Newsletter software for people like you.
What makes Buttondown different?
There are a bajillion email tools out there, I know. I built Buttondown because none of them worked the way I wanted them to.
Some were super-powerful and super-complicated, designed for huge companies who were spending all day tweaking templates + workflow automations.
Others wanted to own my entire digital identity, keeping me on their platform and selling my subscribers’ data to the highest bidder.
I just wanted a small, elegant tool that let me collect subscribers and email them easily, with no fuss and at a reasonable price point.
It turns out tens of thousands of other happy writers, creators, and businesses wanted the same thing.
Why people love us
Privacy-first
Buttondown is GDPR-compliant — and then some. I don't collect any data about you (or your subscribers), and Buttondown is the only newsletter provider that starts with analytics turned off by default.
Write in Markdown
Buttondown uses the best of Markdown (plus things like embedded Tweets and photos) so you can write quickly and efficiently without worrying about clumsy email markup or WYSIWYGs.
Send from Gmail (or wherever)
Send an email from the comfort of your inbox.
RSS-to-email
Setting up your Buttondown account to work with Zapier, IFTTT, Weebly, Squarespace, Ghost, and more.
Run by humans
Buttondown isn't a team or a startup or a movement or whatever: it's just me. I respond to every email personally and deeply care about the problems I'm trying to solve.
Surveys
Buttondown makes it easy to survey your audience and get feedback.
But wait, there's more
How folks use Buttondown
It’s become a cliché to say we live in uncertainty, but lately I’ve wondered if the better word is really precarity. That is, it’s not merely that a lot of things that seemed stable and predictable no longer are, but that a lot of things that seemed comforting and supportive have vanished. Layoffs; the end of emergency pandemic protections; ice storms and atmospheric rivers and drought; the slow-motion collapse of our healthcare industry—I could go on, but it seems everywhere you look there’s something else pushing some risk calculation higher.
First, a thank you. Travis and I wanted to make something we would love as comic fans and it seems like it hit a chord with many of you. The responses from you, publishers, and our partners have been outstanding. So the big question is, when are going to launch? The answer is everyone’s favorite definitive answer: soon. We’re finishing a few features and ingesting publisher content as we speak. We can say that we’re weeks away, not months.
I’ve got a lot on my plate this week, so I’ll keep this newsletter short and sweet. Hyrum’s law:
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
Research is what gives us ground to stand on – and synthesis is how we turn our research into revenue-generating design decisions. During synthesis, we look at what we’ve gathered and plan as many changes to your business’s funnel as possible. That involves both one-off changes (this is broken, fix it) and test ideas (changing this might be a tradeoff, and we need to measure its economic impact).
1st Principle: Have a mental model of the terrain you operate in. Imagine the perspectives that others hold of the same terrain. Remember that it’s easier to change perspective than terraform the terrain around you.
2nd Principle: Building up doesn’t have to be about increasing numbers (sales, employees, square foot, etc). Instead, build familiarity with the terrain; the ability and agility to work in lots of different ways, creating different sources of value.
Last week, I had you print out the length of a program in English words. Some of y’all made this very simple, and some engineered something much more hardcore, and I loved all of the interpretations of it! Great job Miguel, Nate, Ángel, Jonnie, Saad, Ten, Leyan, Zoé, Will, Andrew, Carine, Alvin, Prashant, Austin, Muhammad, and Christian!