People see growth and profitability as a tradeoff: when you dial one up, you turn the dial down on the other. In my experience, the times we've grown the fastest have also been the times we've been the most profitable.
I agree with that - I think a mistake some folks make is wanting Freemium purely as a way to grow more, when all they really care about is pure revenue and paying customers. You need to care about free users getting value and a majority of them never paying (because most free users won't).
A healthy freemium base is a growth savings account. Every month a portion upgrades. Remove the free plan and you get a one-time cash-out that looks like growth, but you're really just stealing from your future.
I feel like there needs to be an iOS ssh client that has voice-first input. I'd love to keep my Claude Code sessions going via mobile just by talking. Does this exist yet?
I send a regular newsletter with my recent posts, links I've saved, highlights from what I'm reading, the latest Buffer news, and something that's been on my mind. I sent my latest edition a couple of days ago, take a read here and subscribe: joel.is/newsletter/m...
Let me know if you end up going in this direction! I personally love how seamlessly I can go from a journal entry to a social post with my setup. I have a Raycast command that can take any note and essentially copy it to a note in the 'posts' directory.
Michael Porter's productivity frontier concept is playing out in real-time. We have 1-2 years where the frontier is getting pushed out by AI before it settles. We get to decide: wait for best practices to emerge, or engage in rebuilding? At Buffer we're choosing to be in the mess of the frontier.
I have my personal website as a 'website' directory in Obsidian with pages, articles, posts, newsletters subdirectories. I have a python script that essentially plucks that folder out and based on any changes puts them into my Eleventy folder so only the changes show up to be deployed.
This is how I have my personal website set up. It's pretty incredible. If you use Eleventy, this is a wonderful plugin that can convert wikilinks to permalinks in your website: github.com/photogabble/....
To play with the beta of the Buffer API:
1️⃣ Enable beta features for yourself: publish.buffer.com/settings/beta
2️⃣ Create an API key: publish.buffer.com/settings/api
3️⃣ View documentation: developers.buffer.com/guides/getti...
I'm happy to share that the brand new Buffer API is in Public Beta 🎉
Use it for personal automations or to create enhancements to Buffer. It works via MCP, with n8n, or build with it using Claude Code / Codex.
Note: this is a beta with limited functionality exposed. Much more to come!
This setup is helping me crank through tasks and be more clear minded, and it's been giving me so many ideas about ways I could extend this workflow.
This has streamlined the weekly review process and reduced friction for me in a way that is helping me get back to the core principle of GTD, which is to get things out of my head and into a system that I keep updated and can trust.
The agents can do some pretty powerful reasoning around rescheduling, my capacity, and even things I might miss. It asks me questions and based on my answers it makes all the changes in Todoist on my behalf.
This has been helping me be consistent with the weekly review, which had been a struggle.
The agents are just markdown files that have the weekly review process documented including using Todoist via the command line to fetch my active projects and next actions. I can just ask Claude Code to fetch and run the agent, and it walks through the weekly review with me.
Something I've been having fun with recently: I've been building custom AI agents that help me with my GTD weekly reviews and my time blocking my days.
I already had my GTD productivity system pretty well documented in Obsidian, and I had Claude Code create agents based on the documentation.
That's wonderful to hear, exactly what we're trying to help with. Have you been using the new Community tool to reply to comments? That's something we worked on to reduce the wormholes even more.
I'm delighted to share that 2025 was one of Buffer's strongest years in our 15-year history. Key results for the year:
- $23.4M Annual Run Rate (+20%)
- 69,764 Paying Customers (+22%)
- 195,928 Monthly Active Users (+19%)
- $2.51M Net Income (+1,142%)
These thoughts first appeared in my recent newsletter. Read the archive and subscribe here: joel.is/newsletter/
I've become better at spotting this habit and shifting the conversation. I will ask for more context and encourage us to step back to a higher level of context before going back to immediate decisions. Often we arrive at different outcomes than we would have by working only within the details.
As CEO I believe I am uniquely placed to keep the whole strategy in my head and draw connections where others may not spot them. My goal when helping teams make strategic decisions is that our combined efforts across the organization are interconnected and greater than the sum of their parts.
Many problems arise from companies being siloed, it's natural for someone in an individual contributor position to not have the full picture of strategic choices across other areas. Similarly, I often lack the details that an individual has. Combining our forces we can arrive at optimal decisions.
But for me, I see it as a critical part of my job to strive to make great decisions, model how I approach doing that, and take every opportunity to help people grow by thinking through decisions holistically.
I'm sure in some ways I've caused this pattern by presenting as busy, and it's probably a learned habit some people have developed from their career experiences. It's probably natural to try to save the CEO time, and many CEO's may be quite efficient at making decisions on much less data than I am.
A pattern I've noticed as a CEO is that people will sometimes try to save me time by presenting just the specific question or items they're hoping to get sign off on.
🧵 A few thoughts on this:
Thank you for the kind words Miguel! Glad these reflections were useful for you 😊
Thanks Ben!
Building and leading Buffer has been the gift that keeps giving. Thank you for following along, whether it's been for the entire journey or since more recently.
15. It's worthwhile shooting for the moon. Sometimes you can just choose the more ambitious path. It might feel scary but in my experience it's almost always the right choice. We can achieve far more than we realize.
14. It's not worth sacrificing health, family, friendships and hobbies for some hypothetical outcome that will solve everything. It's better to try to have it all now.