Buttondown

What they Do Best

Streamlined newsletter software solution.

Main Industry

Software

Platform

Independent/Standalone

Type of Product

Desktop/Web App

Target

B2B + B2C

Price Range

$49 - $99

Business Model

Subscription

Free Plan

Pricing Details

6 different plans that range from free to $139/mo, based on the number of subscribers

Revenue Estimates

$180,000

Monthly Website Traffic

257,732

Revenue Per Traffic

$0.06

Idea to Money

Landed the first handful of paying users on launch day.

Founders

Employees

Year Started

2016

Dedication

Buttondown was very much a nights-and-weekends project for the first few years; it takes a lot of up-front effort to launch a SaaS, especially one in such a competitive space where there are a lot of table stakes.

Market Insights / Trends

newsletter software

Industry Incumbent

Mailchimp ($800M/year)

How They Came Up With The Idea

Justin built Buttondown to scratch his own itch — all of the other email tools he tried were either super-heavy (like Mailchimp or ConvertKit) or wanted to own his entire blogging presence like Medium or Substack. There wasn’t anything that just let him drop in a <form> tag into a blog and automatically send out emails, so he decided to build something just like that on a hunch that other people shared his use case.

How They Built The First Version

Thanks to a good selection of similar apps to understand what the table stakes were — there were a lot of evenings spent in competitor’s workflows to understand what worked well and what worked poorly with their approaches. (Something he still does) Even then, there was a huge swath of decisions he had to make in the early goings of a SaaS: branding and color scheme, technical stack, initial core features, voice, API contracts, the list goes on. By default his approach is to do less and to be extremely surgical with what gets built. He eschewed flavor-of-the-month frameworks in favor of ones that he was experienced with (Heroku, Django, Vue, Sass); he stuck with system default fonts instead of trying to find the perfect font face. This is even reflected in the interface. Buttondown’s initial interface was very minimalist, with an emphasis on what he cared about most: performance, Markdown, and “getting out of your way”. The app has grown much more powerful and complex since, but he's still oddly proud of these initial screens even if they represented a much less mature vision.

Growth Channels

Once the product was ready, he posted on HN and Product Hunt and hit the front page on both, but it wasn’t some meteoric success. It got around thirty thousand unique visitors, out of which only came around five hundred registered users and maybe ten paying customers.

Main Growth Channel

Online Directories

Content Marketing

Tech Stack

- Heroku - Django - Vue - Sass

Tools

Full Case Study

Bootstrapping A [Profitable] $15K/Month Simple Newsletter SaaS With No Experience