Investing in the Python community responsible for Buttondown's success

<p>Not only would Buttondown not exist without Python, but I — your humble founder — would likely not even be a programmer, having washed out of the industry after one too many invocations of <code>public static void main</code>.</p>
<p>In that vein, we are <em>delighted</em> and honored to be a Participating Sponsor of <a href="https://us.pycon.org/2024/sponsorship/sponsors/">PyCon US 2024</a>, the largest and longest-running US-based Python conference — sponsored by the Python Software Foundation. This will be the first of many such commitments this year, in a way to pay back some of our own recent growth into the technologies that made it possible (all under the auspices of marketing!)</p>
<p>Buttondown is <a href="/open-source">committed to open source</a>. We donate 10% of our profits to the open source technologies we use — a number that, while small, in <em>absolute terms</em> is still larger than most companies one hundred times our size — and aim to open source parts of our codebase that we think could be broadly useful to the community.</p>
<p>If there&#39;s one message I&#39;d like to proselytize, it&#39;s that you don&#39;t need to be a behemoth to pledge financial support to great open source causes (though perhaps a close second might be &quot;the behemoths should certainly do so too.&quot;)</p>
<p>Some great writing I recommend on the subject:</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-500-000-dollars-to-open-source-maintainers/">We Just Gave $500,000 to Open Source Maintainers</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2021/what-would-open-source-look-like-if-it-were-healthy-video-transcript/">What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.jeffgeerling.com/comment/18285">The burden of an Open Source maintainer</a></li>
</ol>


We're sponsoring PyCon

<p>We keep a pretty faithful <a href="https://buttondown.email/stack">list of downstream services and apps we use</a>, and just published a big update to backdate some of the changes from the past few months. You can view the full list there, of course, but I thought it&#39;d be fun to chat a bit more about the specific changes:</p>
<h3 id="new-additions">New additions</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://audiogest.app/en">Audiogest</a>, a really lovely AI-powered transcription tool for internal notes and meetings.</li>
<li><a href="https://notion.com">Notion</a>, which I used way back in 2018 for external-facing documentation and am now using for internal documentation. It&#39;s expensive (seat-based pricing always is when you&#39;re working with freelancers!) but not so expensive that I feel tempted to move to some other solution instead.</li>
<li><a href="https://cloudflare.com/">Cloudflare</a>, and in particular their Worker abstraction, which replaced my $200/mo Imgix bill with... $2/mo.</li>
<li><a href="https://pika.style/">Pika</a>, a nice web app for making simple share images and screenshots.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="removals">Removals</h3>
<ul>
<li>We churned from AHrefs (still a great tool!) because we weren&#39;t getting enough day-to-day value out of it to justify the $99/month price.</li>
<li>Bear, since we&#39;re back to using Notion for internal documentation. (More people than just me need to know how stuff works!)</li>
<li>Imgix, as aforementioned.</li>
<li><a href="https://texts.com/">Texts</a>, which has grown a little too brittle for my use case — I&#39;m back to just alt-tabbing between seven apps at all times.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.sketch.com/">Sketch</a>, which was ousted by the aforementioned Pika. (I still go to their marketing page every few weeks, though, as sheer inspiration.)</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="changes--notes">Changes &amp; notes</h3>
<ul>
<li>Due to reputation and operations issues we encountered, we migrated a huge swath of our traffic from SES onto Postmark. There&#39;s still a good amount left to transfer, but that decision has been borne out in the results thus far.</li>
<li>Looking at the list in full, I&#39;m not particularly unhappy with either the quantity nor the sum cost as it stands today. Margins are good, and I know I could save a solid $200/mo if I worked to build my own replacements of the Twitter API integration and DNSHelper but that just seems like a poor use of my time.</li>
</ul>


Changes to our stack in 2024

<p>By now, you&#39;ve likely received the email from Mailchimp informing you that <a href="https://us17.campaign-archive.com/?u=7408690b9f7fe1132e6e7422b&id=35a0ed6cab">they are shutting
down TinyLetter</a> after over ten years of service. This is — there&#39;s no other way to put it —
a huge bummer, and all too common in a tech landscape that seems increasingly interested in the &quot;billions or bust&quot; mentality.</p>
<p>Before building Buttondown, I was a happy and faithful TinyLetter user for many years. I loved its
core mission — to be an app for people who weren&#39;t trying to make millions of dollars or spend all day
customizing things — but wanted something that wasn&#39;t as buggy and had just a couple more quality-of-life features
(image resizing, link checking, that sort of thing.)</p>
<p>We run Buttondown a little bit differently than other tech companies. Unlike Mailchimp, our goal is not to funnel every user into a complicated, expensive tool meant for S&amp;P 500 companies; unlike some of our venture-capital-backed competitors, our goal is not to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every month until we either pivot to a new strategy or shut down.</p>
<p>We&#39;re running Buttondown for the long haul: we provide a service, we charge a small fee for providing that service, and we remain profitable and independent so we can put your needs first for decades to come. This means we can spend all of our time improving and refining a simple, pleasant experience just for people like you. (That&#39;s why <a href="/testimonials">thousands of happy authors</a> trust us with their emails, from Pulitzer Prize winners to high-school poetry classes.)</p>
<p>If you&#39;re looking for a new tool to fulfill TinyLetter&#39;s old promise — <strong>keeping it simple</strong> — you can give us
a shot today. As a special offer in light of the news, I&#39;m happy to migrate <em>everything</em> for you: your subscribers,
your old emails, the works. Just shoot me an email at <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">justin@buttondown.email</a>, or <a href="https://buttondown.email/comparisons/tinyletter">read more about how TinyLetter and Buttondown compare.</a></p>
<hr>
<h2 id="frequently-asked-questions">Frequently asked questions</h2>
<h3 id="are-you-free-like-tinyletter">Are you free, like TinyLetter?</h3>
<p>Buttondown is free if you&#39;ve got less than a hundred subscribers. (If you&#39;re, like, <em>a hundred and ten</em> subscribers — that&#39;s probably fine.) If you&#39;ve got more than a hundred subscribers, you&#39;ll need to sign up for one of Buttondown&#39;s <a href="https://buttondown.email/pricing">paid plans</a>. The reason we charge for our services is the very reason TinyLetter is shutting down — it costs money to send emails.</p>
<h3 id="will-subscribers-have-to-re-confirm-their-subscription-when-i-move-them-over-to-buttondown">Will subscribers have to re-confirm their subscription when I move them over to Buttondown?</h3>
<p>Nope.</p>
<h3 id="do-you-offer-online-archives-like-tinyletter">Do you offer online archives, like TinyLetter?</h3>
<p>Yup!</p>
<h3 id="can-you-migrate-my-archives-from-tinyletter">Can you migrate my archives from TinyLetter?</h3>
<p>Sure can.</p>
<h3 id="even-if-theyre-set-to-private">Even if they&#39;re set to private?</h3>
<p>Even then. (We just need the CSV export that TinyLetter gives you.)</p>
<h3 id="what-about-drafts">What about drafts?</h3>
<p>Even drafts!</p>


Dear Tinyletter Users

<h2 id="tldr">TL;DR</h2>
<p>This year — really great, we grew a lot, shipped a bunch of stuff, sent many emails, had little downtime.</p>
<p>Next year — localization, better API/programmatic access, prettier archives/subscription pages, better writing/sending experience, better in-app experience.</p>
<h2 id="2023">2023</h2>
<p>It&#39;s been a while since I&#39;ve shared a &quot;peek-behind-the-curtain&quot; style of essay — the last one was technically <a href="https://buttondown.email/blog/q1-planning">Q1 Planning</a>, published in the first week of January. It was meant to be a year-in-review blog post, and of course it ended up being published a little too late for that.</p>
<p>Indeed, the last <em>true</em> year in review essay I wrote <a href="https://buttondown.email/blog/2020-12-31-buttondown-in-2021">was three years ago</a>. It is cute to re-read this: I was very confident that internationalization was going to ship (it still has not shipped), and I was already fed up with Heroku, which Buttondown uses for infrastructure (I would say my likelihood of churning off of Heroku in the next twelve months has <em>decreased</em>, not increased.)</p>
<p>Here&#39;s, in no apparent order, a bunch of stuff that happened in 2023:</p>
<ul>
<li>It was the first year of my full undivided attention.</li>
<li>Not just that, it grew from being &quot;just me&quot; to an incredible team of gifted writers, engineers, designers, and support specialists. (If you emailed in to support or read something on the documentation site, chances are that was the incredible work of someone other than me.)</li>
<li>Entire <em>swaths</em> of functionality and surface area were added to the product:<ul>
<li><a href="https://buttondown.email/features/automation">Automations</a>!</li>
<li><a href="https://buttondown.email/features/rss">RSS-to-email</a>!</li>
<li><a href="https://buttondown.email/features/teams">Teams support</a>!</li>
<li><a href="https://buttondown.email/features/surveys">Surveys</a>!</li>
<li><a href="https://buttondown.email/features/attachments">Attachments</a>!</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>We&#39;re sending <em>more emails</em> to <em>more people</em> than ever before. (As you might guess, given that this is an email platform, our highest-volume day was Cyber Monday, our first day ever of sending more than ten million emails.)</li>
<li>Buttondown&#39;s core business is healthier than ever — more people are using Buttondown, they&#39;re spending more money (on average), they&#39;re churning at a lower rate (on average).</li>
<li>And, to state the obvious, Buttondown remains profitable. We charge users in exchange for services; we make more money than we spend.</li>
<li>A <strong>99.51% CSAT rating</strong>, per our internal help desk tool.</li>
</ul>
<p>One of the hardest things about running a business is managing your emotions: the thing that made this challenge much easier is hearing from so many of y&#39;all that Buttondown has made your life — in some small, marginal way — better, or easier, or less frustrating. I can easily and confidently say that 2023 has been the most fulfilling work of my career.</p>
<h2 id="2024">2024</h2>
<p>Okay! Enough with the navelgazing! What&#39;s coming down the pike?</p>
<p>I&#39;ve spent the past month chatting with users, sifting through the <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/roadmap/issues">backlog</a>, and thinking hard about how best to spend the next year. Here&#39;s what I&#39;ve got:</p>
<ul>
<li>A <strong>prettier, more modern archive theme</strong>. Tens of millions of page views are served through Buttondown every month, and — let&#39;s be honest, folks — the archives for your terrific words could look better out of the box.</li>
<li>Buttondown&#39;s powerful REST API is serving more traffic than ever before (yay!) But it&#39;s still kind of painful to get used to — we&#39;ll be shipping <strong>OAuth support</strong> and <strong>native API bindings for Ruby, Python, and TypeScript</strong> to make it easier to send your first API request.</li>
<li>‌Just like I did three years ago (whoops), I am committing to <strong>localization support</strong>, so the entire end-to-end newsletter experience for your subscribers can be in whatever language fits best.</li>
</ul>
<p>Beyond that, very little <em>new stuff</em> is going to be added. Instead, we&#39;re doubling down on the parts of the authorial experience that can be improved:</p>
<ul>
<li>rebuilding the docs from the ground-up to be faster, more useful, and better organized</li>
<li>reshaping the writing and sending experience to be less, uh, labrynthine and more ergonomic for folks who prefer the WYSIWYG mode</li>
<li>reorganizing the settings page to make it easier to discover new functionality and onboard without being overwhelmed by a sea of toggles and dropdown menus</li>
<li>rethinking analytics (again) to, frankly, add <em>more stuff</em> and make it easier for you to understand how and why your newsletter is perfoming</li>
</ul>
<p>That&#39;s a lot of &quot;re&quot;&#39;s, I know. It&#39;s intentional! Buttondown has expanded a <em>lot</em> in the past twelve months, but I&#39;m very mindful that the majority of you trust Buttondown not because of the knobs and whistles but because it does the <em>core work</em> very well. I think we can do that core work even <strong>better</strong>, and that&#39;s where time and energy will be spent next year.</p>


2023 (and what's next)

<p>For this coming holiday spendtacular we&#39;re offering <strong>the same low prices</strong> we always do, starting <a href="https://buttondown.email/pricing">free for your first hundred subscribers and then from $9/month if you&#39;ve got more than that.</a></p>
<p>Buttondown is already a pretty affordable product, and we want to earn your trust and money as a customer not through artificial scarcity or time-bomb sales but by making a high-quality product that is a good deal every month of the year.</p>
<p>There&#39;s, of course, nothing <em>wrong</em> with BFCM deals, but if you&#39;re pulling the trigger on something that&#39;s &quot;50% off&quot; — make sure that the price hasn&#39;t been slowly ramped up over the past three months to make the &quot;discount&quot; look more attractive.</p>
<p>Have a great day! Enjoy the turkey!</p>


Black Friday / Cyber Monday prices

<h2 id="tldr">TL;DR</h2>
<p>Everything we do comes down to three things:</p>
<ol>
<li>Make sure the only people getting your newsletter are the ones who <em>actually want</em> to get your newsletter.</li>
<li>Make sure the emails being sent out are content-rich, accessible, and performant.</li>
<li>Be deliberate and careful in who we allow onto the platform to make sure our reputation stays golden.</li>
</ol>
<p>There&#39;s no secret sauce — it&#39;s not rocket science. It&#39;s just diligence and good engineering. But for the details, keep reading!</p>
<h2 id="mandatory-double-opt-in">Mandatory double opt-in</h2>
<p>Some email platforms treat double opt-in as a &quot;table stakes&quot; feature that authors can turn on and off as they wish, or even treat cold emailing (the practice of sending emails in bulk to addresses who haven&#39;t given you permission to do so) as legitimate.</p>
<p>Buttondown... does not. Every single subscriber on Buttondown <strong>must</strong> explicitly opt into your newsletter. This keeps the risk of spam complaints low, your engagement high, and readers <em>everywhere</em> happy.</p>
<p>That being said, we&#39;re nothing if not flexible and hospitable to other use cases. If you&#39;re confirming double opt-in outside of Buttondown (for instance, asking authors to confirm their interest as part of a registration or checkout flow) you can always <a href="mailto:support@buttondown.email">email us</a> and we can discuss other options!</p>
<h2 id="automatic-clean-up">Automatic clean-up</h2>
<p>Even if a subscriber to your newsletter is a real human who explicitly signed up to hear more from you, you might not want to keep them around if they haven&#39;t opened a single email from you in <em>months</em>. This is referred to as a number of different things across the industry (&quot;list cleaning&quot;, &quot;email scrubbing&quot;, &quot;email hygiene&quot;...) — we call it <strong>subscriber cleanup</strong>. It&#39;s an automatic opt-in process that checks for folks who are suspected to have abandoned their email address or have never engaged with your content. Removing these folks from your list might feel a bit like ripping off a band-aid (it can be sad to see the big subscriber count go down!) but is great for the long-term health of your subscriber base, because it means your engagement rate amongst your <em>true</em> fans will be higher.</p>
<p>(You can read more about subscriber clean-up <a href="https://buttondown.email/changelog/2023-07-04">here</a>!)</p>
<h2 id="a-human-eye">A human eye</h2>
<p>Last but not least, every single new Buttondown newsletter who imports subscribers from an external source goes through a manual approval process to make sure everything looks kosher. This is old-school, we know, but it&#39;s for the safety of you <em>and</em> every other author on the platform. We take our sending reputation and deliverability seriously, and this helps us maintain our best-in-class benchmarks on both fronts.</p>
<p>(If you&#39;re worried that this process is Kafka-esque and will take days on end, worry not — we generally complete it in less than eight hours during the week and less than 24 hours during the weekend.)</p>
<h2 id="offboarding-people-who-dont-pass-our-bar">Offboarding people who don&#39;t pass our bar</h2>
<p>A human eye is <em>great</em>, but it&#39;s not perfect, and circumstances can change — maybe an author starts abusing their API privileges or decides to otherwise violate Buttondown&#39;s terms of service by sending emails to folks who haven&#39;t signed up for them.</p>
<p>If you&#39;re found to have breached our internal threshold for either <em>the number of emails you send that bounce</em> or <em>the number of emails you send that are marked as spam</em>, we&#39;ll reach out to talk about your sending strategy. If those conversations don&#39;t go anywhere, you&#39;ll be removed from the platform.</p>
<p>(Sometimes, when we mention this, we&#39;re greeted with a bit of shock and dismay — &quot;so you&#39;ll remove me just for sending more emails than usual?!&quot; Buttondown&#39;s never off-boarded a well-meaning customer who made a mistake double-sending an email or accidentally imported bad subscribers; it&#39;s only ever been malicious actors.)</p>
<h2 id="pre-flight-checks">Pre-flight checks</h2>
<p>Before sending your email, Buttondown runs a battery of <strong>62</strong> pre-flight verifications to make sure everything&#39;s in ship-shape. We check everything you can think of, like:</p>
<ol>
<li>Do you have specific words or phrases that Gmail or other inboxes will flag as spammy?</li>
<li>Are any of your images too large?</li>
<li>Did you use the word &quot;attached&quot; without actually attaching a file?</li>
<li>Did you add <em>too many</em> images, meaning that some clients will refuse to load or send your email?</li>
</ol>
<p>This validation suite makes sure you&#39;re sending out the best possible email, and the best possible email gets delivered at the best possible rate.</p>
<h2 id="ip-based-subscriber-filtering">IP-based subscriber filtering</h2>
<p>Buttondown works very hard to make sure all of the subscribers joining your newsletter are <em>legitimate</em>, so that they&#39;re not giving your publication a bad reputation. One of the first and most effective lines of defense is checking incoming subscriptions&#39; IP addresses against a combination of both our internal datasets and those of trusted vendors like <a href="https://check.spamhaus.org/">Spamhaus</a> and <a href="https://www.projecthoneypot.org/">Project Honeypot</a>. (Note that we do this by pulling in omnibus data from external sources, rather than polling them, so as to protect the privacy of you and your subscribers.) This lets us immediately filter out automated or malicious bots subscribing to your newsletter.</p>
<h2 id="no-in-app-cross-promo">No in-app cross-promo</h2>
<p>One of the bigger product decisions Buttondown has made is to not push cross-promotion — this is the fancy industry term for &quot;when someone subscribes to your newsletter, we suggest three similar newsletters for them to also subscribe to.&quot;</p>
<p>There are a number of reasons we do this — mostly, we don&#39;t think it&#39;s our place to get in between you and your audience — but the biggest one is <strong>it hurts everyone&#39;s deliverability.</strong> Studies that Buttondown&#39;s run show that subscribers who sign up for other newsletters through cross-promotion end up reporting emails as spam and unsubscribing at a <em>much</em> higher rate — even for the newsletter that they originally signed up for!</p>
<p>Other platforms taut growth through cross-promotion to juice your subscriber base; while you&#39;re of course free to run your own manual promotional efforts, it&#39;s not worth the risk to deliverability for us to push them on your behalf.</p>
<h2 id="spf-and-dkim">SPF and DKIM</h2>
<p>You don&#39;t really <em>need</em> to know what these clumsy-sounding acronyms are, but they&#39;re protocols that we (along with many other reputable senders) use to ensure that the emails we send are coming from <em>us</em>, not someone pretending to be <em>us.</em></p>
<p>Setting up SPF and DKIM are a bit of a hassle to handle yourself, but if you&#39;re sending from Buttondown it&#39;s automatically handled for you (even if you&#39;re sending from a custom domain!) And starting in 2024, Google <a href="https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/">requires all senders</a> to send their emails with these authentication protocols in place.</p>
<h2 id="we-keep-it-easy-for-subscribers-to-unsubscribe">We keep it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe</h2>
<p>I&#39;m sure this has happened to you:</p>
<ol>
<li>You bought something online.</li>
<li>You started getting an email every. single. day. from the retailer.</li>
<li>You finally got fed up and hit unsubscribe, except that page took you to another page which took you to <em>another</em> page.</li>
<li>And then you still got an email the next day, because you unsubscribed from &quot;weekly recommendations&quot; but not &quot;hot deals&quot; or whatever.</li>
</ol>
<p>Yeah — that drives us crazy too. Every email coming from Buttondown is one-click unsubscribe compliant, meaning that there&#39;s no labyrinthine set of hoops to jump through to unsubscribe. You might not love this as an author, but it&#39;s good for you in the long run — unhappy subscribers turn into frustrated subscribers, frustrated subscribers report your newsletter as spammy, and spam reports tank deliverability.</p>
<h2 id="emphasis-on-text-over-images">Emphasis on text over images</h2>
<p>Buttondown&#39;s default email templates are very plain-text forward. This is nice for aesthetic reasons, but also is <em>very</em> positive on deliverability. Text-heavy, less rococo emails (as compared to their image-heavy counterparts) work great on inboxes of all sizes and shapes and score extremely well in content scanning, meaning that you&#39;ll be reaching more of your subscribers more reliably.</p>
<h2 id="bring-your-own-domain">Bring your own domain</h2>
<p>Last but not least, Buttondown lets you send from own domain (if you own one!) This improves the overall engagement rate for your emails, as they appear more personal and have a higher domain reputation. More importantly, that domain reputation carries with you — even if you leave Buttondown for another service, so long as that service also allows you to send from a custom domain.</p>


How we keep deliverability high

Isn't it time for software that respects you?

<p>By now, you&#39;re probably aware that in three weeks&#39; time, Mailchimp will be automatically using your data — your customers, your content, your <em>everything</em> — to power their generative AI products:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We may use your Inputs and Outputs, including Customer Data, for machine learning purposes in order to develop and improve the AI Model, the Services, and similar products and features, and you instruct us to process Customer Data for such purposes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(There&#39;s no opt-out, of course; the only opt-out is to stop using Mailchimp, and to delete your data.)</p>
<p>I&#39;m no Luddite: I think whether you want to call it an &quot;LLM&quot; or &quot;generative AI&quot; or &quot;GPT&quot;, the products and technologies that seem to be taking over the world are legitimately useful and cool.</p>
<p>But &quot;useful&quot; and &quot;cool&quot; do not outweigh privacy concerns. Nor do they outweigh your right as a user to decide what companies you trust get to do, not just with <strong>your</strong> data but with <strong>your customer&#39;s</strong> data.</p>
<p>Buttondown takes that trust seriously, and considers it a sacred responsibility to be a good steward of your data.</p>
<p>That&#39;s why we&#39;re the only newsletter tool that offers <strong>opt-in</strong> tracking, not <strong>opt-out</strong>. We don&#39;t gather any data unless you explicitly ask us to, and we certainly won&#39;t be feeding it into any other newsletters or black-box AIs without you knowing it.</p>
<p>If you&#39;re a happy Mailchimp user, no hard feelings! But if you&#39;ve been frustrated by some of their changes over the years — the price increases, the complicated UI, the sale to Intuit — and this is the straw that broke the camel&#39;s back, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">send me an email</a>. I&#39;d be happy to personally onboard you onto a platform that respects your privacy.</p>
<p>(Oh, yeah, and we&#39;re <a href="/pricing">cheaper than Mailchimp</a>, too.)</p>


Dear Mailchimp Users

<p>Earlier this year, I came across an article entitled <a href="https://growth.design/sniper-link">Sniper Links: How To Increase Your Email Confirmation Rates</a> from the folks over at growth.design. It sounds a little clickbait-y, but it&#39;s both benign and brilliant: when asking folks to confirm their email, try and figure out what email provider they&#39;re using (gmail, outlook, and so on) and give them a magic link that opens up the search functionality in those apps.</p>
<p>A few months ago, we shipped this functionality as a little test to see if it was in fact useful.</p>
<p>It was! We saw statistically significant uplift — around 6% — in double opt-in for folks shown the sniper link.</p>
<p>We were so happy with this that we decided to release it as a free tool: <a href="https://sniperl.ink/">sniperl.ink</a> (I was a sucker for the clever domain name). It&#39;s totally free.</p>
<p>You can use it either as an API call to get a magic URL:</p>
<pre><code>fetch(`https://sniperl.ink/v1/render?recipient=${
    recipient
  }&amp;sender=justin@buttondown.email`)
</code></pre>
<p>Or as a web component:</p>
<pre><code>&lt;sniper-link
  recipient=&quot;you@example.com&quot;
  from=&quot;justin@buttondown.email&quot;
/&gt;
&lt;script src=&quot;https://sniperl.ink/v1/sniper-link.js&quot; defer&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
</code></pre>
<p>We support Gmail, Yahoo, Proton, iCloud, Outlook, HEY, AOL, and Mail.ru, which counts for over 85% of the traffic we&#39;ve seen thus far.</p>
<p>That&#39;s it! I hope you like it, and shoot us an <a href="mailto:support@buttondown.email">email</a> if you have any questions or feature requests.</p>


sniperl.ink, our free tool for improving subscription rate

<p>It does not.</p>
<p>Have a great day!</p>


How Buttondown uses your content to power generative AI

Sponsoring internships in open source and science

<p>I am, bluntly, <em>delighted</em> to announce that Buttondown has pledged $5,000 as an <a href="https://www.outreachy.org/">internship sponsor of Outreachy</a>, a not for profit organization that provides internships in the open source world for engineers impacted by systemic bias.</p>
<p>Outreachy&#39;s past work is deeply impressive; the accomplishments that their interns have gone on to achieve in the industry is a track record that speaks for itself. I am honored to be able to, however fractionally, help folks fall in love with the kind of work that has shaped my life for the past decade.</p>
<p>This will be the first of many years of contributing to an initiative that I think does <em>serious</em> long-term good in building the kind of progressive, equitable future that our industry deserves.</p>
<p>Deep thanks to:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software Freedom Conservancy</a> for their stewardship of Outreachy</li>
<li><a href="https://www.harihareswara.net/">Sumana Harihareswara</a> for initially putting me in touch with the organization</li>
<li><a href="https://egr.vcu.edu/directory/debraduke/">Professor Debra Duke</a>, my mother, for many, many things — but most of all privileging me with a computer that had Macromedia Dreamweaver and Visual Basic installed on it, and enough faith that I wouldn&#39;t get into too much trouble.</li>
</ul>


Buttondown pledges $5,000 to Outreachy

Buttondown added "Login with X"; the results are very good

<p>After six years of not touching the registration page, I added &quot;Login with Google&quot; and &quot;Login with Apple&quot;. (You can see exactly what that looks like <a href="https://buttondown.email/register">here</a>.)</p>
<p>Here are the results, after a week of testing:</p>
<ol>
<li>Registration rate is up <strong>13%</strong>.</li>
<li><strong>73%</strong> of new users register via Google/Apple.</li>
<li>Conversion rate from free to paying appears unrelated between &quot;folks who sign up with username + password&quot; and &quot;folks who sign up via Google/Apple&quot;.</li>
</ol>
<p>The entire project took me around five hours, start to finish — I used <a href="https://django-allauth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html">django-allauth</a>, as the prospect of relying on a third-party vendor for registration seems fairly terrifying.</p>
<p>Probably the single highest-ROI thing I&#39;ve done this year (and I&#39;ve done a lot of high-ROI work this year!) Couldn&#39;t recommend it enough.</p>


You should add SSO

Thoughts on how to use the pricing page to mold and refine your pricing position

<h1 id="pricing-page-driven-development">Pricing Page Driven Development</h1>
<p>You are perhaps familiar with the concept of <a href="https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-development.html">Readme Driven Development</a>: writing your Readme first and using it to backtest the interface for your CLI.</p>
<p>I&#39;d like to propose a similar mental exercise for thinking about your pricing model: <strong>pricing page driven development</strong>. As in: when thinking about your monetization strategy, write a pricing page first and work your way backwards into something that makes sense.</p>
<h2 id="some-context-about-buttondown">Some context about Buttondown</h2>
<p>Buttondown is API-first software for sending emails and managing subscriptions. (Think Mailchimp, except for people who don&#39;t want to spend all day inside Mailchimp.) Sending emails cost money; running servers costs money; paying a mortgage costs money. So I charge for the service, albeit with a free tier.</p>
<h2 id="some-context-about-pricing-strategy">Some context about pricing strategy</h2>
<p><em>What makes a good pricing model</em>? More than anything else, you want to think about two numbers:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Conversion rate</strong> — how many prospective users become paying customers?</li>
<li><strong>Lifetime value</strong> — how much does each customer pay you over their lifetime? (You can think about this separately as ARPU <em>and</em> churn, but the two tend to have a tight relationship.)</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="buttondowns-old-pricing-model-2020">Buttondown&#39;s old pricing model (2020)</h2>
<h4 id="conversion-rate-5-·-ltv-455"><strong>Conversion rate: 5% · LTV: $455</strong></h4>
<p>When we launched in 2018, Buttondown had a hybrid model: you pay ~at-cost for the amount of emails you send, and then you also pay an additional $29/mo for additional functionality such as custom domains or whitelabeling. I considered this a very clever approach to align incentives — I &quot;give away&quot; the rails for free and then charge for the fancy stuff!</p>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/pp1.png" alt="Buttondown&#39;s pricing page circa 2020"></p>
<p>The problem here was in <em>communication</em>. The vast majority of new customers would have to begin their journey by emailing me some variation of &quot;wait, so how much do I need to pay?&quot; — rarely a good sign.</p>
<h2 id="buttondowns-new-pricing-model-2022">Buttondown&#39;s new pricing model (2022)</h2>
<h4 id="conversion-rate-85-·-ltv-397"><strong>Conversion rate: 8.5% · LTV: $397</strong></h4>
<p>Last year, I did what many founders do — admit defeat and swear newfound fealty to the almighty three-column SaaS grid. <em>Out</em> goes the clever combination of usage-and-feature-based pricing, <em>in</em> comes the cascading waterfall of checkboxes and the various price tiers:</p>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/pp2.png" alt="Buttondown&#39;s pricing page circa 2022"></p>
<p>The combination of both a <em>usage</em> cliff (you have too many subscribers, time to upgrade!) and a <em>feature</em> cliff (you want to use Zapier, time to upgrade!) proved efficacious: ARPU and expansion revenue steadily rose as new customers coalesced around the $29/mo plan.</p>
<p>While the <em>bones</em> of the new pricing model were solid, I found myself running into two core issues:</p>
<ol>
<li>Expansion revenue from the $29/mo tier into the $79/mo tier was <em>tiny</em>: businesses with hundreds of thousands of dollars of MRR were happily sitting in the $29/mo tier and I didn&#39;t have an obvious lever to incentivize them.</li>
<li>Enterprise/volume-based revenue was the wild west: larger customers were put off by the fact that there weren&#39;t any obvious tiers for them, and I had to YOLO answers for their costs each time they reached out.</li>
</ol>
<p>Once again, the pricing page presaged the outcome: <em>of course</em> folks weren&#39;t voluntarily expanding because they had no reason to! <em>of course</em> enterprise customers were harder to convert because the messaging for them was terrible!</p>
<h2 id="expanding-buttondowns-pricing-model-2023">Expanding Buttondown&#39;s pricing model (2023)</h2>
<h4 id="conversion-rate-92-·-ltv-511"><strong>Conversion rate: 9.2% · LTV: $511</strong></h4>
<p>Earlier this year, I shipped two changes to address both problems:</p>
<p>First, I added and shift functionality to incentivize moving towards Professional — gating whitelabeling behind a higher tier and adding support for teams + dedicated IPs, two long-standing asks:</p>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/pp3.png" alt="Buttondown&#39;s pricing page circa 2023"></p>
<p>Second, I added obvious enterprise pricing based on the same value metric that the existing prices were on:</p>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/pp4.png" alt="Buttondown&#39;s pricing page circa 2023"></p>
<p>(I dithered between having the public-facing enterprise pricing be based on &quot;emails sent&quot;, which is more common in the industry, vs. &quot;number of subscribers&quot; — ultimately landing on the latter because it feels more <em>cohesive</em> with the other prices.)</p>
<p>Buttondown&#39;s pricing isn&#39;t <em>perfect</em> — for instance, now I need to think about levers to incentivize upselling into the $139/mo plan — but it&#39;s much better than it was 24 months ago. (Much better being defined as ARPU is up <em>and</em> conversion rate is up <em>and</em> churn is down.)</p>
<p>(This pricing page is <a href="https://buttondown.email/pricing">live</a>, btw!)</p>
<h2 id="all-of-this-is-to-say">All of this is to say</h2>
<p>An underrated part of pricing is &quot;does this make sense to users?&quot; Users think about your pricing primarily through your pricing page (and secondarily through your competitor&#39;s pricing page.) If rationale or price can&#39;t be concisely explained on a page devoted to the subject, then something is probably wrong.</p>


Pricing page driven development

<p>I am a sucker for a good list of running costs, dating back to seeing <a href="https://cushionapp.com/running-costs">Cushion&#39;s</a>, back in 2015. I think it lends an earnest and unglamorous look as to what it <em>really</em> takes to a business in the way that &quot;hustle porn&quot;-type essays rarely do.</p>
<p>I&#39;ve done a poor job of keeping my own such running cost document (though I&#39;d like to do a better job!), but in lieu of a beautiful chart like Cushion&#39;s I&#39;ll try and offer something sloppier: a screenshot of my finances table!</p>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/2023-costs.png" alt="All the costs."></p>
<p>(As context, Buttondown posts around low five figures of monthly revenue, so this is a pretty healthy margin.)</p>
<p>Some notes on these numbers:</p>
<ul>
<li>My Stripe fees are a goose-egg thanks to Stripe offering a huge amount of free credits to alumni. This would otherwise be one of my largest costs.</li>
<li>Instead, my largest cost is Heroku, which is coincidentally the cost I&#39;m least happy with. Buttondown does not serve enough traffic to warrant five hundred dollars a month; in fact, the lion&#39;s share of that money goes towards a Redis cluster and auto-scaling asynchronous queues. A goal of mine for later this quarter is to migrate onto a more modern, cheaper solution like <a href="">Render</a> — which I&#39;ve napkin math&#39;d out to be closer to $150/month.</li>
<li>Of the things I pay for that I&#39;m <em>least satisfied with</em> regardless of cost, PagerDuty and StatusPage share the award. Neither of these are good products for my use case, and I deeply wish to migrate to <a href="https://betteruptime.com/">Better Uptime</a>. But the trap that you quickly run into is that $60/month is simply not an urgent enough level of cost to prioritize migration, and so I toil away using these subpar tools. (I&#39;ll switch off of them probably when I also switch off of Heroku.)</li>
<li>I spend a lot on <em>sending emails</em>. Sending emails is not free! I have three active ESPs — Postmark, Mailgun, and AWS — for various use cases, as well as a dormant ESP (Sendgrid) for failover&#39;s sake (it&#39;s currently on the free tier, as I only send through enough traffic to make sure the plumbing doesn&#39;t explode).</li>
</ul>
<p>Beyond that, nothing much to report. There&#39;s a slew of things that cost somewhere between $5—$30/month for which I use the following heuristic: does this provide at least fifteen minutes&#39; worth of value? If so, great. That&#39;s perhaps a low bar, but it&#39;s certainly a higher one than at big technical companies (where the bar might be &quot;has someone used this tool in the past year? okay, we won&#39;t churn from our four-digit plan&quot;.)</p>


What it costs to run a software business in 2023

<p>I took a break from the mistletoe chaos of the dead zone between Christmas and New Year&#39;s to do two things, both portrayed below:</p>
<ul>
<li>Triage Buttondown&#39;s <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/roadmap/issues">roadmap</a> from <strong>325</strong> items (at time of writing this; by the time this goes out, it&#39;ll likely be <strong>330</strong>) to around half of that.</li>
<li>Stack rank the top ten things I want to get done in Q1.</li>
</ul>
<p>&lt;CaptionedImage
  image={
    &quot;<a href="https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/31ec3a6e-b62a-4a2f-bafe-9be91047135e.png">https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/31ec3a6e-b62a-4a2f-bafe-9be91047135e.png</a>&quot;
  }</p>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>  (Thank you, Haley, for cutting up all of these into tiny slivers for me.)
</CaptionedImage></p>
<p>&lt;CaptionedImage
  image={
    &quot;<a href="https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/200dfa45-7d7f-4108-97e2-07a9b567054d.png">https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/200dfa45-7d7f-4108-97e2-07a9b567054d.png</a>&quot;
  }</p>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>  (I might not work at a big company any more, but I can&#39;t stop myself from
  over-stylizing my Google Sheets.)
</CaptionedImage></p>
<p>This process came from a simple desire: <em>focus</em>. Seven things on that list of ten are <em>the current thing, but better</em>, and only three things are net new:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>RSS automation</strong>, which I&#39;ve chatted about a little here, but feels like such an <em>obvious and useful</em> feature that I don&#39;t mind its expanding the surface area of what Buttondown does. (The more I work on Buttondown, the more confident I am that in many ways the <em>ideal</em> user, as odd as it sounds, is someone who never uses the writing interface. This is not to say I don&#39;t think the writing interface is useful, but that Buttondown&#39;s most obviously useful when it is a headless CMS — a &quot;just add subscriptions!&quot; to someone&#39;s existing set-up.)</li>
<li><strong>Social signin</strong>, which is just one of those obvious &quot;here&#39;s how you increase conversion rate by ten percent&quot; buttons that I think will take me less time to implement than to write a blog post about <em>how</em> I implemented it.</li>
<li><strong>Teams support</strong>, which is already 90% implemented and again falls into one of the bucket of &quot;obvious and useful&quot;. (Here&#39;s an interesting heuristic for whether or not a feature is a good idea — if you feel embarrassed when you tell someone that you haven&#39;t shipped it yet, you should probably build it.)</li>
</ul>
<p>It is...hard for me to take planning processes too seriously. Sometimes it feels sacrilegious to worry too much about event sequencing when I know I have more than enough high-urgency, high-importance items to tackle for the foreseeable future. As my old colleague <a href="https://basta.substack.com/p/why-dont-big-companies-move-fast">@basta writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s obvious value in knowing what you want to be doing in a year. Having a vision is important. Laying out all of the individual steps to get there isn’t valuable or important. Besides the planning process for an extended roadmap being tedious and slow, it forces teams to sign up for a plan that is disrupted by any participant in the plan facing disruptions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(By the way — you should subscribe to his newsletter. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say he was the single most interesting technical writer within the company and I am <em>thrilled</em> that he&#39;s taken his talents to the public domain, so to speak.)</p>
<p>The <em>vision</em> thing is good. I think I write every two months about struggling to translate tactics into strategy; this is one of those times where I am trying to be a bit more conscious about having a horizon larger than a month and an appetite larger than a pull request.</p>
<p>All of which is to say: the vision I&#39;m carrying forward into 2023 is (and will be enshrined into some somewhat hackeneyed principles, I&#39;m sure):</p>
<ul>
<li>Buttondown should be very easy to go from &quot;learning about&quot; to &quot;using&quot;.</li>
<li>Buttondown isn&#39;t perfect for every use case, but it&#39;s the <em>best</em> tool for its given use case.</li>
<li>Buttondown (to steal some video game parlance) has a great endgame experience without sacrificing the gameplay for your first ten levels.</li>
<li>Buttondown feels boring to use.</li>
</ul>
<p>I don&#39;t think I will actually <em>track</em> these as KPIs; I&#39;m not sure that&#39;s useful or interesting. But they will be a good compass, and a good forcing function to push me to say no to work that doesn&#39;t move any of these hypothetical needles.</p>


Q1 Planning

All about the new pricing plans, and I promise to try and take it easy on the marketing speak.

<p>First off — I&#39;ve read a countless number of these posts before and they&#39;re all couched in evasive, annoying language. It&#39;s very annoying! So let me get a few things out of the way:</p>
<ol>
<li>Buttondown&#39;s shifting from a two-tiered pricing model (pay for your subscriber count, and then also pay $29/mo for fancy features) to a more traditional model (pay $9/mo, $29/mo, or $79/mo.)</li>
<li>There&#39;s a very good likelihood you&#39;ll be paying less.</li>
<li>If you&#39;re currently paying for Buttondown, you&#39;ll be migrated to the new billing system at your current price at a legacy discount.</li>
<li>I&#39;m doing this for three reasons:
a) simplify the billing code
b) simplify Buttondown&#39;s value proposition
c) slightly shift Buttondown&#39;s clientele away from free users.</li>
</ol>
<p>Okay! That&#39;s the spark notes version. Now let&#39;s get on to the meat of the matter, which I&#39;ll express — out of equal parts rhetorical laziness and a distaste for hackneyed marketing speak — in Q&amp;A form.</p>
<h2 id="okay-so-whats-the-new-pricing-structure">Okay, so, what&#39;s the new pricing structure?</h2>
<p>Check out the new <a href="https://buttondown.email/pricing">pricing page</a>!</p>
<p>If you&#39;ve paid for software on the internet before, it might look familiar: this is what we technologists call a &quot;SaaS pricing grid.&quot;</p>
<p>Buttondown offers four tiers, based on the features you&#39;re looking for and the number of active subscribers you have:</p>
<h2 id="uh-what-was-the-old-pricing-structure-again">Uh, what was the old pricing structure again?</h2>
<p>The old pricing structure was two-track:</p>
<ol>
<li>Pay $5/month for every thousand subscribers you have (except for your first thousand, which is free.)</li>
<li>Pay $29/month for a bunch of &quot;power user&quot; features (custom domains, API support, that sort of thing.)</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="what-does-this-mean-for-my-paid-subscriptions">What does this mean for my paid subscriptions?</h2>
<p>Before the pricing change, Buttondown took <strong>zero</strong> percent of your paid subscriptions revenue. After the pricing change.... Buttondown takes <strong>zero</strong> percent of your paid subscriptions revenue.</p>
<p>You&#39;ll likely note that paid subscriptions as a <em>feature</em> has gone from being gratis to being locked behind the Basic plan ($9/month.)</p>
<h2 id="you-used-to-talk-a-big-game-about-costing-less-than-your-competitors-is-that-still-true">You used to talk a big game about costing less than your competitors. Is that still true?</h2>
<p>Yup, yup it is. There are edge cases (if you&#39;re just using Substack without any paid subscriptions functionality, for instance), but Buttondown&#39;s still pretty dang cheap for what you&#39;re getting.</p>
<p>That being said — I want folks to pay for Buttondown not because it&#39;s the cheapest option but because it&#39;s the best. If I&#39;m going to lose you as a customer because a competing tool is going to save you three dollars every month, I&#39;m more okay with that now than I was in 2016 when I cooked up these prices.</p>
<h2 id="what-do-you-mean-i-could-be-paying-less">What do you mean I could be paying <em>less</em>?</h2>
<p>Let&#39;s say you have 3,500 subscribers and you&#39;re a Buttondown for Professionals user because you&#39;d like to host your archives on a custom domain. You&#39;re currently paying me $49/mo — $29/mo for Buttondown for Professionals, and $20/mo for those 3,500 subscribers.</p>
<p>You&#39;re now just on the hook for $29/mo. <strong>That&#39;s a saving of $20/mo!</strong></p>
<h2 id="what-if-im-gonna-have-to-pay-more">What if I&#39;m gonna have to pay <em>more</em>?</h2>
<p>Yeah, the above is a cherry-picked example! Let&#39;s say you have 3,500 subscribers and you&#39;re <em>not</em> using Buttondown for Professionals — you&#39;re getting bumped up from $20/month to $29/month.</p>
<p>Theoretically, at least. Like I led with — I&#39;m honoring everyone&#39;s current rates with a legacy discount, and am more than happy to grant you a $9/month coupon. <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">Email me</a> and I&#39;ll cut you a discount!</p>
<h2 id="what-happens-if-i-get-migrated-into-a-legacy-rate-but-then-get-so-many-subscribers-that-i-get-bumped-into-a-new-plan">What happens if I get migrated into a legacy rate but then get so many subscribers that I get bumped into a new plan?</h2>
<p>Your rate only applies to the current plan that you&#39;re slotted into — so in the above example where you&#39;re getting $9/month off, as soon as you either upgrade to a new subscription (by breaking 5,000 subscribers) or downgrade to the lightweight Basic subscription that legacy discount is null and void.</p>
<h2 id="does-this-mean-youre-finally-offering-annual-discounts">Does this mean you&#39;re finally offering annual discounts?</h2>
<p>Yes! Buy a year, get two months free.</p>
<h2 id="you-said-simplify-buttondowns-value-proposition-and-that-sounds-awfully-like-marketing-talk">You said &quot;simplify Buttondown&#39;s value proposition&quot; and that sounds awfully like <em>marketing talk</em>.</h2>
<p>I mean it! Do you know how many emails I&#39;ve had to answer from folks rightfully confused about how much I&#39;m going to charge them when they migrate onto Buttondown?</p>
<p>I really liked the two-tier pricing structure I came up with back in 2016. I thought it was <em>clever</em>. I have learned, in the past six years, that it is more important to be clear than to be clever. (In most cases, but especially when it comes to charging people money over the internet.)</p>
<p>It&#39;s now <em>much</em> easier for someone to visit Buttondown and understand how much they&#39;re going to have to spend to use it — moreover, I think that number makes more sense to <em>me</em> as well.</p>
<h2 id="you-said-shifting-buttondowns-clientele-away-from-free-users-and-im-a-free-user">You said &quot;shifting Buttondown&#39;s clientele away from free users&quot; and <em>I&#39;m</em> a free user.</h2>
<p>I&#39;m sorry! I really am.</p>
<p>I won&#39;t sugarcoat it — Buttondown&#39;s <em>free</em> tier is shrinking pretty significantly, from a thousand subscribers to a mere hundred.</p>
<p>Buttondown has grown a <em>lot</em> over the past few years; when I added the generous free tier back in 2016 I imagined a few friends using the platform, not tens of thousands of accounts sending millions of emails every month (and sending me thousands of questions &amp; feature requests.)</p>
<p>I&#39;ve noticed two motifs alongside this growth:</p>
<ol>
<li>Around 85% of the time I spend helping folks out is time spent with folks who are not paying for Buttondown.</li>
<li>Many of these folks say something along the lines of &quot;I wish my newsletter was large enough that I could pay you for your help!&quot;</li>
</ol>
<p>It&#39;s not feasible for me to continue supporting it in its current fashion: I am spending more time answering questions about setting up DNS and debugging CSS issues than I am spending time making it a better tool.</p>
<p>This change is a bet that folks are willing to put their money where their mouth is and pay for software they find useful. It might be a mistake!</p>
<p>But the alternative is doing a lot of things that <em>take me away from Buttondown</em> — hiring customer service folks, charging more for already-profitable customers, et cetera. And that feels worse.</p>
<h2 id="ive-got-more-than-ten-thousand-subscribers">I&#39;ve got more than ten thousand subscribers.</h2>
<p>We&#39;ve probably already been in touch to discuss your new pricing plan, but <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a>!</p>
<h2 id="whats-the-timeline-for-all-of-this">What&#39;s the timeline for all of this?</h2>
<p>If you&#39;re reading this essay, then the new pricing changes are live — any new accounts registered are subject to them.</p>
<p>If you&#39;re interested in getting the legacy discount for your <em>existing</em> account, I&#39;m going to leave that option open through the end of the year — at which point I&#39;ll be migrating folks who haven&#39;t reached out to the new pricing and unshipping the old billing engine. So <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a>!</p>
<h2 id="i-have-a-question-that-wasnt-answered-here">I have a question that wasn&#39;t answered here.</h2>
<p>Great! <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">Email me</a>.</p>


Buttondown's new pricing system

<p>It’s been a while since I’ve written a good old-fashioned updates post! I wrote in late December about <a href="https://blog.buttondown.email/2020/12/31/buttondown-in-2021">my annual roadmap</a> and I’m excited to say a lot of this work has already landed in the past three months: operational requests are way down, paid newsletters and subscribe management is improved (though not quite yet <em>finished</em>, as we’ll get to in a moment), and Buttondown’s performance metrics are the best they’ve been since launching in 2017.</p>
<p>I’ve received an influx of new users and customers this week (hi, new friends!) and wanted to provide some context as to what I’m working on now: but you can always check up on the <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/roadmap/">public roadmap</a> for a slightly-more-up-to-date view of things.</p>
<h3 id="whats-coming-up-in-april">What’s coming up in April</h3>
<p>The three features I plan on launching in the next few weeks:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Support for pay-what-you-want newsletters</strong>. There are a bunch of different names for this, but I prefer to think of this as a full-on “patronage” model: if you’re an author, you can optionally collect an arbitrary recurring sum from your subscribers.</li>
<li><strong>Improved accessibility &amp; browser compatibility</strong>. If you are a technical user, there is a different description for this, which is “removing JavaScript from your newsletters”. I am happy to dive into depth about this — and will, on a later date! — but I want Buttondown’s archives to be the fastest and most accessible content platform in the world, and this is the keystone in making that a reality.</li>
<li><strong>Support for file attachments</strong>. At long last, you can attach arbitrary files to your newsletters — podcast episodes, PDFs for class discussion, code snippets — and send them out without having to pull in some sort of third-party provider.</li>
</ol>
<p>Some other things that are only exciting to me, a massive dork:</p>
<ul>
<li>Support for uploading from <code>.zips</code> so I can stop scraping archives (which will also involve being able to pull in historical email events like opens and clicks)</li>
<li>Better firewall detection to make sure overzealous spam-checkers don’t result in accidental unsubscriptions</li>
<li>Improved analytics for paid subscriptions</li>
<li>Building out a Tumblr-esque theme gallery for easily customizing your email</li>
<li>Improved DNS onboarding</li>
<li>Support for IFTTT and Integromat</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="i-want-to-hear-from-you">I want to hear from you</h3>
<p>If you’ve emailed me, you have probably heard me ask some variation of the question “what else can I help you with?”, and I mean that in earnest! The roadmap I just outlined above is largely due to your input: if there is a feature you are hoping for or some bug or paper cut that you don’t think <em>really</em> warrants my attention — I promise you, it does, and <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">please email me</a>. (My favorite emails are the ones I get that are laundry lists of complaints and feature ideas.)</p>
<h2 id="what-buttondown-is">What Buttondown is</h2>
<p>March is not quite yet over and it has already been the most successful month of Buttondown’s history. This is super humbling: I am grateful that so many people have discovered Buttondown valuable enough to pay for. Buttondown is not a venture-backed behemoth with marketing capital to spend: every single user has come based on the kind words of another, and I promise that I am not being overly saccharine when I say that gives me a great deal of joy and pride.</p>
<p>One of the privileges of running Buttondown in its current form — a labor of love — is that I can do with it what I please. I grow it more like a garden than a business, which is why I do things like <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/">set aside a portion of profits for open-source software that Buttondown depends upon</a>.</p>
<p>It has been hard for me to square the dissonance of Buttondown’s success and growth — and the fact that I can spend my past few weeks stably and happily coding along — with the knowledge that so many others cannot leave their homes without the fear of being harassed or attacked.</p>
<p>I’ll be donating 90% of this month’s profits (everything except the 10% set aside for open-source funding) to <a href="https://www.apichaya.org/">API Chaya</a>, a Washington-based organization for helping AAPI survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.</p>
<h3 id="lastly-a-dog">Lastly, a dog</h3>
<p>If you follow me on Twitter, you may know that I am obsessed with my <a href="https://telemachus.dog">dog</a>. Here is Telemachus in all of his sleeping glory;</p>
<p><img src="https://scontent-sea1-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/p1080x1080/142459915_820727185443979_6806333071965615191_n.jpg?tp=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=107&_nc_ohc=pEZiIgs7EXUAX94QamE&ccb=7-4&oh=924143a119c68d8f3d332a9941e6f3e1&oe=607E52F8&_nc_sid=86f79a" alt=""></p>


Spring 2021

<p>I haven’t written that much about Buttondown in 2020: scanning through the archives, it looks like a total of eight blog posts (including this one.) That’s not so great!</p>
<p>On the other hand, I have been very busy with doing things on Buttondown that don’t involve blogging. Buttondown has been growing steadily — did you know that newsletters are having a moment? — and my time spent on Buttondown is concomitant with that growth, meaning that my hours are spent more on customer service, onboarding, and scaling than on trying to build out new features or convince more people to write emails (the two ostensible goals of blogging about Buttondown.)</p>
<p>Still, I think it is worth taking a step back and talking about where Buttondown will be going in the next twelve months. As usual, don’t hold me <em>too</em> heavily to any of this stuff — and remember that the <a href="https://github.com/buttondown-email/roadmap/">roadmap</a> is the best source of truth out there.</p>
<h2 id="things-i-am-excited-about">Things I am excited about</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Making common operational requests self-service</strong>. Importing archives, importing subscribers, setting up DNS, and using the software before registering are the four most common pain points for folks acclimating to Buttondown, and thankfully all four are things that I can solve with software engineering!</li>
<li><strong>Improved features for paid newsletters</strong>. Support for non-USD subscriptions, pay-what-you-want (and tier-based) models, and stronger subscriber management tools are all on the way as paid newsletters graduate from “fun feature” to “major component of Buttondown’s value proposition.”</li>
<li><strong>Internationalization</strong>, which is 80% done and, as the prophecy goes, only requires another 80% left to be ready to ship.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="boring-business-stuff-you-probably-dont-care-about">Boring business stuff you probably don’t care about</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Improvements to the conversion funnel</strong>. Mostly this will be coming in the form of moving a lot of my content marketing &amp; public resources (like that roadmap, and the FAQ, and the running costs) to be under the <code>buttondown.email</code> domain rather than a random Notion page.</li>
<li><strong>Performance &amp; operational costs improvements</strong>. I’ll likely be moving some or all traffic off of Mailgun and Heroku; both are wonderful solutions but I’m now at the event horizon where it’s worth spending some time building out lower-margin solutions.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="things-that-wont-happen-in-2021">Things that won’t happen in 2021</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Support for activation sequences / drip campaigns</strong>. Sorry, y’all, I know this is the most common feature request out there, but it requires a lot of real estate, thought, and investment for something that I am not particularly interested or excited about!</li>
<li><strong>SSO and teams support</strong>. I am holding out some hope here that I figure out a way to work on more enterprise-y/teams-y features, but it’s just not in the cards.</li>
</ul>
<p>As always, if you have any feedback (or thoughts on what I should be working on next!) — <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a>! Beyond that, happy new year and I’m excited to share more with y’all soon.</p>


Buttondown in 2021

<p>Software sits on the shoulders of giants.</p>
<p>Buttondown is a tool that simply would not exist without the gargantuan effort of many, many open-source projects, the vast majority of which are drastically underfunded relative to the value they provide.</p>
<p>I&#39;ve committed to donating at least 20% of Buttondown&#39;s profits to the software that enables it. This is a relatively low number in absolute terms — I&#39;m certainly not changing anyone&#39;s life — but I think it&#39;s still important.</p>
<p>I&#39;ve finally pulled together a document for tracking Buttondown&#39;s public donations, and you can follow it at <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email">docs.buttondown.email</a>.</p>
<p>(I haven&#39;t pulled it server-side, like I did with my <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email">running costs</a>, because I anticipate the data being much more boring. But if that changes in the future, I&#39;ll certainly re-evaluate!)</p>


Buttondown's funding of open source software

<p>A question I get surprisingly often in my inbox:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hey Justin — do I <em>really</em> need to include a physical address in my email newsletter?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a reasonable question! Going from cyberspace into the physical world via an address (especially if it&#39;s your home address) sends all sorts of red flags, I&#39;m sure.</p>
<p>Sadly (or not sadly, depending on your perspective), the answer is yes. You need a physical address!</p>
<p>Your ESP (whether that&#39;s Buttondown or someone else) asking for a physical mailing address is standard practice, and you should actually be a little alarmed if you <em>aren&#39;t</em> being asked for one. This is because of the <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business">CAN-SPAM Act</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some good tips to comply with the law while remaining safe and practicing good opsec:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Use a snail mail address</strong>. This <em>has</em> to be an actual physical address. [^1]</li>
<li><strong>Don&#39;t use your actual home&#39;s address.</strong> Rent a P.O. box, an office, or something along those lines. These generally cost around five bucks a month and are well worth it.</li>
<li><strong>Use our official newsletter address.</strong> Like our <a href="https://help.convertkit.com/en/articles/2502494-alternatives-for-your-physical-address?lmref=7geofA">friends at ConvertKit</a>, Buttondown offers a physical address:</li>
</ol>
<pre><code>304 S. Jones Blvd #3567
Las Vegas NV 89107
</code></pre>
<p>[^1]: Buttondown doesn&#39;t do any enforcement or analysis of your address.</p>


Why you need a physical address in your newsletter

<p>Welcome to May! I wrote this from two places:</p><ol><li>the lounge of Seattle’s Sorrento Hotel, counting down the minutes until Silent Reading Party (a truly insufferable city tradition that I love dearly) begins;</li><li>the promenade of Cal Anderson Park, on a particularly sunny Saturday.</li></ol><p>I wrote last month that April was going to be filled with small and necessary work, a nice step back before diving into some renewed projects.  It was exactly that!</p><p>Buttondown has been <em>buggy</em> the past few months.  It feels bad to admit that, but it's true; the "bugs" tag in my issue tracker has been growing wider and more bulbous, and it feels good (and, frankly, necessary) to dedicate some time tackling it.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"></figure><p>Still, I was able to get <em>some</em> fun stuff done:</p><h1 id="email-domains-for-all">Email domains for all</h1><p>I announced last month that I had added support for custom SPIF/DKM records for premium accounts, and I'm <em>thrilled</em> to announce that it's now available for <em>everyone</em>.  If you own your own domain, you can now use it to sign the emails you send from Buttondown, greatly improving deliverability:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"></figure><p>There are a couple reasons why I decided to make this a free feature: but it really comes down to one thing: <strong>deliverability is important</strong>, and it feels gross to essentially gate high deliverability behind $29/month.</p><h1 id="utm-sources">UTM sources</h1><p>In what may be the most niche feature ever, you can now <a href="https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/what-are-utm-tags-and-how-to-use-them">automatically apply UTM tags</a> to all outgoing links from your newsletter.</p><h1 id="twitter-support-for-meta-tags">Twitter support for meta tags</h1><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"></figure><p>Sharing your newsletter on Twitter looks prettier!</p><h1 id="what-s-next">What’s next</h1><p>May is going to also be a heavy bug-squash-and-technical-debt month, but with a couple meatier things to handle:</p><ol><li>CAPTCHA support for embedded signup forms.  (Lots of folks have complained about getting spammy subscribers: I hear you, and this should help with that!)</li><li>A nicer writing UI.  (The first major UI change since I launched Buttondown in 2017!)</li></ol><h1 id="oh-and-introducing-weeknotes">Oh, and... introducing Weeknotes</h1><p>I've launched <a href="https://weeknotes.buttondown.email">Weeknotes</a>, a weekly update newsletter for Buttondown.  Weeknotes will be more focused on the minutiae of building Buttondown, rather than feature announcements and updates.  Subscribe to it if:</p><ol><li>You want to learn more about what building Buttondown is like.</li><li>You want to support Buttondown but do not want to pay $29/month for a premium account.  (Weeknotes costs $4/month — think of it as patronage!)</li></ol><p>As such, I'll likely be shifting the blog's structure from monthly updates more towards blog posts for each major feature.  (Of course, I say that now, but who knows what happens five months from now.  I'm nothing if not consistently inconsistent!)</p>


May Updates

<p>Howdy, friends!  I'm writing this belated update having just arrived back in Seattle from a week of leisure and wine in Paris.  Apologies for the sluggishness in responding to emails and DMs; rest assured, I'll be spending the next few days getting back to folks.</p><h2 id="what-s-new">What’s new</h2><p>March was a <em>big</em> month for Buttondown.</p><p>I shipped three things that have folks have been pining for for <em>months</em>:</p><ol><li>You can now create and send emails through <a href="https://api.buttondown.email">Buttondown’s API</a>.</li><li>Buttondown now has a <a href="https://zapier.com/platform/public-invite/10328/3f461ccf51be6e2e3f356c7365434907/">Zapier integration</a>, meaning that you can now do things like fire webhook events in response to new subscribers or send out emails in response to RSS items.</li><li>Paid subscriptions are now in public beta.  (I’ve onboarded three folks and am in the process of onboarding three more; if you want in, just email me!)</li></ol><p>I cannot be more excited about all of these new ships.  There’s a lot of work to be done still (especially on that last piece: paid subscriptions are <em>barebone</em>, and I need to flesh out analytics and reporting) but this represents the culmination of a lot of work and I am thrilled to have it across the line.</p><h2 id="what-s-next">What’s next</h2><p>April is going to be a languid month, filled with paying down some technical debt, solving myriad bugs, and getting my ducks in a row. I’m not promising anything too huge, but some small stuff you may enjoy:</p><ol><li>More work on enabling multiple newsletters for a given account.</li><li>Supporting Firefox/Safari’s <em>reading mode</em> on archive pages.</li><li>Nicer slug URLs for archived emails.</li><li>Exposing subscriber events through the API.</li><li>Seriously, lots of bug fixes.</li></ol><h2 id="running-costs">Running costs</h2><p>I've updated <a href="https://buttondown.email/stack">Buttondown's running costs</a> for April.  Notable are the increased Clearbit costs and the ever-rising costs of Mailgun's email validation; if I have time, I'm going to work on ameliorating both.</p><h2 id="some-other-things-you-might-find-interesting-">Some other things you might find interesting.</h2><p>I’ve been writing about Buttondown a fair bit on my personal blog:</p><ol><li><a href="https://jmduke.com/2019/04/07/buttondown-s-anti-roadmap">Buttondown's anti-roadmap</a></li><li><a href="https://jmduke.com/2019/03/25/solvable-problems-in-a-mid-stage-side-project">Buttondown's solveable problems</a>.</li></ol>


April Updates

<p>Hi, friends!  This was a great month in Buttondownsville (Buttondownia?).  I was able to take care of a huge number of paper-cut issues and build out some exciting infrastructure for the next few months.</p><h2 id="even-nicer-analytics-graphs">Even nicer analytics graphs</h2><p>Look at these new graphs!  They're beautiful.  They're wonderful.  They're straight-up <em>lovely</em>.  And they are all thanks to the <a href="https://c3js.org">c3</a> package, which I'm slowly migrating our visualizations to.  (Sorry, <a href="https://frappe.io/charts">Frappe</a>.)</p><p>Notably, you can now see how many unconfirmed users you have, if you've enabled double opt-in on your account.</p><h2 id="ghost-integration-">Ghost integration!</h2><p>Our <a href="https://docs.ghost.org/integrations/buttondown/">Ghost integration</a> is now live!  Woop!</p><h2 id="support-for-sending-from-custom-domains">Support for sending from custom domains</h2><p>Okay, no exciting GIF here, <em>but</em>.  You can set up <a href="https://blog.woodpecker.co/cold-email/spf-dkim/">SPF/DKIM records</a> if you want to send stuff from your own domain.  Intrigued? <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">Email me.</a></p><h2 id="what-s-next">What's Next</h2><p>Hoo boy I'm excited for March.  The plans:</p><ol><li><strong>Zapier integration.</strong></li><li><strong>Allow creating emails from the API.  </strong>Meant to get to this in February, but was unable to.</li><li><strong>Launching Premium subscribers.  </strong>Sorry for bailing on this for like six months, but I wanted to make sure the polish was there — and it almost is!</li></ol><h2 id="thanks">Thanks</h2><p>Buttondown wouldn't be Buttondown if it weren't for the support of lots of kind folks who share it with others, report issues, suggest features, send emails, and — of course — pay me.  In particular, this month I'd like to thank:</p><ul><li><a href="https://jackcheng.com">Jack</a>, for being a very patient guinea pig for testing custom domain routing</li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/mikker">Mikkel</a>, for suggesting a now-live <a>SmartyPants</a> integration</li><li><a href="https://craigmod.com">Craig</a>, for sharing Buttondown</li><li><a href="https://ghost.org">John</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/kymeliis">Kym</a> for working with me to launch the Ghost integration</li></ul><h2 id="a-gif-for-your-troubles">A GIF for your troubles</h2><iframe src="https://giphy.com/embed/6EW2vu7rqkcyQ" width="480" height="360" frameBorder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowFullScreen></iframe><p>Have a good one, y'all, and always feel free to <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a> if you need anything!</p>


March Updates

<p>Welcome to February, y'all! Seattle saw its first snow of 2019 last night, which is always an event worth celebrating.  I'm writing this from a friend's couch and watching a <em>very slow</em> Super Bowl (and a <em>very mediocre</em> Maroon Five performance.)</p>
<p>Some new stuff from January:</p>
<h2 id="richtextcopypaste">Rich text copy/paste</h2>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/knAFRsx.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>I'm super pumped about this one!  You can now copy and paste HTML or rich text from sources like Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or random web pages and Buttondown will automatically convert it into Markdown.</p>
<h2 id="amoreprominentdraftinformationpane">A more prominent draft information pane</h2>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/KWQnVNP.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>This looks small but <em>is</em> big — we've rearchitected the draft view to add this little information pane.  Right now, there are just two things — the link checker and the word count — but it will get more helpful and complex over time.</p>
<p>(And yeah, okay, y'all win.  There's a word counter now.)</p>
<h2 id="betterintrospectionintoincomingsubscribers">Better introspection into incoming subscribers</h2>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/kqpny9i.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>We've enhanced the subscriber information chart in the Analytics page to show more information about <em>where</em> those subscribers are coming from!</p>
<h2 id="upcomingwork">Upcoming work</h2>
<p>Some stuff I want to work on more in February:</p>
<ol>
<li>Continuing to clean up the new incoming subscribers analytics.  (It's still very rough around the edges.)</li>
<li>Allowing you to filter subscribers by source or referral URL.</li>
<li>Allowing you to disable or enable various sharing integrations.</li>
<li>More work towards enabling multiple newsletters for a single account.  (This won't get done in February, but it needs refactoring.  So much refactoring.)</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="thanks">Thanks</h2>
<p>It is a wild understatement to say that Buttondown would not exist or thrive without the support of the folks that use it, pay for it, write about it, report bugs about it, suggest features for it... you get the idea.</p>
<p>In particular:</p>
<ol>
<li>Thanks to <a href="https://startupsesame.com">Ben</a> for suggesting the <em>rich text copy and paste</em>.</li>
<li>Thanks to <a href="https://mxstbr.com/">Max</a> for suggesting the improved introspection into subscriber sources.</li>
<li>Thanks to <a href="https://t.co/l66BbKV5pZ">Sonya</a> for reporting an issue with subscriber confirmation.</li>
<li>Thanks to <a href="https://www.brizk.com/">Kai</a> for sharing Buttondown on <a href="https://www.densediscovery.com/">Dense Discovery</a>.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="agifforyourtroubles">A gif for your troubles</h2>
<p><img src="https://media3.giphy.com/media/8PA8Ew3nw97yg/200w.webp?cid=3640f6095c57952555376a654592a5db" alt="" /></p>
<p>Have a good one, y'all, and always feel free to <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a> if you need anything!</p>


February Updates

<p>Hello!  How are you doing? That scarf looks great on you.</p>
<p>It’s been a while since I’ve checked in.  That’s for a couple reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>It has been a particularly hectic summer.</li>
<li>And, I suppose, a particularly hectic autumn.</li>
<li>Heck, the winter's been pretty busy too.</li>
<li>Buttondown’s been growing — like, a lot — which means there have been more operational demands that keep me from building features and writing lovely monthly missives to you all.</li>
<li>Writing is, like, <em>difficult</em>, and sometimes I am very lazy.</li>
</ol>
<p>And, so, yeah — on the surface, not much has changed over the past six months.  Below the surface, though, there have been lots of things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Lots of “performance improvements and bug fixes”, to use the App Store parlance.  There are slow endpoints and finicky modals that are slightly less slow and slightly less finicky now.</li>
<li>Operational scaling; figuring out how to scale my customer support to make sure folks get responses and help quickly and effectively.</li>
<li>Some infrastructural changes, including a new customer enrichment provider and a better queuing mechanism.</li>
</ul>
<p>But as I send this out, it is December, and the Seattle air is suffused with a certain crispness and calm that steers a young man’s thoughts towards feature development.  I’m excited to keep working in earnest on stuff that makes Buttondown, you know, better, in the new year:</p>
<ul>
<li>Email templating</li>
<li>SoundCloud, Instagram, and CodePen embeds.</li>
<li>A better way to view your upcoming scheduled emails</li>
<li>Suggested schedule times.</li>
<li>Zapier support.</li>
<li>Multiple newsletters for a single user.</li>
<li>Integration with Google Analytics.</li>
<li>The finishing touches on paid subscriptions (sorry to those of you who have been pining for this! Just want to make sure it’s really, <em>really</em> polished.)</li>
</ul>
<p>This is going to sound hackneyed, but it is a blessing and a joy to work on Buttondown.  Y’all are the best.</p>
<p>(And, as always, if you ever have any questions, concerns, or suggestions — <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">shoot me an email</a>!</p>
<p>(And I promise, the monthly updates will come back in 2019.  I missed them.)</p>


Winter Update

<p>It's really, <em>really</em> summer here in Seattle; the past few days have been what we tend to call Juneuary (sixty-six and overcast), but it's starting to get back into the swing of things.  I'm writing this (a couple days after the start of the month, as is tradition) and then heading off to bike up north to luxuriate in the sunshine.</p>
<h2 id="newslettericons">Newsletter Icons</h2>
<p>It's tricky to balance the minimalism of Buttondown with the fact that your newsletter is, well, <em>yours</em>.  To that end, I've introduced nice little icons with which you can adorn your newsletter — they'll show up on your archive pages, in your favicon, and in your meta tags.  Upload one in your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings/design">settings page</a>!</p>
<h2 id="sendingdrafts">Sending Drafts</h2>
<p>Sometimes you need another pair of eyes on your draft.  Sending a draft to yourself and then forwarding it is a <em>hassle</em> — this makes it a little bit easier.</p>
<h2 id="gistembedding">Gist embedding</h2>
<p>Need to share code?  Just drop in the URL for a gist and it'll get automagically embedded.</p>
<h2 id="giphyembedding">Giphy embedding</h2>
<p>Need to share GIFs (just as important as code!)?  Just drop in the URL for a Giphy GIF and you're good to go.  (Regardless of how you choose to pronounce it.  I don't care, I promise.)</p>
<h2 id="upcoming">Upcoming</h2>
<p>You know the deal — roadmap in flux, I have the capriciousness of an old man, etc. etc.  Still, I am pumped (as ever!) for what's coming out this month:</p>
<ol>
<li>More paid subscriptions stuff. (It's getting <em>so close</em>, y'all.  Just making sure to dot my i's and cross my t's.)</li>
<li>Take another stab at the settings page.  This is boring work, but the number of settings has grown really large over time, and it's looking a bit like an overgrown jungle at the moment.</li>
<li>Improvements to deliverability speed and reliability.  (There have been some issues with the IP we're using that I'm looking to resolve permanently.)</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="agifforyourtroubles">A gif for your troubles</h2>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="byR8SQY"><a href="//imgur.com/byR8SQY">The snoot must be booped.</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>


June Updates

<p>Howdy!</p>
<p>It's a quiet Sunday here in Seattle; the sun hasn't quite imposed its will on the streets and shops yet, and I'm here wrapping up a couple small bugs.  (Er, bug <em>fixes</em>, not bugs.  But probably some bugs too.)</p>
<p>Here's what's new this month!</p>
<h3 id="analytics">Analytics</h3>
<p>The new <a href="https://buttondown.email/features/analytics">analytics page</a> is live!  There are still a few edge cases that are rough around the edges, but I hope you enjoy it (and let me know if there's anything that explodes.)</p>
<h3 id="codehandling">Code handling</h3>
<p>Code blocks now work, like, <em>way</em> better, as seen above.  (Plus: built-in syntax highlighting!  Check out the <a href="https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/code_hilite/">documentation</a> for more details.)</p>
<h3 id="vimeoembeds">Vimeo embeds</h3>
<p>Adding a Vimeo video to your email is as easy as dropping in the link, as you see above. (More context: email clients don't support actual videos, so what we're doing here is generating a thumbnail of the video, adding a play button on top, and making it a link to the actual video!)</p>
<h3 id="upcoming">Upcoming</h3>
<p>As always, my product backlog is somewhere between &quot;flux&quot; and &quot;unmitigated&quot; chaos, but here's whats on the docket for June:</p>
<ol>
<li>Launching the beta for <em>paid subscriptions.</em> (Does this sound interesting?  Get in touch.)</li>
<li>Support for newsletter icons.</li>
<li>Sending drafts to folks besides yourself.  (Meant to do this last month.  I got...sidetracked.)</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="agifforyourtroubles">A gif for your troubles</h3>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="UZJPQIh"><a href="//imgur.com/UZJPQIh">Efficient and Appealing</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>


<p>Howdy!  April had a <em>lot</em> of stuff — 184 commits, to be exact! — and a lot of that was laying groundwork and paying off technical debt, as well as some general performance improvements and housecleaning.  Still, we've got three exciting things to share:</p>
<h3 id="youtubeembeds">YouTube embeds</h3>
<p>Adding a YouTube video to your email is as easy as dropping in the link, as you see above.  (More context: email clients don't support actual videos, so what we're doing here is generating a thumbnail of the video, adding a play button on top, and making it a link to the actual video!)</p>
<h3 id="faq">FAQ</h3>
<p>Y'all got questions, and a lot of them are very similar! (Which is more a condemnation of how troublesome and unintuitive parts of the interface are — which is on me, of course.) So <a href="https://www.notion.so/FAQ-23bd5faf51eb489a8e7a828bc5249459">here</a> is a central repository for all of that, lovingly hosted by <a href="https://notion.so">Notion</a>.</p>
<h3 id="autosaving">Autosaving</h3>
<p>See that lil checkbox in the bottom-right corner?  It will automatically save all your new drafts!  Don't have to worry about accidentally refreshing or navigating away or any of that pesky stuff.</p>
<h3 id="upcomingupdates">Upcoming updates</h3>
<p>My product roadmap is, as ever, prone to flights of fancy, but here's what's on the docket for May:</p>
<ol>
<li>A standalone analytics page, filled with pretty graphs and big numbers (and a couple vanity metrics, just for good measure).  This has been in the works for a while and I'm so excited to finally share it with y'all!</li>
<li>Gist embedding and better code handling.  I promised this last month <em>and then promptly forgot about it</em>.</li>
<li>A very commonly requested feature — sending drafts to folks besides yourself!  I need to bake out the experience of this a little bit more, but I'm pretty excited about it.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="agifforyourtroubles">A gif for your troubles</h3>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="2OWmRWp"><a href="//imgur.com/2OWmRWp">Boop!</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>


<p>Hey there! March has had a bunch of stuff arrive in the ol' Buttondown codebase, mostly on the smaller side of things.  Here's the quick laundry list:</p>
<h3 id="sortyoursubscribers">Sort your subscribers</h3>
<p>Coming shortly after publishing this — sorting by tags, as well!</p>
<h3 id="redesignedarchivepages">Redesigned archive pages</h3>
<p>Easier on the eyes.  (No changes to the actual emails being sent.)</p>
<h3 id="streamlinedbillingflow">Streamlined billing flow</h3>
<p>Okay, yeah, you might not be too excited about this, but it's a big deal I promise.</p>
<h3 id="publicapilaunch">Public API launch</h3>
<p>Still in the process of baking out more documentation, but it's live! If you're curious about this, feel free to <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email</a> me.</p>
<h3 id="upcomingupdates">Upcoming updates</h3>
<p>My product roadmap is, as ever, prone to flights of fancy, but here's what's on the docket for April:</p>
<ul>
<li>Adding an FAQ page (or knowledge base or whatever we want to call the whole idea of enshrining knowledge someplace that is publicly accessible.)</li>
<li>Nicer display of code in emails and archives.</li>
<li>Some boring technical debt stuff.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="agifforyourtroubles">A gif for your troubles</h3>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="5EntMNH"><a href="//imgur.com/5EntMNH">Imgurians on the camp now.</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>


<p>Howdy and Happy New Year!  We had a quiet but productive start to 2018; I'm pumped to share what we've been up to.</p>
<h3 id="linkanalytics">Link analytics</h3>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/6.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>You can now gain insight into exactly what links folks are clicking on and reading!</p>
<h3 id="embeddedtweets">Embedded tweets</h3>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/7.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>You can now paste Tweet URLs and they'll automatically get converted into embedded tweets, saving you time and energy.</p>
<h3 id="nicerscheduling">Nicer scheduling</h3>
<p><img src="/next-assets/img/8.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>The scheduling mechanism has been replaced with something a little less janky and confusing.  (Everyone hated UTC.  Myself included.)</p>
<h3 id="onnextweeksepisode">On next week's episode...</h3>
<p>My product roadmap is, as ever, prone to flights of fancy, but here's what's on the docket for February:</p>
<ul>
<li>Continuing to refine and improve tweet embedding.  (It handles embedded links sort of oddly, amongst other things.)</li>
<li>Getting the API ready for public consumption.  (If you have strong feelings on this, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">let me know</a>!)</li>
<li>A stand-alone analytics page.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="spreadtheword">Spread the word!</h3>
<p>If you've enjoyed using Buttondown, <a href="https://twitter.com/home?status=Buttondown%20is%20the%20best%20way%20to%20start%20and%20grow%20your%20newsletter%3A%20https%3A//buttondown.email">share it</a> with a friend! More people using Buttondown means more time and energy I can justify working on it.</p>
<h3 id="agifforyourtroubles">A gif for your troubles</h3>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="d8skZVO"><a href="//imgur.com/d8skZVO">Joey doesn&#39;t share food</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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January Updates

<p><img src="/next-assets/img/53.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>I <a href="https://twitter.com/justinmduke/status/820761156964843520">tweeted</a> about my desire for Buttondown in January.  That was before it was Buttondown, just a hope that a tool that I used could be slightly better in a bunch of different ways.</p>
<p>And then <a href="https://twitter.com/justinmduke/status/827663184274132992">again</a> in February.</p>
<p>In late April, I finally decided to build it.</p>
<p>By the end of May, <a href="https://twitter.com/justinmduke/status/868944561057312768">it was functional enough to send emails</a>.</p>
<p>By the end of June, it was officially launched.</p>
<p>By July, I had a few paying customers.</p>
<p>Now it's December, and Buttondown continues to grow in ways that legitimately surprise me:</p>
<ul>
<li>Thousands of users reach tens of thousands of subscribers every week</li>
<li>Features and polish continue to accumulate</li>
<li>I've been lucky enough to talk with lots of cool people who were very chill with my answer to feature requests being “uhh, maybe later.”</li>
<li>I've been lucky enough to talk with lots of cool people who were very chill with my answer to bugs being “oh no oh no oh no”.</li>
<li>I'm genuinely proud of this thing!  This is the most ambitious project I've started and I am thrilled that so many people find value in it.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="whatwentpoorly">What went poorly?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Bugs due to poor testing.  This is slowly getting better, and thankfully most of the bugs were cosmetic and/or had tiny surface areas.  (Still: if you run into anything, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/buttondownemail">DM</a> me.)</li>
<li>Didn’t market things enough, which isn't a <em>product</em> failure so much as a <em>growth</em> failure.  This is mostly a result of triage; I cared more about making sure the product was as strong as possible than making sure it was in the hands of as many people as possible.</li>
<li>Some technical debt things, largely sourcing from poor planning — implementing custom domains would have been much easier if I had given it more thought, for instance.  Same with analytics.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="whatsinstorefornextyear">What’s in store for next year</h3>
<ul>
<li>Increased stability.  Most of Buttondown’s core features are completed: everything else is gravy, and there’s no excuse for any room for error.  TweetDeck exposes me to many horror stories of peoples’ emails getting swallowed in other platforms, and I shudder at the thought of that happening in mine.</li>
<li>Improved analytics.  A lot of the plumbing has been done with the new <a href="https://blog.buttondown.email/introducing-subscriber-events/">subscriber events</a> support, but I want to build out a nicer universal interface for this data.</li>
<li>Full-throated API support.  There’s some janky stuff for POSTing to create subscribers and most of our data is available via JSON, but an API’s not public until its publicly documented, and I’d like to canonize that sooner rather than later.</li>
<li>Getting a little more social: integration with Twitter, Facebook, and allowing imports of contacts from Gmail.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="cheers">Cheers</h3>
<p>I mentioned this already, but it has been a <em>blast</em> working on Buttondown.  I am indebted to the help of so many: everyone who has tested, used, evangelized, or even clicked around.  You all have been very kind, and I can't wait to build more stuff for y'all.</p>
<p>Here's to 2018.  (And here's to the enduring power of newsletters, too.)</p>


2017: In Review

<p><img src="/next-assets/img/50.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>Previously, Buttondown's changes were in the form of a changelog, hosted generously by the fine folks over at <a href="https://headwayapp.co">Headway</a>.</p>
<p>Headway is great, but as Buttondown matures there's a lot more content and writing that needs to develop around it, stuff like:</p>
<ol>
<li>API documentation</li>
<li>a knowledge base</li>
<li>content marketing</li>
</ol>
<p>This stuff requires a level of sophistication (or, if not sophistication, etymological complexity) that connotes my favorite three-letter word: CMS.</p>
<p>Choosing a CMS these days is just as fraught and hairy of a decision as choosing a tech stack (hell, it <em>is</em> choosing a tech stack), and I batted around a number of options:</p>
<ol>
<li>I love static site generators, but I wanted an easier deployment process than what they offer.  Specifically, I wanted an admin interface that made drafting and publishing easy (especially when I'm away from my laptop.)</li>
<li>I looked at <a href="https://craftcms.com/">Craft</a>, which had a lot of praise from friends and peers, but the hosting story seemed murky and developing a theme locally seemed painful (I do not want to have to run MySQL just to write some templates!)</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.com/">Wordpress</a> is, as always, an elephant in every room: but I didn't think I needed the complex ecosystem behind it and wasn't thrilled about the concept of writing PHP.</li>
</ol>
<p>Meanwhile, I've had <a href="https://ghost.org">Ghost</a> bookmarked for ages.  It offers a lot of great quality-of-life stuff out of the gate:</p>
<ol>
<li>A beautiful admin interface (as seen above).</li>
<li>Built-in support for <a href="https://handlebarsjs.com/">Handlebars</a>, a great and functional templating interface</li>
<li>A <a href="https://ghost.org/pricing/">reasonably priced</a> managed hosting offering.</li>
</ol>
<p>And so, yeah! Buttondown's blog runs on Ghost. I'm excited to explore Ghost's ecosystem more — it's been a delight to work with thus far — and as always, feel free to email <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">me</a> if you have any questions about the platform.</p>


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