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@_jacksmith Not really actually. Although it did create a rather awkward conversation between Joel and I, we have an understanding for each other's plans and goals for both our products. Sparkcentral is the market leader for the largest airlines, telcos, financial institutions and more, and we have grown to be very focused on delivering a much superior customer engagement platform for enterprise B2Cs, often competing with companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP.
How does this compare to Frontapp (for the twitter channel) or say Mention ?
Hey everyone,
Joel here, co-founder and CEO of Buffer. Super excited to be on Product Hunt with Respond, especially since PH themselves are one of the amazing customers we're lucky to have using Respond.
We've been privileged to have quite an incredible journey with Buffer. We're happy to now be a team of 80 people (still fully distributed, across 50+ cities on 5 continents) and we're currently doing $9m in annual revenue. Over time, our vision for Buffer has naturally grown, as we have seen beyond the horizon of our original plans.
Opening up Respond to the public marks a very interesting point in the Buffer journey, which happens to fall shortly after our 5 year anniversary. Ever since the beginning, we’ve found ourselves providing a marketing solution, which is largely about having a strong voice, and putting content out there on social networks. At the same time, we continually made sure to share our view that listening and responding on social media is just as important as using those channels for marketing. Today marks the day where our product offerings now align fully with our own vision and beliefs around having a balanced approach to social media and business, both listening and sharing. We’re excited for Respond to fundamentally change Buffer for the better, and we’re pumped to serve existing and new customers with the new product.
With Respond as part of the Buffer family of products, it fundamentally changes us as a company. We’re excited to grow to serve the needs of customers both in terms of marketing, as well as now customer service and brand monitoring. A key opportunity this triggers for us too, is to be a complete social media solution for larger companies, agencies and enterprises who want to work with a single product across both marketing and customer service departments. As part of this, we’re excited to add more enterprise features to both Buffer and Respond over the coming year. After 5 years, Buffer is ready to serve a larger market of customers and we’re looking forward to making all our products better for a broad range of users and customers, from our free offerings all the way to fortune 500 companies.
I've been blown away by the whole team working on Respond (@Marc_Rosa, @ivanazuber, @boristroja, @twanlass, @mike_eck, @misterfeeney, @sunils34, @djfarrelly). They'll all be hopping in here throughout the day (from many different time zones), and I'm sure they'll be delighted to answer questions you all might have :)
Thanks!
@joelgascoigne @marc_rosa @ivanazuber @boristroja @twanlass @mike_eck @misterfeeney @sunils34 @djfarrelly Congrats to the Buffer team on the launch. #happyinvestor
@joelgascoigne @marc_rosa @ivanazuber @boristroja @twanlass @mike_eck @misterfeeney @sunils34 @djfarrelly Great product! Well done team Buffer 💃🙌😻
Co-founder of CoTweet here. Love this product - it feels like where we would be had the product continued to be developed post-acquisition. Glad to see such a great team running with it.
I've also had a chance to have a play over the last week or so and it's great, as per what you expect from the team at Buffer. It makes getting through all those notifications much simpler with a few nice little touches. Integration with Buffer scheduler could be interesting...
Looks nice and simple - signature Buffer :) Curious to know a bit more about searches and filtering capabilities before upgrading to paid though. Couldn't find much in the way of detailed descriptions or screenshots to see if it's going to do what I'm hoping.
I've been giving feedback on this for weeks! It's an essential tool we use @ProductHunt to help 💩get done - you can see a collection of the All of the fabulous stuff that powers Product Hunt
As an avid fan of Respondly (RIP) - I was keen to see what the awesome team @Buffer were going to do with it. I've also managed to have a sneaky play around before the release which has been very kind of the team... I think they knew how much of a power user I was!
This version is there first and it makes a huge difference! I've asked for some pretty niche things but the feedback has been met with great enthusiasm.
I'm excited to see the improvements and where this will go.
Integration with the Buffer platform completely?
Mobile app? 🙏
I'll let the team tell you more!!
@joelgascoigne @leowid @Marc_Rosa @ivanazuber @boristroja @twanlass @mike_eck
Hey Team. I've been a big fan of Buffer as a company and Respondly was one of the first production grade successes using Meteor, which i'm also a big supporter of. From that technological standpoint, what have been the most valuable lessons you've taken from those new approaches to engineering a product?
@joao_oliveira Great one João! This was such an exciting time for us at Buffer. For the first time, we've acquired a fully-built post product-market fit product, and didn't acquire the team. @timhaines was incredible to help us with the transition to us, though for the most part, we reverse engineered the product, design and implementation details. Not many on the team have used Meteor before and so it was quite a quick ramp up for @boristroja, @ivanazuber @twanlass and @djfarrelly and myself to understanding things. The architectural model of Meteor blew my mind and I find it a super interesting way to build. Tim and Phil did a great job architecting the product, and it shows for how we've been able to re-launch it fairly quickly.
We're now undergoing some plans to re-architect certain areas of the product. Right now, there is a large learning curve to understand the code-base, we'll look to simplify this over the next few months as we further build features. This is key if we want to grow the team working on respond. We've also noticed front-end performance troubles that we focused much of our time between acquisition and re-launch to improving. At the time when Tim and Phil built respond, Meteor and React wasn't fully integrated well together. Now that it is, we hope we can move fast in bringing React into the product to help with some of the front-end perf challenges we've seen.
I'm also grateful we've been able to take the learnings we've had from building Buffer and apply much of it to Respond. The first thing we set up after acquiring the product was fast, continuous deployments as we know that's been key for development on Buffer. We've also hit certain scaling challenges in the first few days of our Beta (once we crossed 3000 active users. So glad we did a beta launch before a public launch!). In the days building Buffer, the scaling challenges would happen more gradually. We expect with Respond these challenges will be much more fast paced. Since we've learned a lot trying to scale Buffer, we hope we can tackle these challenges much more rapidly with Respond :).
@sunils34 @joao_oliveira @timhaines Hey Sunil, old Respondly user here – thanks for making a home for it! You might find this post on Meteor render performance helpful: https://medium.com/parlay-engine...
Joel,
Great to see the newest @buffer product release. I've been part of the Respond beta version and seen it evolve into a principled solution for many groups; Now, Buffer with a few additions, could become a complete social media solution for larger companies, agencies and enterprises.
In the interest of Buffer transparency, I'll release my thoughts here on how to make this happen and happy to discuss with Sunil (@sunils34) and the awesome Buffer crew... they know how to reach me :)
Buffer is capturing new audiences everyday with these 4 primary verbs: sharing, building, responding, and analyzing.
The current - and projected - path to becoming a Billion-Dollar company appears to be:
I. Sharing: Core product (Buffer 1.0, 2.0...) + Email
II. Building: (Pablo 1.0, 2.0...) community.
III. Responding: This new product is a listening tool (Respond 1.0, ___ )
IV. Analyzing: forthcoming (insert name: ______ ) deep analytics resource.
_____
Ok, so now we know where you are, but what should we add to the Buffer pipeline and future?
Well, there's a couple missing pieces which I hope to see on Buffer's path to becoming a Billion Dollar company: (I.) email integration on the Core product and (IV.) ROI Analysis/deep analytical tools.
Email continues to be the largest form of communication for social media - for both enterprise and consumers - and could be combined with (I.) Core Buffer to boost capabilities. Simple integration of one's existing email lists where one could drag and drop Bufferized content into newsletters for subscribers? - (connect with these guys, @revue and @mdekuijper) Also, once email integration is added to the Core, you could have a Hotmail-esque email footer to reach billions of potential new customers. Big potential here.
And lastly, deep analytics - vis-a-vis rich content sharing/analysis (showing clear ROI analytics), which empowers decision makers to better allocate marketing resources and budgets across new channels and people. Both Buffer and Respond offer some analytics, but we need to re-invent and show decision makers at enterprises how they could increase revenues by utilizing Buffer.
Respond is a great step in the right direction, but look forward to being part of the next generation of Buffer's quest.
Get in touch. I'd be happy to help make these things happen and get more specific.
Ross D. Blankenship
Entrepreneur & Builder, http://AngelKings.com
@rossblankenship
***
Notes:
My original Buffer investor post was here (http://goo.gl/07NI9b).
P.S. And good work to the Respond crew! (@Marc_Rosa, @ivanazuber, @boristroja, @twanlass, @mike_eck, @misterfeeney, @djfarrelly) :)
@rossblankenship @buffer @sunils34 @revue Thanks for mentioning us Ross. Would love to talk to about the opportunities here!
I am a big fan of everything Buffer does and they rolled out this product beautifully.
Buffer hits it out of the park again I use Pablo and the Buffer app to run all my social media for two years now, Product has never let me down.
Buffer always delivers extreme end user value than this new addition just goes to strengthen that track record.
Buffer = Dependability + simplicity
@joelgascoigne I love how you transferred the design approach of Buffer to Respond. I've had some issues with sign up, but once inside it feels awesome! Already closed all tickets for Samu! 🐼
As you mentioned this fundamentally changes Buffer as a company. How do you keep both products, Buffer and Respond, aligned to your vision?
#PHReview: I'm really digging the core functionality of Respond. This is my first time using it and right out of the gate it's an amazing product. I do think there are a few UX/UI tweaks that could clear up some minor issues, but I understand that this is beta.
Overall, I'm very excited to use the product to help streamline my daily social activity.
I've been using Buffer for almost 3 years and the product just keeps getting better. Paradoxically, they manage to add features while becoming simpler. That's true magic in product development. Respond is just the latest example of their innovation. The added awesomeness of Buffer is the company itself; their culture is the core product so all the residual software is user-friendly, clean and responsive. I salute Buffer not only for the jobs their tools do for users like me, but also for their leadership in management, which makes Buffer one of the ground-breaking companies of the information economy.
Excellent product @joelgascoigne. I'm in awe of the quality of content and apps that the buffer team comes out with. Keep it up!!
@joelgascoigne looks like a great product, but what makes it better than SproutSocial for instance?
Hustle X