i’ve been thinking about buttondown’s future a lot lately, trying to work out how to turn it from “growing and largely unmapped” into “sustainable and legible”. ¹

i think it would be useful to enumerate some things i never want to build into the product. this is helpful on two fronts:

1. to have an artifact to point to folks who ask if i will add these things, the number of whom seems to grow steadily. ²
2. to consciously limit the surface area of where the tool will grow, and to act as a map for a direction forward

Social networking

social networks are great ³. there are a whole host of social-network-y things that folks have asked for Buttondown to provide:

• social-graph-esque stuff, like having a dossier of all of your Buttondown newsletters
• leaderboards / unified feed of all newsletters
• “suggested newsletters”
• reactions

none of these will happen! i don’t like anything that perpetuates or strengthens the idea of buttondown as an “ecosystem” or a “platform”.

Automation

email automation is really powerful. it is stuff like:

• send a new subscriber a precise sequence of seven emails over three weeks
• send a subscriber that looked at but did not purchase a specific product a given email
• branching logic to send a given subscriber a given email depending on if they clicked a link in a previous email

there are really powerful tools that do things like this, and whenever someone asks if buttondown will support this I point them to those tools.

a lot of this is about laziness, frankly: automation is a pandora’s box, and as soon as i start trying to build it out i will inevitably fall into a rabbit hole of arcana.

but also… email automation isn’t for newsletters. newsletters are a pretty specific thing, and i think as soon as you start getting into optimizing your email sequencing for e-commerce or whatever you’re not a newsletter. not that that’s a moral judgment — it’s just not the thing i’m trying to build.

Advertising

i have no great moral outrage against advertising; I think there are a lot of completely valid business models that rely on advertising, and i think it works particularly well in industries like email and podcasts where there isn’t the terrifying obelisk of infrastructure and analytics.

rather, i don’t want Buttondown to mess around with advertising stuff too much because it’s a lot of effort and it muddies how i provide (and extract) value. building out relationships with advertisers and publishers is difficult, onerous, and requires a lot of tooling and knowledge.

…

buttondown is a tool; the goal is to do a very specific thing as best as possible, and it’s helpful for me to remember that whenever i browse my comically large list of (331, at the time of writing) github issues.

1. i’ve been rereading seeing like a state, so legible might not be the best choice of words here, but i digress ↩

2. which i don’t mind! the best things i’ve added to buttondown in the past six months have come from user suggestions ↩

3. citation needed ↩

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