joelgascoigne

Happiness Heroes are the people who help customers with queries via Email, Twitter and Live Chat. Weekend Warriors are people in the team who help with those same things during the weekend (though it's a full-time 5 days a week role, so 3 other days too). We have 6 full-time members of this Happiness team, it's something we make a very high priority. In the last month we answered 92% of emails within 6 hours, 65% within 1 hour, with a volume of around 10,000 emails.

I can definitely see how it seems Mary is getting screwed. Our equity number there is misleading, she has 0.3% (column to the right). Key things to note: Mary lives in Spokane, which has a relatively low cost of living and falls into our "C" bracket in the salary formula. If she moves, her salary will go up by either $6K or $16K depending on where she moves to. Also, Mary chose equity over salary (yay) which is a choice to increase equity by taking $10K less salary. I hope that helps explain things there, let me know if you have any more questions!

Comment · 12 years ago

We've been transparent about how many applications we get, which is quite a lot from what I've heard other founders say when I've mentioned the numbers: http://open.bufferapp.com/hiring-at-buffer-in-february-2024-... (we probably get at least 100 emails from HN if we end up near the top).

We're lucky to have a lot of interest and so in some ways I guess it ends up like a lottery. At the same time, we try and share as much as we can around the culture and when it is a good fit. Here's a post about that: http://open.bufferapp.com/how-we-hire/

Let me know if you have any questions :-)

Edit: To answer your question about getting a reply - we reply to every single email, even though it can be tough and can take a couple of weeks or so for us to get to them all.

Comment · 12 years ago

Let me know if you have any questions about that or anything else :-)

Comment · 12 years ago

We're fully distributed, that includes all engineers too :-) Colin is based in Cambridge. Firmly rooted in Warwickshire is no problem! I went to Warwick University by the way :-)

Comment · 12 years ago

Hey Vishal, that's amazing to hear! Data scientist is a role we've been pondering, if you are up for it, we'd still love to hear from you :-)

Comment · 12 years ago

Hey everyone, hope your April is off to a killer start!

Like in last month's Who is hiring I wanted to share all our numbers for complete transparency. March just came to a close and Buffer stands at 1.4M total users served by a small 21 person team spread across 14 cities and 5 continents. 130,000 of our users are actively using the product each month. We generated $350,000 in March, and we have $580,000 in the bank. The average salary at the company is $98,000 and our total funding to date is $450,000 which we raised in December 2011, for which we gave up 14% of the company. I'm sharing all of this because one of the highest values we have at Buffer is to be fully transparent, and I'd love for you to be part of the incredible journey we've embarked upon.

At 16% month over month revenue growth on average in the last 6 months, we're seeing increasing demand to build out the product further and help our fast-growing customer base with all their social media problems. To achieve this, we'd love your help with some interesting engineering challenges. Do any of these areas stand out for you? I'd really love to hear from you:

    - Reliability Hacker (we're sending 450,000 posts to
      social networks every day, our architecture is still
      not ideal)
    - Android Lead (our Android app has half a million
      downloads but currently no full-time developer!)
    - iOS Hacker (our favorite people who use Buffer are
      all crying out for an iPad app)
    - Growth Hacker (our landing page conversion is at 7%,
      we'd love your help improving it and many other
      metrics)
    - Frontend Hacker (last month 130,000 people used
      Buffer, we'd love to improve our dashboard interface
      and extensions for them)

Some of the tech we work with: PHP, Python, MongoDB, AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, Elasticache, SQS), Backbone.js, Grunt.js, Android, iOS).

    - We're completely open about salary and equity, in
      fact here is a spreadsheet of all individual salaries:
      https://docs.google.com/a/bufferapp.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&usp=drive_web#gid=1.
      It's most likely you'd fall into a range of
      $85,000-$150,000 and 0.1%-1%.
    - We're a fully distributed remote team, and we come
      together 3 times a year for super fun retreats.
      The last one was in Thailand in December, our next
      is Cape Town in April!
    - We have a big focus on culture, that's the main thing
      we think about when someone joins the team. Here is
      our slide deck of values:
      http://www.slideshare.net/Bufferapp/buffer-culture-03

I'll read through emails with our CTO Sunil, I hope yours might be part of that. Send him a quick note at [email protected]. If you'd like you can check out more details about all the areas we need help with at http://jobs.bufferapp.com

I'm excited about the chance to work with you. If you have any questions about our culture, product or journey so far, add a reply to this - I'll be checking throughout the day to get back to you :-)

- Joel (Founder/CEO)