COO Buffer Leo Widrich: “The way we interact with each other affects your happiness”
At the age of 20, Leo would have never expected that a Skype call could turn to build a successful company with Joel Gascoigne, the current CEO of Buffer. If you follow his blog, Leo not only shares thoughts about his journey building Buffer, but he shares the emotional battles that he’s faced.
My favorite story is about how meeting Hiten Shah, founder of KISSMetrics and Crazy Egg, impacted Buffer’s future. Leo and Joel had one week left in the United States to fundraise with almost no investing leads. They met Hiten and he gave a good word to one incubator in San Francisco. By the end of the week, Buffer was back on track with $120,000.
In an interview with Brant Cooper, Leo shares what he’s learned about people, companies, and himself.
Lean Startup
Joel built a landing page without a product actually existing. People started signing up and even paid for it because there was a need. This gave him more validation that this was a pain point for customers.
From then, Joel would look at the customer’s Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. “It’s not predicting customer behavior, you have to know them well.” He built brand loyalty and knew what they liked and what was a day in their lives.
Lessons:
- Didn’t waste time and money because they figured out it was an actual problem, running different experiments
- Talk to customers and build relationships all the time
- If you are only looking at the data, you are doing it wrong. He discourages early data to be quantitative since you can’t really get insights if you have less than 50 customers. Go talk to them and you’ll find a pattern
- First element of branding = customer development = loyalty
- People are worried about scaling as opposed to learning what will help to scale
Happiness
A lot of people will disagree with you, but the way we interact with each other affects your happiness, says Leo. He read “How to Make Friends & Influence People,” a book that those who have read it know the value of it. A couple of his principles include:
- Don’t criticize, condemn or complain
- Give honest and sincere appreciation
- Show respect for people’s opinions
- Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
- Become genuinely interested in other people
More here.
People + Buffer
Buffer is known for its open culture and fully distributed team with the end-goal of creating the most fulfilling place to work and live. Books like the one mentioned before and Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness have contributed to building Buffer’s culture.
“The structure is going to come out of the culture. Culture came first.”
- Happiness comes from who we work with and how we work with people
- Focus on positivity and happiness. Do not complain.
- The less you complain the more gratitude
- Transparency — hold us to higher standards and live more fulfilling lives. They started sharing things about their lives and breaking barriers between the people and the product.
- Categorizing things and words don’t matter much. What matters is how do people feel in the company? What are some of the things produced? Let’s all do it and see what we like
- It’s okay to be wrong
- Performance— Why not giving a bonus to someone who created a passionate customer? They also measure meaningful progress in reasonable time. As a distributed team, this has been one of the hardest things to measure. During hiring, people are asked how much they know about their culture? If there’s a good fit, you’ll start a 45-day tryout period matched with a role buddy, cultural buddy, and leader buddy
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