#but otherwise i took care of myself entirely and always have. no advice no guidance just two failed disownings

[lupismaris]

My parents cancelled the official family gathering and I put my foot down and said I wasn't coming over on Christmas unless my brother called me himself and asked me to (because I cannot stomach being in the same space as him and my father rn) and frankly I'm glad this is a bare minimum makeshift holiday sure It be nice to have decorations up but we need to clean and get rid of shit more than we need decorations and I need a fuckin break from ppl who make me want to commit acts of violence. Gonna spend the holiday break in the woods.

[michigantomexicali-blog]

Trusting God in Infertility

I rolled my eyes as I read the words “Wait five years.” I knew by the handwriting it was my grandfather who wrote it. Instead of writing a baby name suggestion like everyone else, he wanted to give advice on when we should have kids. It’s family and I guess that’s normal. Everyone else at our wedding suggested names like Bertha, Paco, or their own name because it is such an honor to name our children after them...

I knew that once my husband and I were married it wouldn't be long before we would get pregnant. I never took birth control and we were always open to the idea that if it happened we would be happy even if it was an accident. In our first year of marriage, we did what we had to do to avoid getting pregnant. As our first anniversary came around, we started to talk about trying to have children. Confident and happy we enjoyed every moment of it. I read every book you can read before getting pregnant and asked all my friends with kids about what kinds of prenatal vitamins they took. I even began dreaming of what the nursery would look like because I was going to be pregnant soon and I wanted to be more than prepared.  

Just like someone who gets diagnosed with a sickness, never thinking it could happen to them, I never had a thought in my mind that getting pregnant would be something difficult. With my strong faith convictions, trouble getting pregnant wasn’t even on my radar. After all, in high school, my friends would always laugh and say that my babies would just drop out of me because of my wide hips.  

It’s insane that time has gone by so fast, but here we are five years later and it seems like my grandfather's suggestion became more like a prophecy. I’ve never publicly shared anything about this issue because I always believed that when the positive pregnancy test happened, when the miracle finally came, when it became a testimony not just a test, then I would share it. But I’ve simply changed my mind. So at the end of this story, you will not find out that I am pregnant because as of now there is no bun in the oven.

Not getting pregnant is the first thing in my life that I’ve had no control over. If I've had relationship issues, I fixed it. Job problems, I found a new job. Money issues, I worked it out. However, when you encounter something you can’t control and your faith seems to be challenged more than ever... it changes you. For the first time in my life, my “authority as a believer” hasn't done the trick. No matter how positive I’ve thought, how much I’ve confessed, how hard I’ve believed, I am still not pregnant.

Faith is what my entire life is built upon. If I don't have faith, I have nothing. That is the thing, I’ve seen it work so much in my life that I know it’s real and it does have power. When I was younger, if I asked for something in faith, it happened. When I asked God for a car to go to bible school, I received it without paying a dollar. I asked for my entire tuition to be paid for and weeks later, supernaturally, it was paid off. I prayed for the job I interviewed for and you guessed it, I got it. You couldn’t convince me otherwise that faith doesn’t work.    

Yet, it seems I haven't had a period in the past three years where I don’t cry. It’s like clockwork, I feel the cramps, try to fight it, hoping that it’s just an early pregnancy sign and then bam, there it is and I'm crying on the bathroom floor. This last month was just plain deceiving. I was four days late and began to think that this could be it, but it ended up just being an evil game.

Infertility is extremely difficult because of the emotional turmoil. Hopes are high every month and then they get thrown on the floor and stomped on every twenty-eight days and it is an intense roller coaster of emotions. Plus, every girlfriend who was with you trying to get pregnant together when you first started is already on their third kid. It is the most insane emotional experience I’ve ever been through.

So, when I need guidance I look to one-of-two places, the bible, and my husband. Yes, I said husband, and thank God for husbands, real men who are there with you through it all. Their friendship and love are priceless. They deserve so much just for living with us hormone-crazy women. I find myself saying things like, “I am so angry!! Baby can you make me some dinner, please.” Like I have no idea...but for now, I’ll blame my hormones.

Anyways, many people in the Bible faced circumstances that were out of their control, including infertility. Yes, as much as I believe the spike in infertility is probably something in the water, thousands of years ago women were struggling to get pregnant, including Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth. They each were getting older and there was no baby in sight. Each had their doubts, Sarah even laughed when God told her that he would give her a child. Yet, suddenly, God came through and made it happen.

It brings me to my favorite word, TRUST. It’s been one of my deepest convictions since I was a child. Trusting God is something that comes naturally to me. After years of building my faith, it is a part of who I am. I have renewed my mind in the Word of God. Believing that God will take care of me and that His plans are good has become easy. These women also had to learn to trust God. They trusted that He was faithful and that He was a giver of good gifts. You know, faith comes through hearing the Word over and over again, so if you’re looking to get more faith, keep reading the Word, going to church, and start now by confessing that you trust God no matter what and He is going to work out your situation.

Let’s take a moment to look at the sons God gave to these women because you’re going to find out that these barren women gave birth to some amazing men. Sarah’s son, Isaac, was the promised son from God to Abraham and became a foundational ancestor of the nation of Israel. Rachel and Jacob’s son, Joseph, got sold by his brothers into slavery and ended up becoming the second in command of all Egypt, saving the nation of Isreal during a seven-year famine. Hannah and Elkanah’s son, Samuel, was dedicated to the Lord and became a prophet to all Israel who then anointed King Saul and King David. Elizabeth and Zachariah’s son, John, was spoken about by Jesus using these words, “Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Matthew 11:11

It blows my mind that these women who had the same struggle that I find myself in today, had crazy world-changing, history-altering, God-given babies. We don’t know the details of their stories, but we do know that they had a desire to be moms and God fulfilled it with a bonus of having children who changed the world. I’m sure those women all shed many tears, felt discouraged, alone, and felt like life was simply unfair. I know that is how I’ve felt many times, but we have to remember that weeping only happens for a moment and joy comes in the morning.

Many women I know today who struggled through infertility are either pregnant as I write this or have already become mamas. My sister-in-law Elizabeth is now pregnant after eight years! Praise God! God cares and His sovereignty and grace are real. I don’t know when I’ll have my miracle, but I do have a testimony even if my miracle hasn’t happened yet, and it is this; that I am still here, still trusting, not turning my back on His word, and like a child, I will still believe for what I am asking for.

It is time to hold on and believe that God hears us and will answer our prayers.

-Morgan Gutierrez   

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?    How long will you hide your face from me?  How long must I wrestle with my thoughts    and day after day have sorrow in my heart?    How long will my enemy triumph over me?

 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.    Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,  and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”    and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

 But I trust in your unfailing love;    my heart rejoices in your salvation.  I will sing the Lord’s praise,    for he has been good to me.

Psalms 13 New International Version 

[awkward-and-fluffy]

Important little post for those who are still following me and wondering where I’ve gone...

I’ve obviously lost interest in Tumblr over these past couple of years. I’m not that active here anymore and a lot has been going on in my life anyhow.

If anyone wants to keep up with me on social media, I’m on Twitter the most! And I’ve actually gotten myself comfortable with doing Twitch streams as of May 2018. It feels like a great accomplishment for me to overcome most of my public speech fears through that!

Aside from getting into streaming, I managed to finish enough of my website for it to be hosted! I put a lot of money into that, but it’ll last about 2 years. :’D

Sooo...

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/WolfKat777

My Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/wolfkat7

My Website: https://wolfkatworks.com/

Sometime soon I’ll be able to complete the HTML/CSS tutorial pages for my website, but it wasn’t possible to get it launched ASAP when those pages take the longest to put together. I’m not sure when I can get them done yet, but I hope it’ll be before Tumblr completely crashes and burns... I need my old tutorials on this blog to reference back to for how I organized everything. There are lots of mistakes to fix and new screenshots to take for better lesson examples, etc.

But yeah, a lot’s been going on. I’ve been trying to search for a new job (with no luck yet), managed to reach Affiliate on Twitch by some miracle, various family issues took place, my dad had to get heart surgery, etc.

Before going to a read more, if you don’t quite want to read a big wall of text or are scared of reading any medical topics (I get that), I’ll provide my thanks and more right here.

It’s been awesome to meet all the people I have on here - mostly through Gravity Falls! Writing and replying to theories was such a freakin blast, no matter how ridiculous things would get at times. Granted, I don’t like Tumblr itself as a social media platform and community if I’m brutally honest... However, I still had a little good come from this regardless of my bitterness from my old account before this one.

To you old mutuals of mine, and some of you old pals, keep being awesome! I hope you’re doing well in life; and if not, I hope for things to improve. Fight a good fight, but be careful in picking those fights. Life’s worth living and all that cliche junk that may or may not have much affect on you as motivating advice. 

This all goes to my general base of followers too if any of them come across this post. Thank you guys for following this dumb blog and enjoying and sharing so many of my fun posts for Gravity Falls! The show is still super important to me, and my all time favorite cartoon to exist. Whether you sent asks, replied, reblogged, or simply liked, all of that was awesome in its own way. Having discussions on the series is one of the best memories I’ll have on this most often unbearable website! (I hope that doesn’t sound too insulting or generalizing about this site...)

And thank you for anyone who enjoyed the rest of my content here, and bearing with any personal ramblings I may have had on some bad days.

It’d be cool to come across anyone here again in the near future, but at some other online platform. I’ve provided my active links above, so feel free to find me elsewhere if you want.

Goodbye to you all, and have a great rest of 2019 and beyond!

This new year is also already off to a very... Surreal and terrifying start. In case you haven’t already checked my Twitter from the time of this post to see what I wrote there, I got a severe case of my rapid heartrate and ended up hospitalized rather than stuck in Urgent Care on its own. Just 3 weeks ago, I was in UC from a less severe but still terrifying rapid heart rate that woke me up at 5am and wouldn’t calm the heck down.

I know it seems weird to include this following story for my “farewell, Tumblr” post, but I think it’ll help give some interesting record of closure here. I’ve had personal posts and ramblings on this blog about my cardiac terrors and fears. I don’t recall exactly what I’ve written here, but maybe it’d be interesting for me to search for any of those posts again to kinda look back on those thoughts...

It’s been a few years since I’ve had a bad case of rapid heartrate... In fact, I remember writing about that experience back then here on my blog too. I was put on a heart monitor for only 3 days and yeah. Of course 3 days wasn’t enough to catch anything significant... So my heart issue was still freakin shrouded in mystery and only ever connected to my anxiety/panic disorder.

Welp, I was put on a heart monitor again just last week and I requested for it to last 30 days. Lo and behold, about 8 days later, my most severe case occurred and my monitor recorded a 250bpm max rate... This monitor is linked to cellular wifi thankfully, so the company got alerted of it and called my local UC to take me in and then called the house for my mom to answer and help drive me there. (Some moments before leaving home, my heartrate went back down to the 140′s or so, but still really bad and wouldn’t return to normal.)

In UC, I had to get X-Rays as well, but I have no idea what they found from ‘em? I wasn’t really told what they resulted with... I’ll have to ask sometime.

However, with everything going on and not even medication getting my heartrate back to normal, I was moved into a hospital shortly after my stay in UC. That was my first time ever being in an ambulance.

At the hospital, I got more blood tests done, more EKGs, all that stuff. There was also talk of me needing a uh... An ablation procedure. Then later that night, a cardiologist visited me and explained that I FINALLY got a confirmation on my issue. I’ve waited 10 years for answers on why my heart would be like this... Ugh. I’m relieved, but also frustrated it took that long to figure it out, y’know?

At this point, I didn’t have the name of the condition, but I was feeling more at peace when the cardiologist mentioned this condition isn’t life-threatening and doesn’t increase my risks of heart disease. The most common issue of it is how disruptive it is, and some other symptoms it can induce (dizziness,fatigue, etc.) Gosh, that cleared away so many worries and questions I had throughout these years.

But yeah, it’s something that people are just born with and it causes a faulty circuit or two in the heart giving it weird signals at times. Stuff like that. Those with the condition have a chance to never have symptoms of it, while others start showing symptoms between 11 - 50 years old. Mine started showing when I was 13, so that was... Great.

The only way to most likely treat it, is through an ablation... And that’s where things get really scary. I’ve always had nightmares about needing heart surgery, or my heart getting shot by bullets, etc. Like, that’s how bad I felt from never knowing what’s wrong with my vital organ.

My other option was medication, but it wouldn’t be guaranteed to help by itself. Afterall, I’ve had a few times in UC throughout my life where these meds didn’t help much if at all. They also figured it’d be good to get this procedure done the earlier the better, since it can be much more complicated if I were to have it done at an older age.

-big siiigh- After spending my first night there, yep, I’ve had that done. I don’t want to describe it ‘cause it was a terrifying experience, but I hope it helps in the end. I indeed had a faulty circuit they found, and they uh... Did what had to be done.

After I was sent back to my room, the cadiologist returned and gave me the name of my condition. Of ALL THINGS, it’s “Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome” or “WPW Syndrome” for short. Despite all the straight-up trauma I’ve had, I guess in a way I can kinda thank God for the bit of humor?? (For context, I developed an interest in wolves and werewolves during my teens and loving them about as much as cats...)

I was keeping my closest friends up to date on this through my phone during all this too. I kinda knew what I’d get myself into when revealing the name of my diagnosis to them... But the friendly teasing (such as “wow, so you DO have a wolf’s heart!”) cheered me up. I’m just really thankful for my friends for keeping me company even if only possible through online chat. And despite my conflicts with my mom, she stayed by me and helped me, spending nights in the hospital with me and all that stuff. I would’ve been so much more terrified and - errgh, for lack of better words - heart broken. Being all alone without someone I know being nearby during these types of things, regardless of how much I like being alone, is stressful. I would’ve otherwise only had doctors and nurses, but they’d come in and out and not always be in the room.

So, my heart needs to adjust to this, and the recovery is a little scary at times too. I’m pulling through the best I can, using guidance from my doctors. They had me stay one more night, and as of yesterday, I’ve been able to return home. Gotta spend a week relaxing and healing up, keeping up with certain medications to help, and so on.

With all that said, and for those who read this entire mess of a thing, see you all elsewhere!

[margaretbeagle]

Reflecting on 10 Years of Building Buffer

Today marks ten years since I launched the first version of Buffer. What started as a landing page to gauge interest, and then a very basic product that I worked on alone, has become so much more. Buffer is now a leading social media management platform and a team of nearly 90 people working remotely worldwide, with our own approach and culture.

Reaching this milestone means a lot for me, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on each year of the Buffer journey. As you’ll see, things have changed enormously over time, and I could not be more proud of where we are now.

2010: After getting paying customers, I shifted the focus to marketing.

I launched Buffer on November 30th, 2010. One of the things that inspired me to launch earlier than I may have otherwise, was an initiative someone started on Hacker News called November Startup Sprint. I decided to participate and committed to launching the first version of Buffer by the end of November 2010, which I only just accomplished. Something I learned from this experience is that you’ll always have additional features or fixes you want to finish before you launch, but actually putting something out there in the world is really what starts momentum.

I employed many of The Lean Startup techniques in order to validate the problem and the existence of an audience before launching. Thankfully, these steps and a healthy dose of luck resulted in some strong initial traction for the product. I had the first paying customer within four days of launch.

After the first paying customer, I took a step back, acknowledged that as a significant milestone, and decided a slight shift in focus was required. As an engineer, it’s easy to keep building, adding more features. I knew it was time to focus on marketing and further customer development. This is what led me to bring on a co-founder. It was time to keep the balance of development, marketing, and customer development with a product that had proved it was “good enough.” It was clear that there would be more people out there who would find value even at the early stage. This has been a valuable lesson I’ve tried to maintain: when the signal is there that the product is good enough, shout about it!

Read more about how I went from an idea to paying customers in seven weeks.

2011: Transitioning to working full-time on Buffer.

2011 was a year of transition for me, from contract web development work to working full-time on Buffer. Before starting Buffer, I was doing what I called “working in waves,” a method to have enough funds to work full-time on a project for a certain period of time. The idea is that you work a full-time job or contract work for a set amount of time and then work full-time on your startup idea once you have enough funds to support yourself for a set amount of time. Having tried working in waves, I would not recommend it as a long term strategy. Read my thoughts.

With Buffer, I was completely focused on hitting ramen profitability. I sensed that if I could get there, it would change everything. Ramen profitability describes a situation where you’re making just enough to pay your living expenses. For me, that first goal was £1,200 per month.

We reached ramen profitability early in 2011, and I gradually dropped the number of days of contract development work I was doing as the revenue grew. My co-founder finished his college year and had the summer free to focus entirely on Buffer. We decided to get on a plane and travel to what we thought of as Startup Mecca, San Francisco. This was, in fact, my first ever trip to the U.S., which I now call home. Later in 2011, strong revenue growth combined with a year of working on Buffer and some great education from AngelPad allowed us to raise $450,000.

2012: Becoming a fully remote company.

Becoming a fully remote company is a decision I made in 2012. During the few months I spent focused on whether to commit to Buffer being a distributed team, I sought advice from many people. I received some of the best advice from David Cancel, whom I had the chance to sit down and chat with over coffee. His key insight was that in his experience founding several companies so far, he has found that two scenarios work well, while one doesn’t work too well. He advised that we either be fully distributed or have everyone in the same office. David said that the time he had a main office with most people there and only one or two people working remotely didn’t work so well.

With this insight and further thinking, we became a fully distributed team. Here’s a screenshot from my email to the team sharing this news:

An email to the Buffer team about becoming a fully distributed company.

We immediately hired several people working remotely to quickly balance out the team from a group forming in San Francisco and ensure we were truly fully distributed. This was an immediate benefit to us, especially as a team focused on outstanding customer support since we quickly covered all time-zones. Read more about how I made the decision for Buffer to be fully remote.

Becoming fully remote didn’t mean we never met up in person, though. Over the years, we’ve found ways to incorporate annual retreats into our yearly planning and have prioritized this key time together for brainstorming, talking strategy, and setting the tone for the year ahead. See more about our past ten retreats in this post.

2013: Creating values and living by them.

In 2013, as we became a team of ten, we decided to articulate and document our company values. At the time, I knew we had already formed a strong culture, so I polled the team to ask them how they would describe it. From there, we came up with our original Buffer values.

The original ten Buffer values.

One of our more unique values, default to transparency, which is the value that Buffer is known by the most, was put to the test this same year. In late 2013, Buffer was hacked. We shared transparently and quickly with our customers and the broader public what had happened and what we were doing about it. We alerted our community to the breach before knowing the source of it, and we provided updates on our progress every few hours for the first few days. Both our community and the public responded well to this openness, reinforcing my theory at the time that bugs and downtime can be a good thing, as long as they are rare and handled with great care.

We further committed to this value by making our salaries transparent at the end of 2013, which resulted in a spike of applications for open Buffer jobs, and is a step I believe contributed significantly to growing our brand.

Check out our transparency page to see a full timeline of transparency at Buffer.

2014: Our largest acquisition offer and deciding not to sell Buffer.

In the early years, we received a number of acquisition offers. The earliest offer we had for Buffer was not long after we had started, and it felt fairly easy for us to say no simply because we felt we had much more growth ahead and wanted to see where our path would lead.

However, in 2014 we received our largest acquisition offer to date. It was a nine-figure offer from a public company, and it stopped us in our tracks and made us truly step back and reflect. For myself, my co-founder, and for most of our team with early-stage stock options grants, it would have been a life-changing outcome. An offer like that drives existential questioning, making you really think about the purpose and fulfillment of what you’re doing. Ultimately, we believed there was significantly more growth from where we were, and we have since increased revenue 6x. Beyond the growth potential, however, it was the culture and the movements we had become part of (transparency and remote work, in particular), which led us to turn the offer down and continue on our path. The most memorable advice we received during this decision process was from Hiten Shah, who asked us simply, “Are you done?”.

Money will come and go, but experiences and learning is what I define as true wealth. This is why I try to frame a decision of whether to sell around the opportunities for learning and experience in each path. I reflected on how if I sold Buffer, I would sacrifice many future learnings. I asked myself if and when I would ever have the learning opportunity I did for the years ahead from that stage of Buffer. Here’s a longer post reflecting on not selling Buffer.

I made the decision to continue learning with Buffer, and this is a decision I feel great about to this day. Instead of an acquisition, we raised $3.5 million in late 2014 with a secondary liquidity component, in part to remove the pressure to sell and help us go long. Here I am six years later, still energized and happy with my gradual return, so overall, I believe that worked out. More recently, I’ve been focused on finding ways to separate exit from liquidity for myself and the whole team. This helps us take a genuinely long-term view on the business.

2015: Exploring self-management.

In 2015, after reading Reinventing Organizations, the entire team voted and agreed to become self-managed. We reorganized Buffer into a completely flat structure. At first, this felt energizing and invigorating. There was a great sense of freedom and ownership. Over the course of a few months, things started to feel off. People were easily lost, especially those that had just joined Buffer. More experienced people often didn’t quite see a place to help out and share ideas around which direction a project could take. The amount of freedom people had, with absolutely no guidance, expectations, or accountability, was pretty overwhelming.

Our self-management setup was a partial success for customers. One of the experiments we pursued during this time was to create a team specifically aimed at launching new functionality rapidly for customers. We launched Pablo, our popular image creation product, out of this team. The main challenge we found with these types of projects is resourcing, maintaining, and improving them over time. We’ve since become more deliberate about what we choose to launch rapidly while maintaining our culture of experimentation.

We eventually decided to move away from self-management. This period will always hold a special place in my heart, though I believe ultimately we are better placed with some hierarchy and structure. It reinforced to me that it’s okay to try big experiments and to go in knowing that not all of them will work. This is a mindset we’ve kept at Buffer and has helped us continue to experiment with the way we work. This type of exploration and playfulness generally becomes harder to do as you grow larger, and the boldness, optimism, and curiosity that it requires is something that I’m committed to supporting.

2016: Launching Reply, then facing cash-flow challenges and layoffs.

Early in 2016, we launched Buffer Reply, which was the result of an acquisition and a lot of great work to adapt the product to make it feel like a Buffer offering. This was a bold move to expand beyond social media marketing and into social customer service. As a company, we had always held ourselves to a very high bar for customer service, and we found the tools out there for managing customer service on social media to be lacking. We had some success with Reply, and over the next few years, grew monthly revenue from $4k at acquisition to over $70k at its peak. Ultimately, we found that the need for customer service on social media was less widespread and didn’t develop as we imagined it may, and also found that we were spreading ourselves thin with taking on very different types of products and customer segments, so we sunset Reply in 2020. The experience of Reply increased our ambitions as a company, launched us to serving more than a single customer job, and paved the way for us to build a social engagement tool, which is coming in early 2021.

After we concluded our self-management experiment, we felt a drive to grow the team more rapidly again. We ultimately grew from 34 to 94 people. With team growth, however, comes the need for new systems, and existing approaches start to show cracks and feel ineffective. Our revenue growth, while strong, didn’t keep pace with hiring, and we found ourselves in financial challenges.

With the prospect of only five months of runway before depleting our cash reserves, we made the excruciating decision to lay off ten team members. What was more disappointing than anything was that this was totally within our control. It was all caused by the fact that we grew the team too big, too fast. We thought we were being mindful about balancing the pace of our hiring with our revenue growth, but we weren’t. One of our advisors gave us an apt metaphor for what happened: We moved into a house that we couldn’t afford with our monthly paycheck.

A chart showing our bank balance projections for 2016.

We made an important yet challenging decision to solve our financial challenges ourselves rather than raising a bridge round of funding to see us through. It was a painful process to go through, and I’ve now experienced first-hand the loss of morale, the negative impact on culture, and the erosion of trust that layoffs can cause. This is especially true for a small, tight-knit, and mission-driven team. With all of that said, I’m grateful for the personal and company growth that this enabled for us. We immediately leveled up our financial operations and set down a commitment to financial stability.

This experience led us to truly figure out sustainability at Buffer and understand how we could be around long term. I believe we’re better off as a company for this and have developed some strong financial principles for our company, which have led to us being around and self-sustaining four years on. I’m proud of the results we have to show for these efforts. We’ve been profitable every quarter since we made these layoffs; eighteen straight quarters of profitability.

2017: Recommitting to a single path, stabilizing the company, experiencing co-founder conflict, and the lows of burnout.

2017 was perhaps the hardest year of the Buffer journey so far. After a difficult 2016, I focused on stabilizing the company, mending the erosion of trust with the team, and charting a clear, singular, and enduring direction for the company going forward. In the midst of this, significant conflict developed between myself and my co-founder, and several investors became involved in the disputes. This contributed to some of the lowest points of my career and experiencing severe burnout.

In the earlier part of the Buffer journey, we were lucky to have it all: great growth, funding on fantastic terms, building a generous, positive, inclusive culture, and maintaining a lot of individual freedom. Over time, some of these things started to feel like trade-offs, and we started to debate our path. Rapid growth vs. freedom, focus on culture vs. product, performance vs. nurturing. I don’t fundamentally believe these things must be at odds, but in late 2016, it felt that way to all of us. My co-founder and I started to increasingly fall on different sides of these choices. What was once a beautiful balance of complementary strengths and opinions felt like constant misalignment and mixed messages to the team. After many attempts at finding common ground, we agreed we had grown apart and developed differing visions. In early 2017, my co-founder and our CTO both moved on from Buffer.

After this significant change, I focused on stabilizing the company for the team and in terms of our financials. I articulated a clear path for the company focused on sustainable growth, product quality, and an empowering company culture. We had great revenue growth, and I made a decision to pause hiring for most of 2017 in order to build our profitability. We went from burning $30-150k per month in early 2016 to consistently generating more than $300k in monthly profit in 2017.

After an initial amicable parting and starting to meet as friends rather than co-workers, we started to open up about lingering unsaid frustrations. With this, resentment started to grow between my co-founder and I, specifically around the timing and scale of liquidity he could expect. Admittedly, as the CEO of an 85+ person company just recently coming out of layoffs and significant leadership change, this wasn’t my top focus. All of this led to high stress, low energy and capacity, negativity, and stubbornness. This also drove challenges in my relationship with my partner, Jess. I’m happy to say we got through it and got married in 2019.

Throughout all of this, I can look back and see that while I was exercising and keeping myself in good shape, as well as feeling optimistic about the future of Buffer, it was adrenaline that was carrying me forward. By the spring of 2017, the company felt much more stable, and the adrenaline was no longer needed. As soon as the adrenaline subsided, my body and mind could suddenly feel what it had worked through. That’s when burnout hit me, and I felt unable to function effectively. With great support from my leadership team, I took a six-week break to recharge and came back much better equipped to take on the rest of the year.

Read my full experience with burnout here.

2018: Spending $3.3 Million buying out investors.

After recommitting to a path of long-term sustainability in 2017, I had conversations with our main venture capital investors, and it became clear that our choice of path was not a great fit for the investment. Thankfully, we had been open about this possibility when we raised the funding back in 2014, and so we were able to open up conversations about a way to move forward. These discussions were challenging and uncomfortable, but pushing ahead with them allowed us to ensure Buffer was set up to run independently in the long-term.

These discussions, and over a year and a half of profitability, resulted in our ability to spend $3.3 Million buying out our VC investors. This was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in the Buffer journey so far. This was a key inflection point for Buffer that put us truly on a path of sustainable, long-term growth, and we’ve been better off for the significant increase in alignment in our shareholder base. I’m grateful to our VC investors for being open to this solution and to our many remaining investors who are excited about this unusual path.

A timeline of funding history. 

At times, this move towards stability and setting ourselves up for the future has felt like a slow journey and has drawn focus away from customers, which I have found painful. With that said, this is foundational work on the core of the company — ownership — and has set us up to be able to be more customer-focused and have less distractions going forward. Additionally, it has helped us to maintain and continue to craft a company culture that puts people over profit, something I believe will pay dividends for years to come. With the benefit of hindsight, these decisions have driven long-term benefits for Buffer. For example, we figured out how to be profitable and sustainable, and as a result, we were better set up for unknown future events like the impact of COVID-19 and the global pandemic on our customers, team, and finances.

2019: Creating balance and setting myself and Buffer up to scale sustainably.

2019 was a different year for me in many ways. On the personal side of things, I established a routine living in Boulder, I got married, and refocused on hobbies like skiing. This was the year that I really worked on integrating my work and personal lives, rather than taking the early-stage mentality of sacrificing my personal life, relationships, and hobbies in order to spend more time and energy on work. While we had become financially sustainable, I truly believe this personal change made it sustainable for me to keep operating as CEO in the long-term.

At Buffer, after two eventful and foundation-building years for the company itself, I decided to turn this thinking to my role. Something that clicked for me towards the end of 2018 was that I would significantly benefit from setting up a support system around myself. Without an active co-founder, it became that much more critical that I have other types of support to fill that gap. I decided to take a new approach this time, putting together a group of people rather than relying on a single person. In late 2018, I brought on a new Executive Assistant and tasked her with helping me to form this support network, which I decided would include a coach, a financial advisor, and regularly connecting with other founders. In addition, I was regularly meeting with a therapist since mid-2017. By the end of 2019, this support system was fully established, and I am confident this group has made me a better leader over time.

2019 also marked the beginning of starting to reflect on my role, and the initial step I took towards the end of the year was to make a decision to hire a Product leader. This was the final area of the company I chose to fully let go of, and we recently brought on a great CPO to lead us and level up our product strategy, quality, and operations.

2020: Building a resilient company and taking a step back to think about purpose.

We are almost at the end of 2020, and I think calling this a tough year would be an understatement for many. This year our focus was on building a resilient company.

I started the year traveling and taking some time off in Thailand and New Zealand. As part of this, I had a chance to step back and start to reflect on what we had achieved and where I may want to take the company next. A level of clarity started to emerge about the type of customer, and type of company, that I feel energized to work towards.

Of course, by the end of February, COVID-19 was taking hold and already starting to impact many countries around the world. We were lucky at Buffer, as a fully distributed team with several people in Asia, that we had an early warning, and it became clear quickly that this would be a global challenge. We canceled our upcoming company retreat to Greece and start to focus on how to get the company through this period as unscathed as possible. Our mantra for the year became resilience, with a focus on people over profit and mental well being. A key decision I made was that I wanted to get through the year accruing the least debt possible in terms of impact on the team, issues such as burnout, customer satisfaction, and our financial position. We set up a COVID-19 customer assistance program, reduced some of our performance criteria and deadline focus, and implemented a 4-day workweek pilot.

This year, we experienced the worst customer churn we’ve ever seen at Buffer as thousands of our small business customers struggled to adapt and survive. We saw a consistent decline in revenue from mid-March to mid-June, and throughout that period, we crafted countless new projections and scenarios to ensure we could emerge in a strong position. Thankfully, the decline eased off, and since mid-June, we’ve seen modest growth.

With the financial impact of the pandemic stabilizing, I was able to turn back to some of the reflections I had around Buffer’s purpose and my CEO role. I worked with my coach and arrived at clarity that what we’ve always been focused on at Buffer is helping small businesses to succeed and do good along the way by providing tools to grow and serve an audience and inspirational content to rethink how businesses are built. As for my role, I’ve realized that the next key evolution is in truly reflecting on the work that energizes me versus the work that drains me. I love to focus on the high level of bold vision and strategy and the details around customer experiences and our culture. The in-between of operations and keeping the train running on time is less fun for me. I’ve been shifting my role, and Caro, our Chief of Special projects and someone I’ve now worked with on Buffer for over eight years has been stepping into operations to give us the best long-term outcomes.

One of our all-hands meetings.

It’s been powerful to take a step back and reflect on ten years of building a company. Looking back, there are a few additional observations I want to share.

In the early days, it’s easy to treat a startup as a sprint, but it’s really a marathon. It’s vital to pace yourself and take care of yourself. Regular rest is a necessity, and I’m going to continue to work towards incorporating rest and true vacations into my annual cycle. Additionally, as with life, there are seasons to a company. There have been stages of growth, market changes, and role evolutions. There are always periods with different focuses, and it is a continual journey towards ideal equilibrium.

I’ve learned that it’s hard to grow without compromising, and after doing so, you might have to work to find your purpose again. This is an example of the hard work it takes to create something enduring. If you are to be successful long-term, you have to take time to reflect and rediscover your passion, and sometimes make some bold changes to get back on track.

I’ve been fortunate and privileged and have achieved more than I could ever have dreamed of. I’m proud that Buffer has reached the 10-year mark and that with the help of many people, I’ve created a company that gives meaningful employment to over 85 people across the world. We’re far from perfect and still have much to improve and learn, but there’s a time to catch your breath and say, “we’ve created something awesome.” We have many people on the team who have been part of this wild ride for six, seven, even eight years now, and this blows my mind. It’s a significant part of any person’s life to spend working on something, and I couldn’t be more grateful to those people.

As I look ahead to 2021, while I’ve learned that it never gets easier, it’s always interesting, and there is never a dull week. My admiration for long-term companies has grown significantly. I find myself fascinated by companies that exist for decades and even more so by founders who find a way to keep evolving, increasing their ambition, and remaining energized.

I’m excited to continue on this path of long-term sustainability and thankful to have an incredible team to work with, thousands of happy customers, and a foundation of profitability. It has felt liberating to have a structure that allows us to think in terms of years rather than quarters. I’m ready to dig in for another decade and see the heights we can reach and the value we can provide.

Whether this is the first post of mine you’ve read, you’ve been following along since the beginning, or you’re somewhere in between, thank you for taking the time to read this as I reflect on this big milestone in Buffer’s history. I’m so thankful for the incredible community and customers we have around us that let us continue to do what we do every year.

Reflecting on 10 Years of Building Buffer published first on https://improfitninja.weebly.com/

[anguianobrodan90]

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[dragon-age-my-beloved]

Me: "What I do with my relationships is not a burden you need to bare. It is no ones but my own. Although I love that you care about me to do it without asking, I don't wish you to invest yourself in me in a way that hurts you.

I talk with others about my social problems because I need to reflect off others that I am responding appropriately, not for them to actually go out of their way to help me. I seek understanding and emotional guidance more than physical direction. More akin to "I understand that you are upset, I would be as well. You dont deserve that/you reacted inappropriately" rather than "get rid of him/ your better off not doing this/ if you want to be happy you need to do this" But no matter what if someone is to provide me with advice I dont just throw it out, I mull over it. But I mull over it until I am ready to act on it. I have been considering getting rid of Ryan for months. And I know it is the right thing to do. But the fact of the matter is I'm not ready yet and that's a decision I need to make, not someone else's. I work at a slower pace than others when it comes to understanding. I always have. My need to understand isnt an external one, its internal. I dont need to know where the other person is coming from in negative relationships. The things I need to understand are "Once I get rid of ryan how much do I want to avoid him? How would I even go about doing it? Around how long will it take for me to feel okay? Am I emotionally stable enough to go through with this action?" And honestly losing William then directly having to deal with ryan and now how much stress I am under currently, I know if I threw things away with him right now it could be alot worse than if I waited for when I was better.

I know you arent the type to let your emotions out unless you need to. On the other side I have also never been one to pry because I see it as disrespectful. I am very upfront and forward with my emotions because I have had too many friendships end because someone wouldnt communicate with me. So I compensated by drowing them in my own feelings hoping it would encourage them to open up as well. It doesn't always work but I have honestly had difficulty finding another way to do it when I can't understand social queues.

I dont look people in the eye unless I am completly at ease or I'm in a job interview. I didnt know Nick's eye color until 11th grade despite knowing him since kindergarten, and that's only because people were talking about it. My tone of voice comes out wrong almost all the time. And with that so do my words, though I have gotten better with those in the written form. I have been told numerous times that my tone of voice is disrespectful or makes me appear to others as angry. When in reality it usually starts to happen because I'm not paying EXTREME attention to it. If it helps, I have been told that my facial expressions tend to express what I'm really trying to convey. I'm obsessive, very prone to addiction. I am either rigid or I am tapping or doing some sort of thing to make noise. I dont relax fully around people, physically or mentally.

Not often will acknowledgment of my actions lead me to being upset. If you can be upfront and say "macy, the way you said that hurt my feelings" I will 100% add it to my list of things I shouldnt do. Because the only reason I have gotten this far in life is from people telling me. I don't catch on to things. I cant read a room very well. I can't do a lot of things involving interaction properly. I can tell you I am trying to get better at it, but it's one of those things that I need told to me because I HONESTLY cannot tell. Every social interaction I'm in is a guess unless I have been through the same exact conversation a million times.

I'm not saying this to try and guilt you or anything bad like that. I just came to the realization that I don't think I ever told you about it. This has been a serious work in progress my entire life and it's not just you who has had to deal with it. I'm 99.99% sure it's the actual the reason all of my friends from high school dont speak with me anymore.

It probably isnt anything that will help my case, but this is honestly the best I have ever been with communication. And that's probably partially why it is only coming up now. I used to be a lot worse. I make people upset and can't tell. I constantly am freaking out over people because I'm scared everytime I talk to someone I'm messing up. And when I become closer with someone I start to relax around them and it becomes an issue again.

You are under no obligation to have to adhere to these issues I have. But for a good friendship with me they do need to be taken into consideration. Because it's not something that will go away once I "find myself" or whatever. There is no medication that makes this better, there is no growing out of it, it is constant hard work for me every day to make sure I'm using the "right" words or whatever else is being taken into consideration at the time. If you think it would be easier for you, you can give me signs that you are retreating or something of the like if you are comfortable disclosing that to me. It wouldn't be just you, I want to work to have a better communication style with you.

I never want my friends to feel uncomfortable or upset because of something I've done or said. I care very deeply about people. More than I have ever shown any of you. And I know it's bad of me, but I am trying really really hard to get to the point where I can genuinely express it. It took me a year and a half of being at college to actually feel like the people around me were my actual friends. And only in the past year have I truly believed that they loved me back. I have been trying to express it more since then, but it's difficult.

To express my love I try to tell people. I take photos and videos of my friends because I want them to know I want to remember them. I try to match their emotions that they are telling me about so they wont be alone in them. When my friend Wanda told me she appreciated written word I wrote her a few letters. It took a few months but me and lydia struggled with it a lot. But we are now at a great place, when she is upset I give her space until she wants to talk and then I physically comfort her. She knows when I'm upset I hate being touched and I just want to run the course of my emotions to let myself fully feel it before I'm calm. This usually includes ranting, not speaking at all about it, or just crying a lot.

For us both to feel comfortable in a friendship together you need to communicate with me. No maybe, you NEED to. Otherwise your emotions will boil over and it will all feel over whelming and there will be nothing I can do about it. I would like to work on it with you. It took a little while but me and lydia worked through much much worse than this and now she is one of my closest friends.

You told me not long ago that I was one of your best friends, and I told you that you were one of mine. I honestly don't think a rough patch of communication during a pandemic is unheard of. But if you are willing to open yourself to me now with your honesty as you have, I hope you can continue doing so at more regular intervals. Possibly check once a week if there is something we have done that has bothered the other and we can address it in a stress free environment. If it is more regulated and expected I feel it might possibly limit the amount of stress you feel addressing it, and I can limit the amount of stress I put you under by springing my emotions constantly which I know can be overwhelming to others.

I know I am intense, it is the word I get most often attributed to me. But it's because I am a very focused person, just not always on the right thing. I get completely absorbed into people, into staring at a spot on the wall for 20 minutes, those stupid slot machines at my senior prom that made me realize I should never go to a casino, or most often just on what is happening inside my own head. It's never ill intended, it's just the way I have always been and how my mind works. I hope you can understand."

Me: I just really hope this isn't one of the last things I say to them. Probably one of my most disliked things is to bare my soul for nothing. Stuff like this is why I hardly ever fight for people. Because they are probably better off anyways. I hate... I hate that I am like this. I'm so exhausted, all the time. I just want it to stop.