

100. Joel
Gascoigne
THANK YOU
Stay in touch, follow → ??????
joel.is
Questions?