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- 🧪 Buffer’s Transparent Brand
🧪 Buffer’s Transparent Brand
From publishing salaries to open-sourcing code, they've built trust by sharing everything.
Isaac Peiris
April 15, 2025
Read time: 4 mins | Read online
I’ve been fascinated by transparency recently. Brands that lean into it seem to see benefits, while brands that maintain secrecy find it often working against them.
I found that transparency, like most things, is a spectrum. So what better way to understand the impacts on a brand than to explore one that has leant all the way in to the far end of the spectrum.
Buffer is one of those brands. The more I uncovered about their journey with transparency, my knee-jerk reaction of shock gave way to one of respect and admiration.
Hope you enjoy!
— Isaac
Quick Hits
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To track or not to track: vanity metrics in marketing [Neil Patel]
Google now assesses whether website content is AI-generated [Search Engine Land]
Why Netflix is making a play for video podcasts [Linkedin]
4 charts that prove the White Lotus effect is real [AdWeek]
Buffer’s Transparent Brand
26 October 2013 was a normal Saturday, until Buffer's team noticed something weird. Spam posts had started appearing across their users social media accounts. The social media management platform had been hacked.
Most companies would’ve followed the standard playbook. Gather information internally, issue a statement about "investigating reports," and reveal details only when absolutely necessary.
But Buffer isn’t most companies.
Within 24 hours of discovering the breach, co-founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne published detailed blog posts explaining exactly what happened, what had been compromised and the specific steps they were taking to fix it.
They created a real-time status page updating users on their progress resolving the hack, literally documenting their investigation and recovery in real-time. No PR statements, just authentic updates from the engineers and team members that were actually working to fix the problem. Gascoigne even responded to upset customers on Twitter recommending Buffer’s number 1 competitor, Hootsuite. |
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Security breaches are normally an existential threat to a brand, but Buffer's response had the opposite impact. It generated praise.
One customer wrote "the way you've handled this has been extremely professional, transparent, and worthy of great respect", and a security analyst said "Buffer just provided a masterclass in crisis communication".
The response to the hack validated Buffer's transparency philosophy. Gascoigne later reflected, "It was the ultimate test of whether we truly believed in transparency or just liked the idea of it".
Transparency as a Foundational Value
From their earliest days Buffer had been experimenting with transparency, publicly sharing product roadmaps and company updates.
In 2011, just months after launch, they began publishing monthly investor updates on their blog for anyone to read. They shared typically confidential information like user numbers, revenue figures and even their struggles and failures. By 2012, they were already publishing details about their fundraising process, sharing term sheets and discussing valuation calculations openly.
What began as an experiment quickly became a core company value. "We've found that being open about what we're working on and sharing our approach has helped us build stronger relationships with our customers and community," Gascoigne wrote in early 2013, months before the hack. |  Find me another company that openly shares these kind of investor updates publicly… |
After the security incident validated their approach, they doubled down. In December 2013, just weeks after the hack, they announced they were making every employee's salary public, including the formula used to calculate them. In a blog post they detailed exactly how much everyone earned, from entry-level employees to the CEO himself.
"The simple answer is this: We want to build a company that is transparent by default," Gascoigne explained. This open salary system is still in use today, having been maintained for over a decade.
Expanding the Transparency Ecosystem
Buffer now have a dedicated "Openness Dashboard" that provides access to all kinds of normally-confidential information, including:
Metrics across revenue (ARR, MRR), customer (MAU, LTV, churn), support (response time, satisfaction) and marketing (blog visits, trial starts).
Every employee’s salary, and the formula used to calculate it.
Amount of employee time off per month.
Their equity structure and how it's distributed.
Blog posts documenting their failures and missteps.
Their internal employee handbook and company values.
Oh, and just for good measure, their entire codebase is open sourced on GitHub.
Seriously. You can see which months most Buffer employees take time off in.
The Business Impact of Radical Transparency
Buffer's experiment in radical transparency transformed them into one of tech's most beloved brands, with measurable impacts across every aspect of their business.
After publishing their salary formula in 2013, job applications increased by 230% within just one month. They’ve reported a 12% decrease in employee turnover compared to industry averages, with team members citing the open culture as a primary reason for staying.
They’ve had a 40% increase in customer satisfaction ratings directly attributable to their transparency initiatives, which translates into real results like their 100% year-over-year growth in subscribers after implementing a transparency-driven culture.
Their transparency has created a sense of community. So much so that when Buffer increased prices and explained their reasoning, customers actually defended the change in public forums.
It’s even helped investor relationships. When Buffer decided to buy out their venture capital investors in 2018 (another unusual move they documented in detail), they were able to do so in part because their open metrics had built huge amounts of trust. Transparency also builds resilience, as Gascoigne has noted "transparency doesn't mean you never make mistakes. It means you can recover from them faster because you've built trust equity in advance". |  Their product roadmap is publicly accessible, which actually makes it easier for them to gather feedback from users and make more informed product decisions. |
There's an even bigger benefit. Transparent companies make better decisions. Knowing your actions will be public creates accountability that impacts behaviour. Buffer found themselves making more ethical, customer-centric choices because they knew everything would be visible.
The Psychology Behind Transparency's Effectiveness
Buffer's experience reveals something important about modern consumer psychology. In our current age of information abundance, hiding information doesn't protect you. It creates suspicion.
When consumers have unlimited access to information, traditional secrecy feels untrustworthy. However, transparency creates what researchers call "the authenticity premium", a powerful trust response that's basically impossible to manufacture through traditional marketing.
The Continued Evolution of Transparency
More than a decade after the hack, Buffer continues refining its transparency practices. In January 2024 they launched the updated Open Salary System, reflecting on ten years of transparent salaries and introducing a more robust framework with sophisticated benchmarking.
What started as an early company value has become a sustained competitive advantage. Not because transparency is technically difficult, but because it requires a level of organisational courage very few brands have. The Buffer story is a powerful lesson that while barriers to information between companies and customers are collapsing, transparency isn't just an ethical choice. It's increasingly a business imperative with measurable returns. |  Now this is a company with nothing to hide! |
As one customer put it, "I don't just use Buffer because their product is good. I use them because I know exactly who I'm doing business with".
In the end, that might be the most valuable form of brand equity any company can build. A foundation of trust built through the courage to be transparent through thick and thin.
If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: brandchemistry.co/p/buffer-transparent-brand
 | I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about transparency in your business. It’s scary to think about opening yourself up to criticism, but if it can build trust that leads to business benefit, is it worth it? Reply to this email and let me know what you think, I read and reply to every response! Until next week, P.S. Let’s connect on Linkedin! |
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