Updates from January
Are you excited to talk about newsletters? I sure am.
New archives
We've launched the new archives! You can take a look at how they look here, and if you didn't have any breaking changes on your newsletter (custom CSS) you've already been migrated over.
Read more about the new archives ↗
One of the reasons I'm particularly excited about the new archives is that they enable a whole slew of new functionality that are difficult/unfeasible on the existing archives. One of them is — you guessed it! — comments.
Comments! Comments! Comments!
You better believe we heard the clamor/ardor/dismay about needing comments, and we've shipped them.
One of the interesting things about working on comments — and, frankly, one of the reasons why I've punted on it for so long — is that what starts out as a fairly simple feature quickly balloons into "whoops, we have to build a social network!" Take a close look at the various comment systems out there and you'll discover a fractal web of complexity: moderation tools, likes/reactions, nicknames, profile pictures, and so on.
One part where this is particularly tricky is the fact that data portability remains a non-negotiable tentpole of Buttondown's ethos (if you ever want to leave us for another tool, it should be trivial without having to leave data behind.) This is easy with subscribers and archives — less so with comments.
All the [clap] [clap] small things
Comments and new archives are large and fancy and make for nice screenshots. But where the true boatload of engineering effort has gone has been smaller stuff:
- Syncing Stripe data is now seven times as fast as it used to be.
- Buttondown’s importer now auto-detects common subscriber imports (and supports Tinyletter’s new CSV export.)
What's next
We built out a lot of new things in January; February is going to be a little bit more focused on polish and iteration. Some stuff that's top of mind:
- Continuing to improve the documentation and onboarding experience to make it easier for you to go from "hi, I'm a new user, what are with all of these settings" to "okay I can send emails now"
- Enhancing the (powerful, but inscrutable) analytics experience to make it easier to pay attention to the metrics you care about most
- Re-building the WYSIWYG/rich text writing experience to make it easier to customize your email and add lovely embedded content without having to drop down to HTML.
Coda
The past two months have been Buttondown's busiest and strongest months to date, with more subscribers, sign-ups, paid subscriptions, and emails sent than ever before.
This is not because we ramped up paid user acquisition or announced a big new fundraising round; after all, we don’t spend money on marketing and we don’t raise outside capital.
This is because of one reason and one reason only: word of mouth. I am deeply grateful for every single person who has told someone else about Buttondown; no advertising campaign in the world can ever be effective as hearing hundreds of happy users share their experience.
If you’re one of those people who told a friend or colleague about Buttondown: thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
(And, as always, if you have any questions, just respond directly to this email!)