October 4, 2024

Updates from September

Say hello to Buttondown’s newest employee!

My wife and I welcomed our first child, Lucy, into the world last week. Here you can see her steepling her fingers like a cartoon villain, plotting to undermine my ability to reply to all of you:

In all seriousness, I will be a bit slower to respond for Lucy’s first several months. I appreciate y’all for being patient with me during this wonderful time.

More Zapier!

Another month, another automation upgrade: v1.8 of our Zapier integration is out with a handful of new triggers, actions, and searches.

Want to kick off an automation any time a new tag is created? Or when a subscriber’s tags are updated? Done!

You can also create Zaps that search your list for a subscriber (say, based on info from a previous step) and grab their current subscription status, among other variables. It’s super useful when paired with one of our other new actions, Update Subscriber, which lets you assign new tags or change subscription statuses.

And, finally, you can create Tags with Zaps.

Read all about it in the Changelog post.

From the blog

• Buttondown would not be here without the open-source community. We've committed a percentage of our profits to open source for years—and now, we're upping that commitment. Credit to OpenSourcePledge.com for the idea.

• Often, it’s your first 50 subscribers that are the hardest to find. Later on, people might forward your newsletter to their friends, blogs might link to your archive posts, and people who love your work will post about it on social media. Those first fans though? They’ll probably sign up via your website. So make sure to include the right forms, pages, and details to convert visitors into subscribers.

• Your website funneled a bunch of new people into your list. Awesome! Give them a big ‘ol digital bear hug with an automated welcome message. Or assign tags to them based on their earliest clicks and responses. And if, heaven forbid, they signed up and then disappeared for months, kick them off the list to keep your precious open rate in the green. Almost anything is possible when you have the right recipes for newsletter automations!

Other stuff

• For all the people who left the blue bird for Bluesky (or anyone who uses the decentralized platform, really), Buttondown now has an integration for auto-posting newsletters.
• You asked the new intern to write this month’s newsletter, not to send it! Thankfully, they tried and failed because you updated our brand new Sending Emails permission for team accounts–great job!