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 leo@bufferapp.com - 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.
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/).
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.
Sorry, forgot to mention. It's going to also force you to to acctedited investor verification on each investor. I'm the CEO of AgFunder (and also a Buffer user) and I can send you a guide to AI verification if you need it.
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!
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!
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!
If I can be honest — and maybe that’s me not being used to American-grade fertilizer, but…
That response sounds exactly like the problem. I believe that anything else than:
“Indeed. We f*cked up. I’ve e-mailed you with short answers. Detailed coming soon.
Anyone with a similar issue, please let us know how we can recognize your e-mail.”
would be inappropriate. No one not invited cares about a meeting. Starting by “Great point … absolutely right … doesn’t make people feel great … trying to come up with a better way” and other unnecessary precautions around completely obvious points makes you sound like a politician on SNL. There is no ‘trying to come up with better ways’ to a personal e-mail: there is starting to do it, realising you don’t have the man-power to do it, confessing that you are late on the task. It’s either more important than what you are working on or not, but that shouldn’t take ten lines to figure out.
I love you -- that’s why I tell you how you can be a better version of yourself.
What does it matter if you read my email but didn't give me an actual response?
What do you expect me to do with this information?
On a solution: if every email was read, they should be categorised to ascertain whether they require a tailored reply (ie they had questions that aren't answered with a stock response).
Unless the majority of emails had questions not covered in the response that was sent (I can't imagine they did) you would have a much smaller set of emails to tailor replies.
I applied and received a form rejection (which I am actually OK with and totally understand) but when I sent two followup emails I heard no response back. If you really read every email, do you also ignore the questions?
I also asked for just a few sentences of feedback. I expect this from the average company, but not from yours. You have strong values, but don't live up to them.
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?
Lots of CEOs' salaries are public, but that doesn't stop people from resenting them for making so damn much. It's really hard for people to accept that someone is 3X or 5X or 100X more valuable than they are--either way, it's not a positive thought. I think more important than exposing salary numbers is being transparent about why those numbers are the way they are. Having the company tell me that Bill makes twice as much as me, by itself, might actually make things worse (especially if I don't think Bill deserves it), but knowing that he makes twice as much because he is highly specialized in a specific thing that the company really needs is useful because it gives me a hint as to how I can reach that level.
But aren't most salary discrepancies because you are a better negotiator than someone? Or what if the reason is that you are getting offers from other companies and so your company is giving you a higher salary to keep you around? The company wouldn't like to tell THAT is why they are paying you more, because then everyone would be "pay us more or we leave"
I don't think requiring as part of your employment that the whole world know your salary is a good thing in the private sector. But no one is forcing anyone to work at your company, although how it affects people that were there before this decision, to me is a bit questionable.
This is amazing, huge thanks for the analysis of our pricing page Patrick! Will go ahead and work on that for sure, some great pointers, you're right, there's so much power in the new analytics and we're not conveying that very well at all.
LOVE you guys with all caps intended. I'd look to Wistia as a really good example for you guys. Your value metrics follow a similar slide up and you can use that extra space for what you do best - awesome content/product marketing.
