In what appears to be a growing trend with services that connect to social media platforms, Buffer was recently hacked and thousands of user tokens were stolen. This caused a bit of a kerfuffle, as spam posts started showing up in all our feeds. For someone who is very careful about what email links he clicks on, this kind of issue would have been unexpected. I would have spent more time responding to “you’ve been hacked” messages than creating new content.

Good thing I knew about the issue before it got to that point.

Buffer responded to the adversity in the same way they respond to any kind of feedback from their users: quickly, openly and graciously. There is a culture of over-communicating on the team, and their support team has created a lot of rapport with users like me because they always have confidence and hope in their product.

Please don’t mistake my use of the word hope there. I do not mean to communicate that Joel Gascoigne and his team act as if they “hope” the product Buffer will work on a day-in-day-out basis. Just like my company, I have no doubt that everyone there striving for the best at Buffer works hard towards perfection.

At Bottle Rocket, we deliver premium apps for our customers by paying attention to every single detail. Whether you are designing and coding a new feature, answering an email request from a customer, or conceptualizing the next great hall-of-fame app with a prospect, we must look for innovation in every nook and cranny of the strategy. To accomplish that, we must have hope.

It is the only thing that can fuel real growth. If you wan to move beyond your current capability and understanding, you need fuel. There is no way I would have grown as much without it.

Without knowing all of the story behind Buffer, I am going to speculate a little here. Unless they are the one exception to the rule, most great company cultures start with some growing pains. Not every user and customer wakes up every day happy with your service. Some iterations result in bad code, poorly researched features, and untested edge cases. When those growth pains hit, something better be propelling you forward to the goal.

In other words, hope.

We have hope in our ability to resolve roadblocks and fix problems. We are confident that our ideas have legs. For sure, we are sure that we will listen to every concern and answer every question. That goes beyond a brand identity. It describes corporate cultures, company values and personal creeds. I hope I’m answering for Gascoigne, Calvin Carter, Tim Cook, Sergei Brin, Leo Laporte, and more.

I know I’m answering for Chris Murman. That hope gets me out of bed every morning and is based not just in myself. I’m thankful for that attitude, and it’s source. It has pushed my personal growth through alcoholism and seven awesome years of marriage, professionally in the mobile industry as an agile coach, and spiritually to realize it’s not all about me.

Do you have hope?