Buffer Comes to SF and Wants to Stay!

You hear similar stories all the time especially here in San Francisco. A problem turns into an idea. An idea turns into a product which then turns into a business. This is really how the next hot twitter productivity tool – BufferApp came to be. After getting introduced to Buffer by our Japan and Asia-Pacific connections, we caught up with founders Leo Widrich and Joel Gascoigne after only a week in the SF tech area from the UK to have a quick chat about their goals and dreams for Buffer.

When did you start BufferApp?

JG: I launched December 1 2010 after spending 7 weeks developing it. Leo joined me a month later. Probably, over 10 or more revisions have been launched since, and seem to be updating it on a daily basis. I think we lost count.

What gave you the inspiration to create Buffer?

JG:  In the 2nd half of last year, I started to tweet a lot on startups and business. I got great re-tweets and  content tweets do really well. I wanted to share a lot in a small space of time of reading. I used Hootsuite, Sharefeed, etc. but eventually I realised I didn’t care about the time scheduling of the tweets but the regularity. Given this problem, I started developing extension for browsers and cueing. I approached Hootsuite and  Sharefeed but they didn’t seem to want to take it on.

What does the App do?

LW: Basically, Buffer is a twitter application that allows you to read the content you want at any time and share it without having to go and physically schedule it.  We do the scheduling for you or based on your scheduling, Buffer tweets it out. Right now we have extensions for IE, Firefox, Safari as well as.  We do community building with a twitter-chat called Toolschat co-hosted with a friend in Australia.

What are the Business Goals of Buffer?

LW: After launching the app, we have got some great mentions from ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web, Tech Crunch as well as countless blogs and looks like we have a great following. So, we need to give this thing a go. In general, it seems that there are more resources here in SF than in the UK. So, we decided to get on a plane and come to the SF tech/ Silicon Valley area to get seed/angel funding.

What is the Finance/Revenue model?

JG: We are self-funded,  you know, boot-strapped. As we said earlier, we seek some seed capital and seek overall business experience from Angel investors.

LW: The app model is a free-mium model, based on the buffer size for tweets you need and team members you want to add.

What is the Future Roadmap for BufferApp?

LW: We see buffer for twitter as just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook is on the roadmap. We want to revolutionize how we share things and share the most out of the content-sharing at optimal times, networks and platforms.  We see sharing is akin to Moore’s law and we want to be a part of each social node change.

JG: We see our app as open source development app. For example, a user who was passionate about BufferApp wanted it on her Android phone so she helped us develop the android app and the Buffer for Android was born.

About the founders

Leo Widrich – Leo is originally from Austria.  He is studying business at University of Warwick, UK and at BufferApp. Soccer player and fanatic.

Joel Gascoigne – Joel was coding websites since the age of 12. He is a Computer Science major from the University of Warwick, UK. Joel has the Entrepreneurial mindset.

We wish luck to both Leo and Joel as they both have the startup bug of passion and commitment. An interesting model here is that they created a passionate community willing to promote them especially in the blogosphere. They have a great product which we use and we hope they can bring sharing to the next level.