Building a remote, profitable, transparent and sustainable company with Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer

**Alex Theuma** (0:10)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to The SaaS Revolution Show, brought to you by SaaStock, the conference that helps SaaS companies get traction, growth and scale. I'm your host, Alex Theuma, and I'll be looking at what it really takes to build and grow a SaaS company today, and how founders and entrepreneurs stay healthy on the journey. Now on with the show.
Welcome to The SaaS Revolution Show, Joel Gascoigne, CEO and co-founder of Buffer. Welcome, Joel.

**Joel Gascoigne** (0:40)
Thanks, Alex. Yeah, great to be on here.

**Alex Theuma** (0:42)
Good to have you on. I will have five years we've been doing this, and you're a hard man to get on the podcast.

**Joel Gascoigne** (0:50)
We have a mutual friend, Andy, as well, who has been mentioning us to each other for a while.

**Alex Theuma** (0:57)
Yeah, I ask Andy every time I see him, can you just have a word with Joel and see if we can get him on the show? But great to have you on here.
And yeah, for those that don't know you, Joel, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who is Joel Gascoigne?

**Joel Gascoigne** (1:16)
Yeah, so I'm co-founder and CEO of Buffer, and Buffer is a social media management platform for small businesses. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now today. This year will be the, we'll kind of tick over the 10-year mark with the company. So that's exciting.
And yeah, we have a number of different tools within our platform for customers to be able to publish to social media, to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other places, and then analyze the results of what they're doing and kind of create this feedback loop for themselves and increase their reach and work on their brand online. So yeah, that's what we do.
And I kind of see myself as a problem solver at heart.
I was the technical co-founder, but also love thinking about the business side and so kind of gone through the progression of building out the first version of the product to then really focus on the product side to then really just thinking about the company as a whole and the strategy across all areas. So it's been a fun journey. And yeah, on the personal side, I love to get outdoors. I live in Boulder, Colorado. Been here for a couple of years, lived in a lot of different places. We're a fully remote company as well, so I've been able to travel a lot. And right now I'm really enjoying skiing in the winter, started snowboarding a bit as well in the past season, and then mountain biking, hiking, those kinds of things in the summer as well. So there's plenty of that here in Boulder, which is really great. And I think it has helped me stay sane over the last couple of years in a better way than I have in other times where I've been in big cities.

**Alex Theuma** (3:12)
Is that why you chose Boulder? Because the range of activities, you being an outdoor person, that it sort of fit the bill for you?

**Joel Gascoigne** (3:20)
Yeah, that was a big factor of it. Also, my wife had an opportunity to move with her job from New York to Boulder in the same company.
So that made things easier. And we've been thinking about it for a year or two at that point already. She'd been in New York for several years, longer than I had been there. But we were both starting to feel like, we started doing more regular trips, upstate New York to go on hike or go kayaking or things like that. And then we started, we go on ski trips to Utah or things like that. And so we just started to realize how we should make that more of our default than being the place that we're going to.

**Alex Theuma** (4:02)
Why not? Makes sense. And 10 years, I mean, congrats. I actually didn't know that it had been 10 years of running Buffer. So a great achievement there, you know, in itself. And can you share a few sort of metrics, you know, so you're 10 years in, what is the size of the company?
I saw, I don't know, however many months ago that you crossed 20 million in ARR. It may have even been last year.
Yes, some metrics that I guess are all out there on the internet anyway.

**Joel Gascoigne** (4:34)
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we are just over 20 million. We actually hit reached 22 million, and now we've dipped back down to about 21 right now in the midst of the coronavirus situation. So that's where we are in terms of revenue. We're 89 people as a company, so we're kind of just working our way towards that 100 person mark, which feels very much within sight now.