How Stefan Judis Uses Buttondown

Stefan's a long-time Buttondown user and longer-time frontend developer. He's scouring the web to learn more about core frontend technologies and sharing them with his subscribers at Web Weekly.

As a subscriber of Web Weekly myself, it was a blast to talk with Stefan about how his newsletter stands out from the pack and what he's learned along the way.

To kick things off, give me a sense of your background. Who you are. What your day-to-day job is. What are some of the things you're interested in now?

I'm Stefan. I was born and raised in Germany. I live in Berlin. I've been doing JavaScript stuff since — I don't know, I feel like I've lost count at this point. Maybe I'm closing 15 years with a background in frontend engineering. Seven or eight years ago I started blogging and getting involved in the community in Berlin. And because I spend a good chunk of time reading Frontend news, I thought why not start sharing the good things “officially”,

At first it was just monthly — "Stefan Judis' newsletter", kinda thing — and then I saw that the domain webweekly.email was free. It was like, "should I rebrand? Should I buy the domain?" At the end, I did it with the assumption that it looks more serious; it looks bigger than it maybe is, and that it looks more official than a Weekly Newsletter from a random stranger on the internet. Since then, I have done this newsletter thing on a weekly basis, and it is going well!

Many people know how to do something with React, Vue, Angular, or whatever you want to call it — but don't know anything about the underlying bits, like the DOM and HTML. I want to reach people who are interested in that.

Can you talk a bit more about the type of content you try to cover? What is your ideal subscriber? What do they look like? What information and links are you trying to curate for them?

The ideal subscriber of Web Weekly is someone who is curious to understand how things work. My incentive isn’t to know and share how to do ABC with Framework DEF, but rather, understand how the web works.

I, for example, talked to a lot of people and did some workshops, teaching, and boot camps in Berlin. There is an astonishing amount of people who are very good at frameworks. I think the web industry is on its way to the next abstraction layer. Many people know how to do something with React, Vue, Angular, or whatever you want to call it — but don't know anything about the underlying bits, like the DOM and HTML. I want to reach people who are interested in that.

If I sit in front of my computer, and I'm like, "huh, that's new" — I can’t be the only person. This is how I want to progress. So an ideal Web Weekly edition, for me, includes something I learned. And I see huge value in sharing nerdy details and fundamental web dev facts.

Going back to the shift from monthly to weekly, can you talk about why you made that shift? You mentioned it can be hard keeping up that publishing schedule.

If you run something monthly, your subscriber base will grow very slowly. Eventually, it almost felt like it’s not worth it. The impact was too low and I wanted to see results. Also, very few people wait for or expect a monthly email. 😅

I started doing it weekly with the idea to grow it faster and maybe start making some money out of it.

I think there is a misconception out there — "oh, just because I used to work in DevRel means I must get thousands of subscribers just by sneezing". It's still hard! There's no magic bullet.

Where do most of your subscribers come from these days?

Without doing anything, I can see something between two and six subscribers per day coming from my own domain at stefanjudis.com. So there is organic growth. If I had the time, enough money, and energy, I probably would double down on the social thing and ads.

I think there is a misconception out there — "oh, just because I used to work in DevRel means I must get thousands of subscribers just by sneezing". It's still hard! There's no magic bullet.

But speaking of "organic growth", it can be such a loaded term. Organic growth does not equal organic growth because if a person with 100,000 Twitter followers grows their list organically, the list will grow a thousand times quicker than mine. 😅 Sometimes talking about organic growth is comparing apples and oranges.

You're not only the nicest person but also super responsive. It is incredible what you're doing.

So what brought you to Buttondown?

I started playing around with Buttondown because a person chatted on Twitter and was vouching for you and your service, which is still exceptional. You're not only the nicest person but also super responsive. It is incredible what you're doing.

I think your personal approach is super valuable. It feels great not to be a ticket number in a ZenDesk queue.

I don't know how you do it, but if I need something or if there is a problem, you're back with me in 12 hours and we figure it out. I think this is what makes Buttondown stand out.

Your use of Buttondown — with building your own archives and so much custom frontend work — is unique. How does Buttondown fit into your CMS?

First off, my setup with Buttondown is weird. I only use three things:

1. Your subscriber management
2. Your email sending
3. Your editor

It's like Buttondown in 'headless mode'. I publish and write things in Contentful; from there, I publish it to my blog. Then I have a little tool that transforms my Contentful Markup (I have some custom things on the blog) to Buttondown Markdown and I simply paste it into the editor.

I've got a custom layout that you enabled for me around a year ago, just to have a custom footer and header.

But overall, I think Buttondown does the job just fine. It is out of my way. I think the default styles work. The emoji handling works. I think everything works out of the box. I don't have many customizations.

What could Buttondown do to make your life easier, either in terms of publication or sending things out?

Analytics. I wish there was a bit more power in the analytics section because there's so much data in newsletters that is fun to poke around -- I like to open up my computer and look at the user. Even if there is one person overnight, I look at their overall stuff. I do that every day. So, a bit more power there dividing by week, month, by day, or something.

Beyond that, what I would definitely appreciate is if there would be in Buttondown, a quick way for me to get the CTR in ads. If I could set an attribute on a link, I could go to the overview page and say, "the CTR on this ad was 2%." That would be tremendously valuable.