leowidrich
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
120
Submissions
41
Member since
Apr 15
Co-founder at Buffer. http://twitter.com/leowid
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
Love the name "innovation facilitation" - one of the big things we've been working on at Buffer is called "Buffer for Teams" - in short, it's a way where you can suggest content to share on team members social accounts and people can swipe it (http://bufferapp.com/daily) to approve or reject. Especially PR launches, announcements, blogposts, etc, that more people at your company want to share could be helpful - pricing is very early and less of importance to us, (your budget sounds good) - if you're interested in exploring this, please ping me [email protected] - we currently have a few people trialling it and they seem to get a lot of fun, value from spreading news more widely about a company.
Comment · 12 years ago
That's awesome to hear, thanks!
Comment · 12 years ago
Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) - from wherever you want to be in the world (fully remote), we're looking for a Product Designer.
Over 30,000 people pay for a Buffer subscription to help them with their social media efforts, which helps us generate $420k MRR. With that we spend about $223k/mo on salaries, which is about 66% of our total spending (https://open.bufferapp.com/transparent-pricing-buffer/).
We work without managers and are fully self-managing. You pick your own projects, recruit team members from within the company or join task forces that you find interesting ( https://open.bufferapp.com/decision-maker-no-managers-experi...)
Like with everything else, our hiring process is fully transparent (more here https://open.bufferapp.com/how-we-hire/ )
There are so many exciting projects people are working on and it'd be awesome to have you lead the design efforts product experience of some of them. Just email Brian Lovin from this page: http://jobs.bufferapp.com/designer and he'll be in touch.
If you have any questions about how we work, I'd love to answer them.
Comment · 12 years ago
(to get around paywall: google the title and click through from google)
Comment · 12 years ago
yup, we will, thanks!
Comment · 12 years ago
Yup, great questions! We considered a number of things: dividends, loans, buying back shares without raising money, debt. Dividends for a c-corp are taxed super high (big fan of paying taxes, but you end up paying something like 60-70% tax, not a good idea!). So raising extra cash with minimal dilution (2.5% for this round) was most efficient.
Right now, all money raised goes to company, then company buys back shares from early team members - investors still get preferred stock. We're not selling our common stock directly to investors - you're right, that'd be too complicated and not in investors interest.
Would love to answer more questions on this, keen to explain our full thinking!
Comment · 12 years ago
Great point! We A/B tested a bunch of different ones, we haven't managed to outperform the current one. We'll certainly keep testing it. I like your hypothesis!
Comment · 12 years ago
Yup, it is! We've filed for general solicitation, which the jobs act made possible last year! Let me know if I can answer any questions about it!
Comment · 12 years ago
Hey there,
Great point on this. We've recently had a meeting discussing this in detail, I think you're absolutely right, it doesn't make people feel great to get a standard response like the one you've received. We've been trying to come up with a better way to personally respond to people, which has proven quite difficult. There were 2,000+ applicants last month and I think we're still trying to figure out the best work-flow to make each response tailored.
I wanted to assure though that we've read your email (and we do read each and every email, always), even though we sent a standard response (which I totally agree with isn't a great method). Hope that might help and I hope we can come up with a better solution to respond to you and everyone individually in the future. If anyone has had experience on this, would love your thoughts!
Comment · 12 years ago
This is really interesting, I can see how this must cause a lot of negativity at work. It's one of the reasons we've made salaries completely transparent within Buffer to avoid situations like this: http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffe...
Do you guys think open salaries can help with this?