April 2025 Shareholder Update

Hi there,

Following our strongest Q1 to date, we saw that momentum continue into April. In April we achieved $22M in ARR and ended the month with our 12th company retreat. We’ve recently been hitting our stride and we’re building Buffer with greater clarity, tighter alignment, and a deeper sense of purpose around serving creators and small businesses. Read on for the April numbers and my reflections.

Notes:

• April was our second-highest month ever for new paid customers, with over 5,410 new subscriptions.
• Our strong results in MRR, Customer and MAU growth while seeing ARPU slightly decline show that we are succeeding in growing primarily by serving and gaining more customers. This is a key part of our strategy we have been working towards realizing.
• You might notice cash balance has declined, this was due to a share repurchase which I share more about below.
• We closed April with a net loss of $33,656. This was expected due to our annual team retreat expenses. It’s worth noting that last year, in the month we had our retreat, we saw a loss of $262,577. The significantly reduced loss while retreat costs have remained roughly constant shows our strong profitability in 2025.
• Year-to-date profit is strong at $329,259. We expect to be profitable on a monthly basis for the rest of 2025.

Note-worthy updates and reflections

Annual Retreat in Türkiye

In April, we held our 12th company retreat, this time in Antalya, Türkiye. Fifty-one weeks of the year, we work together across 49 cities in 21 countries. To get to spend a week in the same place is very special, and this retreat hit a particularly high note of how tight-knit, high trust and effective this team feels right now. Our results speak to how well this team is operating, and while we were spending the week together we celebrated a new milestone of crossing $22M in ARR. The themes I had in mind for this retreat were connection, celebration, and collaboration and I believe it checked all of those boxes and more. We're all returning home with full hearts, greater alignment, and fresh energy to take Buffer to entirely new heights together.

Celebrating $22M ARR Milestone

We had the fortunate timing that we crossed $22M in ARR while at retreat, and so we celebrated in person in Türkiye. For context, it took us seven months to go from $18M to $19M, four months to go from $19M to $20M, two and a half months to reach $21M, and now we’ve achieved $22M two months later. Around the same time we reached a new ARR milestone, we crossed 20% YoY growth in ARR/MRR. This is a very strong growth rate and a significant milestone for the team, especially given that our profit margin sits at around 10% most months. We’re also fast-approaching Buffer’s highest ARR to date and I expect to be sharing that celebration with you all soon.

Coming up on our Roadmap

We have two key initiatives which have been longer projects and are starting to reach significant milestones. The first is Community, our rebuilt engagement tool. This will allow users to manage and engage with comments and mentions across platforms, build their community/audience, and seamlessly create new content through the process of responding to comments. Second is a new Public API, which will allow users and 3rd party developers to build powerful new functionality to integrate more seamlessly with Buffer. Both of these have recently gone into Alpha, which is our internal testing step. In the coming months we will move them both to the Beta phase where we start working closely with customers to shape and refine them towards full launch.

Cash Balance impacted by Share Repurchase

Our cash balance declined by ~$1M in April due to a strategic repurchase of shares from our largest investor. We repurchased roughly 9% of the company through this transaction, and the move aligns with our long-term approach to sustainable ownership and simplifying our cap table. Our return to growth and profitability has been defined by going our own unique path, going down-market to serve customers and taking a long-term mindset. To continue this path, we are intentionally managing ownership of Buffer so that we do not have short term growth pressure. In the long-term, we are confident our strategy will lead to compounding strong results. Despite this one-time transaction, we continue to maintain a healthy cash position and are on a steady path to rebuild our bank balance over the coming months. The repurchase was structured as one payment now, and the rest converted to a promissory note (i.e. debt). We expect to make a second repayment within the next 12 months.

Thank you for being part of our journey and for your continued support. As always, reply if there’s anything on your mind.

– Joel, Founder CEO