"In September, we crossed $19M in ARR at Buffer… for the second time.
It's been a journey, to say the least. We first crossed $19M in ARR in September 2018. It's hard to believe that's six years ago.
To be declining for multiple years is demoralizing and exhausting. But I always planned to build a long-term business and was determined to lead us back to thriving, so I remained optimistic despite the fact it took some searching to find the path to new growth. The first time we crossed $19M, the writing was on the wall for our looming decline. Pace of product improvement and innovation had stalled; we were debilitated by tech debt we didn't yet know how to manage. We succumbed to squeezing revenue out of existing customers, and were already seeing a steep decline in new paying customers.
This time around, we are moving faster and more boldly than we have in years, and we've re-centered ourselves around growing by serving more customers and continually adding real value, rather than through price increases and short-term growth hacks. There's no doubt we will run into challenging cycles again in our future. I'm confident we'll find our way through those too. To me, that's a natural part of building a long-term business. From here – onwards to $20M, again." - Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO of Buffer in his Q3 2024 Reflections (?? in ??).