Buffer

And we thought, you know what? That's enough to do an initial site to this product.

Now, this is, Buffer was a really simple app.

So we thought it was going to take a day to do the initial version.

But Buffer is hard.

It never goes right, right? So it took him a week, but still, it wasn't like, If he was going to go do something for 10 months, he probably needed more validation.

But if he's going to spend a day, even a week, there's enough validation.

The final one is going to be what I like to call, and this is like an agentic term, observability monitoring, right? So that's when the AI is like, okay, we've done all these campaigns, we've reached out to people, we have this creator that's done super well before, bringing them back in the loop for a new product launch or a new variation, new flavor, whatever it might be, right? how is that working, right? And then that will feed right back into the marketing.

They'll feed right back into every previous step, right? The execution, the marketing mix preparation, and then that research as well so that you actually have agents that are proactively making sure that, okay, the next campaign round, we're exponentially getting better at what we do, right? So we can talk about the tools all day, right? I mean, you can go from, I know people who've created some of the most complicated things I've ever seen in Zapier, in N8N, even in Buffer, they have workflows now.

And I've seen people do it in ClickUp.

The tool, the AI tool, to some extent matters, but at the same time, there is so many now that you have a lot of different options.

I honestly, you know, Cloud can run a lot of your marketing mix these days.

Like they have all the connections to Instagram and Facebook and like it can kind of do the work.

I do love Buffer, you know, a big content, you know, calendar person, been using them for a long time.

But Genuine, like even in Notion and other, you know, similar project management tools and stuff, like there's marketing in HubSpot, there's all these different things.

After one too many shouty caps responses from me, Claude recommended I hook up a social scheduler to solve this problem.

And despite already having an old Hootsuite account and Sprout Social being a former client, I chose Buffer.

Buffer won my account because of one reason, something that has always fascinated me, employee-led content.

But wait, before I go any further, I just told you an acquisition story.

And this is a retention show.

Your results page runs you head-to-head with a composite of your competitors, line items what each flag is costing you, and even gives you a 90-day recovery plan.

That's nickielbuzz.com slash quiz.

Our guest today is Brandon Green, who is a staff product manager at Buffer.

And now we work a lot more fluidly.

Where right now within Buffer does AI show up?

Almost everywhere.

It's so much easier to produce things.

to plan for healthy skepticism is important that we cannot hold the key agent responsible for something so like it's always like human in the kind of driver's seat um accountable for the outcome

Today, my guest on Less Work is Katarina Porzhneva.

She's head of engineering operations over at Buffer.

Now, Buffer was remote and radically transparent long before it was even fashionable.

It's because it works.

So with this particular repo, what it actually does is this is an open source scheduler like Buffer or like a Hootsuite.

where you can have one single calendar for your Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

So instead of having to post to different platforms, Posts is that one-stop shop for you.

That visibility is the second layer.

When Buffer's founder Joel Gascoigne live-streamed the early development of the product, he wasn't just coding.

He was pressure testing his decisions against an audience who would spot a bad architecture choice in chat before he even finished the function.

That feedback loop is unavailable when you're working through a curriculum alone at two in the morning.

Think about it.

Grafana started as a weekend metrics project.

Buffer was live coded into existence.

The next massive tool in social analytics might be getting built right now on a Twitch stream with twelve viewers.

I got to say I'm shocked that Al Bhandari took my advice on the buffer integration with Quad because I haven't talked about it that much, honestly.

I think I maybe shared it a couple times only on Spaces publicly.

But the fact that she's signed up on Buffer on the free version and she's integrated it with Claude, that's huge, right? Because I just discovered this, I don't know, like a month ago, where Buffer was already connected to Claude, but now I'm able to...

schedule the post directly from Claude and say, hey, just schedule, you know, 30 posts for me.

It does it and it pulls the images and or short video clips automatically from my Google Drive because I've made it available.

So the right question is not, does building in public work? It is, what is it multiplying, and in which direction? Watch how it behaves when there is substance underneath.

In 2013, Buffer, a tool for scheduling social media posts, did something that still makes HR departments flinch.

It published the salaries of every last employee along with the formula used to calculate them.

It looked insane.

Here is what actually happened.

Applications surged, and the quality of candidates went up.

Transparency did not make Buffer a good company.

The company was already good.