Buffer

Remote work, by its very nature, enables the diversity necessary to prevent groupthink.

But the most striking example of engineering trust remotely comes from a company called Buffer.

And I have to be honest, when I read this in the sources, my jaw hit the floor.

It is wild.

Mm.

Buffer is a social media management company with a fully distributed global team, and their method for building trust is radical transparency.

Radical transparency.

They openly share everything, and I mean everything.

And, you know, to a certain degree in the merit cycle, what's happened with promotions, when you're having people working against each other, promotions, it comes down to politics and negotiation skills and the ability to present yourself well relative to other people.

And so implicitly you are now competing, you're having people compete with one another, but You mentioned one example, Carter, and there are other examples, 37 Signals and Buffer, the two that I go to a lot, examples of very transparent, very non-negotiable pay models.

And you mentioned a piece about RUN, if I remember this correctly, R-U-N-N, right? Well, so you remember it.

So tell me about that one and their model and how that's different.

The star of today's episode of SmartBear Live is a solo bootstrap founder in Turkey, a digital nomad who quit his job to take on giants like Buffer and Hootsuite, growing his social media scheduling tool to 4K and MRR.

But he's stuck.

The customers who love the product and never leave are agencies.

And then PostPlanify has a thing that's either an embed or it's an API, who cares, something where they can just like have a thing of their testimonials that are actually managed in PostPlanify.

In which case they could never leave PostPlanify.

Because Buffer doesn't have this.

Like now we're actually, because this is the thing you're like, oh, there's so many social media tools.

Oh, you know, they all kind of do the same stuff.

So there's, oh, now you just scheduled...

Thanks, Buffer.

Publish all these now.

What's the point of saying go, okay, one by one by one? I've been using Buffer to put social posts out because you can put it all in one place and then send it to everything in one go.

It is kind of good, but the UX is just a little bit clunky and it's really easy to accidentally put it in the queue so that it sends things on different social platforms at different times.

But I think we're okay now.

What can I say? I'm not proud of it, but there you go.

So a couple of people mentioned me, and I was like, "Yes." Right? But Joel Gascoigne, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, the, the founder and CEO of Buffer by far won the room.

The number of people who were like, "Oh, my gosh, that talk really touched me." And what is it about? It was about how Buffer started shrinking.

Buffer started not failing, but like, "Oh, my gosh, we're gonna have to lay people off.

We're..." You know, like, "Is it the end?" And for years, years, okay? And he was very vulnerable about what was that like, what did he, how was he thinking, what did they try, how do they try to pull it out of this tailspin? Which they eventually did figure out when they went back to who they really were, refocused on who are we, what are we great at, who, who, what customers do we love to serve? Never mind that their metrics aren't very good, 'cause they're not.

Those customers that they serve are at the low end.

I approve that comment, and that gets posted automatically again.

That's done through automation using make.com, done through the comment generation is done through OpenAI's GPT, and the posting again is done through Buffer.

So effectively, we almost have a full-time social media manager that doesn't exist.

that is engaging with our potential listener base, producing content for them, commenting on them and engaging with them.

That's well and good this broad says she can get off of it, but, like, I couldn't do that," I totally get it.

If you're not using something like Buffer, a scheduling tool, highly recommend starting because it will put a wall between you and the app.

Like, you can still post, you can reply to comments directly from Buffer, but you don't actually have to go on and get sucked in.

And that in itself can be really helpful.

Yeah, that's what I always...

I forgot that they have that business center now where you can schedule it all in there.

That was rolling out as I was, as I was exiting.

So yeah, I even s- still use Buffer for posting on my LinkedIn page.

But the data is actually saying opposite.

According to Buffer's 2026 analysis of millions of posts, videos have the highest engagement on threads at 5.55%.

Images come second at 4.55% and then text posts come a third at 2.79%.

Now, it doesn't mean you should be churning out loads of polished video content for every post.

Okay.

Buffer's analysis of 2 million plus LinkedIn posts found that higher posting frequency correlated with higher reach and engagement per post.

Okay.

not just more total impressions.

You can also use Canva pretty well.

I record a whole bunch of things, and then I schedule it all in Buffer.

using an Airtable that I've connected to Zapier.

That's a whole lot of different things.

And with Airtable, there's an AI feature that helps me generate a caption that I give some restrictions to.

And then once I think that everything there looks good, I hit approval.

Zapier will then send it to Buffer to schedule it.

So I don't have to think about the time.