Joel posted the landing-page link straight to his own Twitter timeline and asked for reactions.

“I simply tweeted the link and asked people what they thought of the idea.”

It worked because he already had an audience of the right people, not because of any paid or novel distribution tactic.

“my marketing consisted of sharing the idea with the 1,700 Twitter followers I had at the time.”

Buffer's public launch was posted to the Hacker News community around the November Startup Sprint initiative.

“Buffer went live on the 30th November and I got some great feedback from the Hacker News community.”

Co-founder Leo Widrich pitched guest posts to bloggers by email in bulk, tracking roughly a 20% hit rate and moving to bigger blogs once a rate was established.

“If he wanted to get a single guest article published, he would sit down and send 5 emails.”

Joel names this as one of Buffer's biggest growth wins in the early period.

“Arguably some of our biggest success with Buffer has been the content marketing we did in the early days”