Buffer just turned 15 years old! And we're fortunate to be closing out our best year in the past 7. We have 69,000 customers, a $23M annual run rate, and achieve over $2M in profit in 2025. To mark 15 years of Buffer, here are 15 of the key lessons I've leaned first hand as a founder CEO. These may not all apply for you, but I hope some are useful and they at least get you thinking: 1. Survival is a competitive advantage. Setting up the ownership structure to play an infinite game is both a great strategy and a lot of fun. 2. Becoming our own customer again has supercharged our motivation, productivity, taste, and clarity of problems to solve. 3. Sustained results over the long term come primarily from differentiation rather than purely from execution. 4. It's generally better to double down on the strengths of your product than shore up weaknesses. 5. Customers come first, because without customers there was never a business in the first place. 6. It's better to shape the company structure around everyone's strengths than try to fill out a perfectly neat org chart. 7. There are many different flavors of CEO, so be yourself and build the team around who you are, rather than doing what you've read a CEO should do. 8. Intuition is an undervalued trait in all roles. Tapping into it and helping people develop it can lead to creating something special. 9. When great strategy and strong operations come together you create magic. You'll generally be stronger in one than the other, so elevate those who are great at the other side of the equation. 10. Even with success, I may feel low. It can feel unsettling when tough emotions hit especially when it seems like I should feel awesome, but there are always clues to follow to get back to a better place. What I find when I explore the emotions can lead to a breakthrough. 11. When you take care of the team, they will give so much to the company and customers. Trust them, be generous, give autonomy and flexibility, and many people will stay for over a decade. 12. Building a truly great product or new feature is dependent on not settling for good enough. Ask yourself if you're really proud of what you're putting out there, and put in the work to feel awesome about your contributions. 13. You're always finding your way. It's better to settle into continual pathfinding than put yourself down for not having perfect clarity. It's a moving target. 14. It's not worth sacrificing health, family, friendships and hobbies for some hypothetical outcome that will solve everything. It's better to try to have it all now. 15. It's worthwhile shooting for the moon. Sometimes you can just choose the more ambitious path. It might feel scary but in my experience it's almost always the right choice. We can achieve far more than we realize. Building and leading Buffer has been the gift that keeps giving. Thank you for following along, whether it's been for the entire journey or since more recently.