I have the (immense) pleasure to introduce to you Joel Gascoigne, founder and CEO of Buffer. Buffer and more particularly the Buffer App lets you, well.. buffer your tweets. It’s a great tool if you want to be consistent with your tweeting. Let’s read what Joel has to say…

How did you come up with the idea behind Buffer?

Sometime in the second half of 2010, after I had been using Twitter for about a year, I started to Tweet quotes and links to articles. I soon discovered that these Tweets did very well, often attracting retweets and mentions. I then decided I wanted to share more of these kinds of Tweets more frequently, but I quickly found that I was Tweeting in bursts which wasn’t great for my followers, and it wasn’t great for me since I then had a big gap with no Tweets until the next time I chose to do the same. I then started using the scheduling feature in some of the existing Twitter apps, but I found that since I simply wanted to delay the Tweets and have a consistent schedule, it was cumbersome to choose a date and time each time. So the idea for Buffer was born: choose your daily schedule once, and very easily keep Tweets posting consistently.

What obstacles have you faced while launching? How did you overcome them?

The biggest obstacle I faced when launching was that it was very easy to think that the product required many many features, and needed to be perfect. Luckily, I had already made this mistake on a previous product and this time I was determined to launch very fast, as I knew this was the only way to get user feedback and work out whether people actually wanted the product.

How did you manage to get noticed by your first users?

Initially, I just Tweeted about the new product. I had 1700 followers at the time, and this was enough to get the first few hundred users and even the first few paying customers. After that, my co-founder Leo joined me and we stepped up the marketing in a big way. The next several tens of thousands of users were almost entirely down to our content marketing approach with Leo took charge of. We had our own blog, and consistently guest blogged for other blogs of various sizes.

What does your typical work day look like?

When I’m in a good flow, which I try to be most of the time, I get up at 6:30. By 7 I will either be in the gym or at the swimming pool. After my exercise for the day, I have a breakfast and at 9 Leo and I have a meeting to brainstorm one aspect of the business and come up with detailed actionable steps for it. The items we come up with will either be delegated to one of the others in our team, or it is the task for one of us to get done. We then split off and work by ourselves, and I am usually doing a mix of admin, support, coding and staying in touch with our freelancers. At 5pm we have another brainstorm, and then at 6pm we have a 20 minute Skype call with Tom, our chief hacker. We all update each other on what we’ve got done, what we will do tomorrow and whether there is anything we need in order to achieve something. I then grab some dinner and usually spend the evening working through personal email or blogging.

What is your hope, your vision for Buffer?

We’ve found that people really love the new approach we have brought about for sharing. Simply sharing later can really make a huge difference for someone’s productivity and can improve all aspects of their social media efforts. Our goal is to become a new standard in sharing, and to make this sharing functionality widespread across websites and apps. We just acquired Digg Digg so it’s now easy to include the Buffer Button on your blog and let readers share more easily and more frequently, thus increasing traffic. We’re also working with a number of Twitter and News Reader apps who are using our API to allow their users to Buffer content.

What are 3 tips you would give to entrepreneurs who are about to launch their startup?

1. Try to validate your idea before you launch. Here’s how we did it and went from idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it

2. Don’t wait for perfect conditions such as having enough cash to work on your idea full-time. It’s totally possible to build your startup on the side: http://joel.is/post/2890790294/bootstrapping-on-the-side

3. Work on something you love, and find ways to enjoy every moment (there is enjoyment in everything, if you stop to think). Focus on day to day happiness instead of a far future reward: http://joel.is/post/5100838977/enjoying-the-moment

Which CEO is your role model?

I would say, and quite appropriately with the current news, that Mark Zuckerberg is someone I truly admire. I was a very early Facebook user, back when you had to have a university email address, and I’ve been blown away by how the man has grown the platform. The single most impressive thing for me is how he continues to change the product in drastic ways. If you stop changing, you die, and Zuckerberg knows this. I try to live by his recent advice: “stay focused and keep shipping”.

Joel, thank you for sharing these links and information with us!