BUFFER — seed deck, October/November 2011 (published by the founders on
Buffer's official SlideShare, "The slide deck we used to raise half a million
dollars"; raised $450-500K from 18 investors Dec 2011). Transcription note:
cleaned OCR transcript from slide images; statements verbatim.

Buffer.

Social, the most important trend:
"The amount a user shares today is twice the amount they shared a year ago"
— Zuckerberg's Law.
"It won't be long before Social Media Marketing will surpass SEO" — Donanza.

How do you use social to drive traffic?

Queue your updates. [product screenshot: scheduled tweets dated Oct 1-2, 2011]

Traction:
800 paying users.
$150,000 annual revenue run rate.
97% margins.
55,000 users, growing 40% per month.

Milestones:
Launched web app — January 2011.
55,000 users ($150K revenue) — October 2011.
Launch the API — October 2011.
Integrated in 50 apps — December 2011.
100,000 users ($288K revenue) — January 2012.
1 million users ($3.6M revenue) — January 2013.

Business Model:
Freemium model with consistent 2% conversion from free to paid plans.
5% churn equates to a LTV of $240 and allows us to pay up to $5 to acquire a
free user.
At 1M users, our projected revenue is $3.6M.

Social Media Landscape:
Of 200M daily tweets, 55% contain links.
4 billion items shared on Facebook per day.
Zuckerberg's Law shows exponential growth of sharing.
Traffic through social is soon to surpass traffic from search.

The effect of Buffering:
"Buffer Finds Tweet Scheduling Can Increase Clicks by 200%" — ReadWriteWeb.

A sharing standard:
6 integrations so far; in talks with Reeder, Pocket and Feedly.
We plan to become the default sharing standard in any app.

Competitive Landscape:
[quadrant: Hootsuite, Seesmic, Crowdbooster, Timely, Twuffer, AddThis,
ShareThis vs Buffer as "intelligent tweet sharing"]

Team:
Joel Gascoigne — co-founder, took the idea to revenue in 7 weeks, Masters
in CS.
Leo Widrich — co-founder, marketeer, took Buffer from 200 to 55,000 users.
Advisors: Guy Kawasaki (former Chief Evangelist of Apple), Hiten Shah
(CEO/co-founder of KISSmetrics).
Previous investors: AngelPad, Inspiration Ventures, Sierra Interwest.

founders@bufferapp.com

[Transcript revision 2, 2026-08-16: re-issued unchanged after a provider outage burned the first analysis budget; no content changes.]