When companies talk about being transparent they usually mean that they share lots of details publicly. Most have lines that they don’t cross, often financials are still considered private, even in companies that aim for transparency. That doesn’t appear to be a concern for the folks at Buffer. Check out open.bufferapp.com and you’ll see they’ve taken transparent pretty far.
There were the well known posts about the security break in, but nearly any company ends up posting things like that under those conditions. I found their recent growth and sales post much more interesting in terms of the level of transparency they are pursuing.
There are some details in that aren’t provided in the growth post that would be interesting to know. Two off the top of my head would be cancelations and expenses. I suppose even those who push transparency further still have a few cards they want to continue to keep to themselves.
The broader question in all of this is, is that level of transparency a good thing? I’m not sure, but it has me interested enough to watch what happens.
2 replies on “Buffer Transparency”
It’s indeed fascinating. However, I think there is a very strong risk associated with that.
For example, someone could find their “cash in the bank” level to be quite low (about 45 days worth of revenues and probably not a lot more in terms of spendings). If that person is a potential customer, they may be worried about investing on the long term with Buffer, because they don’t want to be in a situation where they depend too much on a “fragile” company.
Also a quick analysis shows that they’re ‘not pro’ revenues are growing by just 4%, which seems to be a significantly lower growth than in the previous month…
Oh there are definitely risks involved. Went people aren’t left to their own imaginations to come up with wild over the top numbers then reality might look significantly less exciting.
But then again must of this information is available for companies that have publicly traded stock. In some cases public companies are even rewarded for not having profits (Amazon for instance). There are any number of strange things that might come from sharing financial details when you are not legally obligated to do so.