Buffer was founded in 2010. Now it generates ~$5 million a year.

How did they manage to achieve this number?

Here are their growth steps:

1. In November 2010, the first version of the Buffer (the tweet scheduling app) was released by students in one of the college rooms of the United Kingdom. Joel Gascoigne wrote code, while Leo Widrich was responsible for marketing.

2. They pitched to the top/medium/small tech blogs, but nobody wanted to write about them.

3. So they decided to create their own blog. In the first 9 months, Leo wrote around 350 articles!

4. Leo returned to reaching out to other blogs, but this time he asked if their audience would be interested in similar articles. After 10 months this strategy resulted into over 100,000 users for Buffer.

5. In July 2011, the team moved from the U.K. to Silicon Valley.

6. Then there was the San Franciscan startup incubator AngelPad.

7. Half a year later, after being refused by 88% of investors, they were able to raise $400,000.

8. In 2012, due to visa issues, they moved to Tel Aviv, Israel.

10. In addition to Twitter, they also integrated Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ within their tool.

11. As a result, their articles turned away from Twitter alone to social media marketing in general. Their average shares per article quadrupled.

12. By September 2013, Buffer gained 1 million users, with around 16,000 paying users.

13. To get more backlinks Buffer created a widget for blogs.

Result: ~3000 blogs embedded their widget.

Result #2: Google blocked them for unnatural backlinks :).

After they NoIndexed that link by Robots.txt, Buffer was restored by Google.

14. They used a new link building mentality – Create relevant & engaging content so good that people get your site linked. Now they post almost daily.