Help, or at least do no harm: rolling out features to existing users, with Buffer Staff PM Brandon Green

Nikki Elbaz (00:00) Does your Claude know how to upload files? Because I don’t know about you, but every time I ask Claude to do any task that includes uploading something to some site, it wimps out on me. “I can’t upload files. The tab is open for you to drive. It’s just two clicks from you.” That may be true. When I asked Claude to handle my content scheduling, it really was just two clicks to upload my videos to LinkedIn. But the entire reason that I was handing over my scheduling was so that I didn’t have to be context switching and interrupting my deep work to do tiny little tasks like clicking twice. After one too many shouty caps responses from me, Claude recommended I hook up a social scheduler to solve this problem. And despite already having an old Hootsuite account and Sprout Social being a former client, I chose Buffer. Buffer won my account because of one reason, something that has always fascinated me: employee-led content. But wait, before I go any further, I just told you an acquisition story. And this is a retention show. If you’ve been here before, that’s actually a hint for you to guess which change flag we are diagnosing today. Because there is one flag that can hit you at both acquisition and retention. Need another hint? We have featured this flag twice already, which actually isn’t surprising because it is a common flag in post-growth companies. Oops, that was actually a third hint. Okay, okay, enough hints. Either you got it or you’ll just have to keep listening. And I say listening, not watching, because if you are usually a video watcher of Churn Flags, you probably noticed that the video is pretty placeholder. Gotta love tech, we lost the video recording. But the audio survived and it is worth the blank screen. If you are tempted to click over to another YouTube click, don’t. This episode has some good surprises. And hey, think of it as your analog time. Maybe it’ll even be relaxing. Close your eyes, focus, maybe even take some notes.

Nikki Elbaz (02:02) All right, all the poor new people who have no idea what’s going on here, let’s tell them how this show works. Every episode, I hand my guests one real piece of customer feedback: a three-star review, a Reddit rant, a puzzling survey response. And sometimes the guest brings the feedback to us, like today, where Brandon brings a usage metric from his Mixpanel. Together, we trace this feedback or metric back to what I call change flags, the shift underneath the data that tells you that your user has started reevaluating how you fit into their life. There are nine changes that cause reevaluation. Three happen when you change your product, three when something shifts in your user’s life, and three when something shifts in the market at large. Catch one late and the user just slips away. No complaint, no warning, gone. Catch it in real time and that same moment flips. They go deeper, they upgrade, they add seats or usage that they didn’t even know they needed. Same flag, two outcomes, and obviously we’re aiming for the second. We end off the episode with a theoretical experiment that we build live to address the change flag. Or in this episode, our guests will show us what they have actually built and how it’s working for them. I’m Nikki Elbaz, bringing 15 years of SaaS marketing to these experiments. Welcome to Churn Flags. If you want to dig into all nine change flags, last week’s episode covered the entire framework. And if you are puzzled by your retention rates, and if you want to diagnose your own flags with the world’s coolest quiz – okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but it actually is exceptionally cool – you could find it at nikkielbaz.com/quiz. The results page runs you head to head with a composite of your competitors, line items what each flag is costing you, and even gives you a ninety-day recovery plan. That’s nikkielbaz.com/quiz.

Nikki Elbaz (03:46) Our guest today is Brandon Green, who is a staff product manager at Buffer. And if all you know about Buffer is that they are a social media scheduler, you are in for a ride. Buffer’s been around for about 15 years. They hit 10 million ARR in just five and a half years. And then twenty million in another three. And then they slid down, and it took them another six years to get back to twenty. They’re at twenty-five now, and they got there in just fifteen months. That is a trajectory of real grit and real creativity. They are boots on the ground and their build-in-public culture is team-wide. We’ll get into that in a minute. I already started teasing you about it in the intro. But first, we gotta start with our feedback, or rather, our metric.

Brandon Green (04:26) We launched this templates feature sometime mid last year. And single-digit percent of customers ever actually even saw that templates were there, ever went to the templates page to actually go use a template for a post. And the whole idea of templates was to help users get over the cold start problem. If you don’t know what to write, here are some formats you could use, a whole topic idea. And there’s obviously a lot that we can do to continue to invest in that feature, but you could say the same thing about things like community, things like our analytics offering. We realized, both internally and what we were seeing with our customers, even customers who pay us a lot of money, many people would just use the product as a social media scheduler and that’s it. And not really see all of the other features that we’ve been building. And we realized that quite a bit of the product was just not very discoverable.

Nikki Elbaz (05:11) You were looking at your usage metrics and you were seeing that you were not getting the feature adoption that you were hoping for on these features that you poured time and energy into and could really help your users get their outcome. Not just, okay, this will help them upgrade. This will help them with their outcome. So you took that usage and you said, we need to build something for it.

Brandon Green (05:30) The home screen came out of this disconnect between all of this value we believed we were creating, we were excited to talk about, but our usage metrics for all those secondary features didn’t really reflect that at all.

Nikki Elbaz (05:42) I’m thinking which flag it is. And I think it’s the perception flag. Like you mentioned, people think Buffer is a scheduler, and you have so many other capabilities where you do so much more. And I’ve seen that myself and I’m sure all your users are seeing that as well.

Brandon Green (05:55) Yeah, that feels right. The market data that we operate off of really supports that. Social media is highly commoditized around scheduling, and we’ve done a lot of work to add more features, add more capabilities, add more value to just offer more. Perception is aligned with some of the things that we tried to combat with Home and just a bunch of the other things that we’ve done – whether it’s “Buffer is only a scheduler,” or “Buffer has lackluster features to complement its scheduling strengths.”

Nikki Elbaz (06:23) Here’s another reason I think this is a perception flag. Remember I told you there’s a flag that can hit you at acquisition and retention? Listen to the rest of my story about joining Buffer.

Nikki Elbaz (06:33) I have been basically only using LinkedIn. So I have just been scheduling my content directly in the platform. Then I was having Claude schedule posts, and it kept hitting walls with uploading video and uploading files. And it was like, we should use a social scheduler. And I was like, okay, I’m going with Buffer, which made no sense because I have a Hootsuite account from years ago when I was doing other platforms. And Sprout Social was a client. So why would I choose Buffer? Because you guys have been showing up in my LinkedIn feed, your whole team. It’s the coolest thing ever to see. And I love how everyone has their own voice and their own content and their own angle. And it’s funny because Claude was the reason that I started, but I actually went in and was poking around myself. And the home screen was beautiful. And I also saw so many things I was so surprised about. I’m like, I’m never gonna become a paying user. I’m just a single person using a single platform. I’m not their use case. They’re not even gonna be happy that I’m joining. And all of a sudden I’m seeing all these paid features that I’m like, huh, this looks interesting.

Brandon Green (07:37) That’s great. Thank you for sharing that backstory. It’s helpful to know. We call it internally the team of creators strategy – I guess clearly worked for you. The idea that our own team is brand advocates and employee advocates. And we just really like talking about Buffer and the things that we’re doing outside of Buffer as well. And it’s also just, in the simplest form, a great way to pressure test our own usage of the product. I use Buffer almost entirely myself to handle everything I do on social media. I’ve actually deleted almost all the social media apps from my phone and just use the Buffer iOS app as an extreme test of that.

Nikki Elbaz (08:11) There is so much that I love about this, and I highly encourage you to follow as many of the Buffer team members as you can because they will make your feed a happy place. There is so much value in the content. I learn so much from them, both from the actual content and from their team culture, and of course about Buffer itself, which is useful for me as a user. But what I find so cool about employee-led content is not that it’s an acquisition play. That’s obvious, right? What’s incredible is that it actually gives the team more autonomy and creative freedom, and that actually overflows into their product work.

Brandon Green (08:43) And something like the home screen actually evolved out of a bit of that thinking, not just internally, but thinking about what are the things that our users are excited to do with Buffer. A lot of people just chalk up Buffer to being just a social media scheduler. We’re the affordable option in terms of social media scheduling. And we actually do offer quite a bit of depth. There’s this whole community feature, which is around managing your comments and who in your audience is engaging with you.

Nikki Elbaz (09:10) I was so excited to see that. I was like, wow, because the LinkedIn notifications are so confusing and distracting. And I never catch up on my comments. And all of a sudden it’s just like, here’s all the comments you didn’t respond to. And I’m like, yes, thank you!

Brandon Green (09:23) Yeah. And obviously the beauty of it is, if you do decide to explore another channel like Threads or Bluesky, it’s a unified inbox, so you can manage it all in one place. We just rolled out a total revamp of our insights and analytics tool set. And we are still the affordable option. You can make full use of Buffer on six bucks a month with one channel, or 12 bucks a month with two.

Nikki Elbaz (09:43) That signup story I just told you, it’s the version of the change flag we are most familiar with. We usually treat perception as a top-of-funnel problem. Prospects think a brand is XYZ, so it’s marketing’s job to change perception to ABC so that good-fit prospects even consider the brand an option. But growth and product need to work on perception too, because when there’s a perception flag, even paying customers are at risk. In Buffer’s case, Brandon said there were customers paying a lot of money and using it as just a scheduler, despite the robust feature suite. This outdated picture of Buffer was limiting what customers actually used it for. Those accounts were already sold. They don’t need marketing to work on them. They need growth and product to work on them. They’re in the product. And that is the solve. Meet the users where they are.

Brandon Green (10:33) The home screen was predominantly intended to, from the get-go, make it clear to new users signing up for Buffer – regardless of what type of creator or what kind of business you are, with its social media presence you have to manage – this is a place where you can ideally get out to everything that you can do with Buffer. Comments that you have coming into your inbox that you might not even realize we are surfacing to you. Template ideas, and ideally those templates would get more and more personalized over time. A reminder of your posting schedule, or draft posts that you started writing and forgot about from two weeks ago. So it was just a way to bring little snippets of these features together into one place and then serve as a jumping-off point to all those places. What does it mean to manage your social media presence or grow an audience? There’s really no definition of success there. It depends on what social media channels you care about, what metrics matter on those channels. You might be starting your journey and the name of the game for you at the moment is just consistency. Whereas a much more established or even a highly active marketing agency managing the social presence for brands has very specific and minute metrics that they’re looking to optimize for. And there’s value in meeting the user where they’re at. And we didn’t really have a way of doing that. The home screen was trying to bring a little bit of each of the things that could matter to you to the surface, whether it’s the weekly pulse, which is just a snippet of some high-level metrics for what’s going on with your social media, as a jumping-off point for that marketing agency to dive into much deeper metrics. But it’s also a good way to serve up to the user who’s just starting out, like, I actually posted five times in the last week and I didn’t really think about it. That’s really great. Can I do that again next week? And then you can start a posting streak, which is something we also surface to you on the homepage. And what are some things you can do if you want to keep the habit alive? Well, you have some comments you can reply to. Maybe that’ll inspire some new posts. So it’s really trying to hit on all of the possible things that could keep you going. That’s led to some really interesting momentum. We were kind of flat for a while on monthly active users growth. And not exclusively the home screen, but we’re starting to see this really nice correlation with monthly active users increasing, the usage of these ancillary features I mentioned growing, all just by the nature of launching this home screen.

Nikki Elbaz (12:51) This is the work that I do. Brandon called it a disconnect. All the value his team was creating, and usage numbers that just didn’t reflect it. Most post-growth teams have a disconnect like this somewhere – usually somewheres, plural. My Change Flag Sprints trace those gaps back to the moments of reevaluation, and then we build the fix. Each sprint, we pick the flag that’s costing you the most, trace it back to the shift underneath it, and build and ship the experiment that takes it down. Sprints are best fit for SaaS companies past fifty million in ARR, where retention and expansion are your lowest-hanging fruit. Get started at nikkielbaz.com/sprints.

Nikki Elbaz (13:26) So far we’ve touched a lot on new customers, welcoming them in and helping them see which features they can use to suit their workflows to help them hit their outcomes. Existing customers – have you seen adoption pick up on those for existing customers? Have existing customers given you any feedback? What’s going on with the existing customers?

Brandon Green (13:45) When we launched Home, we made it the default new landing page for new users. But with existing users, we didn’t want to force a change. We have longstanding users. Buffer is like a 15-year-old company, and we have a lot of users who have gotten very accustomed to what we call our Publish view, the main area where you create, schedule, publish, manage content in Buffer. But what we introduced was a setting that you can now choose which default landing experience you want, either the Publish view or Home. We see roughly 10 to 12,000 users, depending on the month, that were existing users prior to the launch of Buffer Home, going to Buffer Home after having introduced it. I can’t think of the exact percentage of monthly active users off the top of my head, trying to account for the increase in signups, but it’s a non-trivial percentage of our monthly active user base that are going there. But what I also don’t want to do is force users to make significant behavioral changes if they’re perfectly happy using the product that they are using. So we made this conscious decision to just do no harm and give the option. We do also flag in the product when we launched it. There’s a little coach mark pop-up that shows up that informs the user that there is now a home screen and that they can change to it as their default. It’s not like we just left that as a passive setting. That seemed to have helped kind of drive some adoption of existing users as well.

Nikki Elbaz (15:04) That’s cool. And then have you seen that those existing users have adopted the additional features? Have you seen a lift from that?

Brandon Green (15:10) A small lift, not as much as we’ve seen of new users coming in and getting the full feature set off the bat. And that’s not terribly surprising to me, just based on what we decided to do and the goals and expectations of each cohort. But we have seen a small lift in users who have discovered Home, been prompted to click on it, and they’re like, I see comments here. I didn’t really know what that community sidebar was. We’ve had some great feedback come in, being like, I love this, I didn’t know that this was a thing, now it’s a thing. We’ve also obviously had the small amount of customers being like, I don’t know why this screen is here, this is distracting, get me back to Publish. And then either me or one of our wonderful customer advocates will be like, no worries, that’s a setting you can change back if you want. One of the things that I’m very grateful for is that we do have quite an active customer base who’s very comfortable giving us direct feedback. Makes it helpful to make some of these decisions, like the do no harm one I just mentioned, where it just felt clearly like the right move to not force users to change their behavioral patterns just because we wanted to introduce a home screen.

Nikki Elbaz (16:12) Do you have plans to get rid of the toggle and push the home screen completely?

Brandon Green (16:16) That’s a good question. As of right now, there are no plans. And I don’t know that it necessarily makes sense to remove that, if anything, just because, again, that spirit of flexibility that we want to bring to the platform. I mentioned we even considered adding all of the other major areas of Buffer to that default setting menu. Because ultimately, again, different users are going to have different needs for social. Someone who really does want to manage their entire life cycle might get a lot of value out of the home screen. But then if a user really just wants to use Buffer for a comments inbox, or a social listening feature as we build out our social listening features, why not just give them direct access to the community tab or the insights tab? And I think offering that choice is valuable. It’s something that I don’t think enough products out there do in the spirit of being opinionated. I think there’s a way to be opinionated with aspects of your product design, like the visual design or how you decide to structure your navigation, while also offering a lot of flexibility without making your product feel too complex. That sort of balance between those different tensions is what we’re really trying to nail as far as a sweet spot.

Nikki Elbaz (17:20) The new home screen takes down the perception flag because it puts the fix in front of everyone. Except Buffer didn’t want to put it in front of everyone. Forcing change on longstanding users, even if it means taking down a change flag, is not great for the relationship or for habit-related usage. And if you’re damaging the relationship or inhibiting usage, that’s not exactly going to improve churn or increase expansion. That’s just giving with one hand and taking with the other. Sure, this intention has a price, but giving existing users the option still shows them that the home screen exists. And so it still erodes the old perception a bit. Maybe not as much, but for Buffer, that is worth the trade-off. It is worth keeping their long-term customers comfortable. New users get the home screen by default because they’re not used to anything else. And hey, if you saturate the greater market with a shifted perception, eventually it seeps into your existing customer base too.

Nikki Elbaz (18:11) I’m curious. I don’t remember seeing any segmentation when I signed up for Buffer. Remind me, was there segmentation?

Brandon Green (18:16) So we do have an onboarding flow. It’s actually relatively recent. We launched it actually just before this home screen, about a month prior. And it’s a simple three- or four-step flow. We ask you where are you on your journey, what networks matter to you most, without really forcing you to have to authenticate all those channels, but just to get a sense of who you are. And then a very high-level product walkthrough of the four or so areas that we wanted to highlight, and then we drop you on this home screen.

Nikki Elbaz (18:42) I’m curious, were you considering making the home screen dynamic based on the segmentation?

Brandon Green (18:46) So we have been thinking about that from the get-go, actually since well before we even designed the home screen. It was something that came out of that exploration of the user onboarding that we talked about earlier. And we have a few light elements in the page today, mostly around helping set up a user for the next action to take once they land on this home screen after they’ve gone through that onboarding flow. So for example, if you very clearly are part of a team or some use case like that, your first CTA that you see on the home screen is bring in your team members, invite them to the organization, get them up and start contributing their own content. One thing that I would like to do much more on this page is tailor the widgets and the arrangement of the home screen to match what each team member is responsible for in an organization. So for example, the marketing director is gonna care about far different things than a freelance content creator who’s just submitting drafts for approval. So that content creator might just have a list of draft posts that are assigned to them that they need to flesh out and submit for approval. And then the marketing director might want to see much more in terms of analytics, or maybe a schedule for review, an abridged schedule that they can get into the more details of in the scheduling area. So I mentioned the personalization based on your role in an organization. But I think for all people on social – not just businesses or marketing agencies, solo creators like you and me – there’s gonna be a lot of opportunity for better content recommendations and personalization and things like that. We have this light feature on the home screen that’s just a showcase of some of the product templates that we offer. But we already actually have work in flight right now to expand on that template directory, create more visual templates, create templates that are much more tailored to different social channels and different formats that work well on those channels, or different verticals – templates that will work better for the different topics that people might write about. For example, I might benefit from some templates around tech or product management, or even AI topics on the occasion that I write about AI. Other people, like a dentist’s office, might need ideas about medical or dental topics. And those might be something that we can offer in a semi-personalized state on this home screen as well. We gotta think through some of the mechanics of that, like how we actually facilitate that, how personal do we want to get, what is useful. But I think there’s some personalization opportunities like that that we can bring into the fold.

Nikki Elbaz (21:00) That’s really cool. Again, directly tied to outcomes, where it’s not just getting them to increase their usage, but to actually hit their outcomes. They will be so delighted by that. And on the topic of delight, just when you were talking about customizing the widgets, it just reminded me of the first Mac that I ever got. And that dashboard. I don’t even know if it still exists.

Brandon Green (21:19) I think it doesn’t exist as it used to, but you can now add dashboard-style widgets just to your desktop. And it is very fun.

Nikki Elbaz (21:26) Right, right, right. The widgets are on my desktop now. It used to be a button that you had to press to get it across the screen. And just being able to customize those widgets and add that dictionary – it was so fun. So I feel like that actually not just would be useful and helpful and help them hit their outcomes, but also just a bit of a delight that they can really customize their dashboard. It’s a funny thing, but I feel like emotionally, social media feels very handcuffed. You’re tied to the algorithm. You have to follow the rules. And this gives a little bit of freedom.

Brandon Green (21:57) I think one of the things that we’ve really tried to bring to not just this home screen, but also just the entire visual language and navigation, the way Buffer is architected, is a sense of focus and calm. You’ll see that in the softer color scheme of the home screen, and choices and things like that, where we want Buffer and the toolkit that we offer to not feel overwhelming – like social media can often feel for really almost everybody. It should be a place you can come in and quickly just see what’s going on and just act on it, or create a bunch of content, and not feel overwhelmed in doing so. A small example of that is you can just take the composer, the window where you actually write your post, and just block out all the navigational elements and just focus on what you’re writing. Little things like that, and being able to offer similar experiences like that throughout the product, is something that we want to bring more of. So it just feels like a welcoming place for you that you can just go about your business and focus on creating, rather than all of the other weird incentives that come with social media.

Nikki Elbaz (22:59) I really felt that. I felt like the home screen was a welcome. It felt like you said, the colors. It felt calm. It felt like, okay, here’s your home base. You’re good. Here’s where you can go from here. Are there any other things that you’re working on to take down this perception change, this shift from scheduler to robust social media management?

Brandon Green (23:18) We already talked about this a bit, but the continued investment into onboarding and personalization of that home experience, making it so that not just the baseline social media creator gets value on step one of Home, but it works for teams and more seasoned pro social marketers who need a little bit more depth from Buffer, whether that’s in features of analytics or what we surface to you on the home screen. Another big one that I’m personally invested in now is revamping the product for multiplayer. I keep mentioning teams because we do have quite a few teams that use Buffer to manage social media for either a large brand, many brands, things like that. And there are several ways in which we need to catch up to the market in terms of what collaborative offerings we have, but also do it in a way that feels very, you know, Buffer-y, very aligned to our unique definition of what the market of social media teams need. Not quite as upmarket and high scale as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, just because you mentioned them, but getting more into that territory, in a more delightful interface at a more affordable price. So that’s one big area that we’re trying to change perception around. Some of the perception is warranted – we do have some lackluster capabilities around collaboration that we need to work on. I think the perception there is that Buffer is not really known for being a tool for social media teams, just lower-level creators. It’s the affordable option, it’s the freemium option. And we want to both cater well to that lower end of the market while also increasing our depth and capabilities to serve the higher end of the market.

Nikki Elbaz (24:44) I think if there’s any team that can do it, it’s your team. I love seeing the way that you guys collaborate together and the creativity that you have. Everyone says, once you go enterprise, you drop the whole freemium tier. I can see your team actually succeeding at that.

Brandon Green (24:56) Yeah, thank you. I think we’re doing it quite well. What we call our down-market business is growing very strongly, very healthily, and really continues to be the lifeblood that keeps Buffer moving forward as far as our ethos and our culture – “helping the little guy,” for lack of a better word. And a lot of the way that we think about serving the upmarket is really around just adding depth to what we have, rather than throwing out what we have and trying to build something really tailor-made for the upmarket. I think that leads to some harder challenges in terms of engineering and software architecture. How do we build something that serves both? A lot in terms of UX and product design. Like, how does this feel calm and easy to digest and understand, while also having that depth?

Nikki Elbaz (25:37) If you couldn’t tell yet, I am a fan of this team and I am a fan of this product, and I like the nuance that they give this perception flag. Don’t forget to diagnose your own flags with the Change Flags quiz. Again, your results page runs you head to head with a composite of your competitors, line items what each flag is costing you, and gives you a 90-day recovery plan. And it’s at nikkielbaz.com/quiz. See you in two weeks. Well, one more surprise story before then.

Nikki Elbaz (26:03) I truly struggle with LinkedIn comments. I post, people comment, and my notifications tab is full of random related posts and nudges. No, LinkedIn, I don’t want to play Zip. I want you to tell me who needs a reply to their comment. Keeping track of the engagement on my daily posts is a mess, and Buffer’s home screen just shows me in one place everyone who I haven’t replied to yet. But here’s the kicker. I don’t use it. Not because I don’t love it – because when I want to manually post on LinkedIn, I go to LinkedIn. When I want to check my comments, I go to LinkedIn. The pain is acute, Buffer is solving this pain, but my force of habit won’t let me use Buffer. So I went looking for a way to break my own habit. I know I prefer desktop apps, so I looked for a Buffer desktop app, but there isn’t one. There is, however, a Chrome extension. It puts a little Buffer button on content all over the web, kinda like how Pinterest does that with pins, so that when you see something good, you add it to your queue right on that site page. Seeing Buffer everywhere slowly saturated me closer. And that’s when I started thinking about other ways that I can get Buffer in my face. I had a couple ideas, but then guess what? Today, literally, I get an email with a recap of comments owed. It looks like it’s going to be daily, and I am so excited because it is right in my face where I need it. Thank you, Buffer.