Hello hello! I hope you had a lovely May.
I'm writing this email by the James River, where the light breeze and the early afternoon sun could not make for better companions. What better weather to talk about newsletters?
What's new
The headline feature — the single largest improvement to Buttondown this year — is full-fledged support for automations. At long last, you can compose drip sequences, welcome sequences, autoresponders, and all sorts of powerful things without having to drop down the API or Zapier.
(A huge thanks to the beta testers who hammered this feature into the simple elegance that you see now.)
Automations aren't for everyone — they're designed to be a nice, ergonomic set of superpowers for advanced users, rather than a mandatory thing that every smart newsletter-writer must use. And, indeed, we've been busy shipping things for writers of all shape and size:
- You can now send out emails by emailing a magic email address!
- If you're collecting subscriber names in your subscribe forms, it appears automagically in your subscriber list page!
- Buttondown now automatically reminds folks to confirm their subscription after 24 hours!
Do you like Buttondown? Please give us a review!
We've recently launched on Capterra, which is sort of like Yelp for software. If you wouldn't mind writing a quick review, you'll earn $20 and also my undying affection. (Which is perhaps worth, if not $20, at least eleven dollars)
What's coming
We tend to think that one of the best ways to prioritize development is a simple, four step process:
- Talk with your most loyal users.
- Figure out what problems are giving them the most angst.
- Solve them.
- Repeat.
This might not be the fast-track to hockey-stick growth or industry domination — which is good, because I'm not terribly concerned about those things compared to building software you love to use. As such, here are the "problems of angst" that we're fixing in June:
- It's annoying to create beautiful share images for social media.
- It's a pain to manage all the business machinery & administrivia when it comes to working with sponsorships and advertisers.
As always...
Buttondown owes its existence to you, dear reader. I work on the things that make sense because enough users tell me about them; Buttondown has grown not because of any VC-subsidized marketing blitz but because people like it enough to tell other people to give it a shot.
If you think there's something that needs to be improved — or, even better, if there's just something you wish was improved — reply to this email because I want to hear more!