We have wrapped up the formal portion of DjangoCon. DjangoCon is not Buttondown's first conference that we've sponsored, but it is the first one that we've actually manned a booth at — and we did so in a fashion that I would describe as idiosyncratic, ramshackle, and informed by a charming bootstrapper ethos — which is to say, deeply on brand. We didn't really know what boothing was like, so we showed up with a stack of postcards because everyone loves a good postcard.

We quickly discovered that every single other booth at DjangoCon had a big banner and some one-pagers, so we printed out a big banner that says EMAILS! and a one-pager about what Buttondown is. (And then, because that felt a little too corporate, a second one-pager with a list of our favorite Django packages that we use. As you might expect, that one was the more popular of the two handouts.)

So, about the postcard. We agonized for a while about what a good little piece of swag could be. We wanted something that was novel, on-brand, interesting, and cheap enough that we could ideally replicate it for future conferences. Steph had the bright idea of a postcard illustrated by a local Chicago artist that folks could then send to friends, loved ones, rivals, et cetera. This was a perfect idea, and we printed them, and hoped people would love them too.

I think if you were to have had me guess how many completed postcards we would have gotten back, I would have guessed in the neighborhood of around 30 to 40: DjangoCon had around 250 attendees, so this would be percentage-wise a solid but not absurd result. The idea of being able to just send a couple dozen nice postcards that people will hold on to way longer than they hold on to yet another Field Notes notebook or yet another stress ball seemed like a great goal.

But as you might have guessed from the H1 of this blog post, we surpassed that. Not counting any stragglers, we're at a count of 63 postcards. The brand, as I have grown increasingly fond of saying, is stronger than ever, and 63 fridges or tackboards will be emblazoned with the word Buttondown for days and weeks to come.

Dave asks how decide what to write about. This is something I'm being asked more and more: I don't think I risk braggadocio when I say that Buttondown's writing outkicks its coverage (by many metrics, including the important ones, but the one I like to point to right now is that we've hit the top of Hacker News three times in the past five months). There are two answers here, the literal and the abstract:

The literal answer is that, every month, Matt and Ryan send over a list of four or five ideas for posts that we (meaning anyone in the #marketing channel) whittle down to two, and then they write them and I edit and publish them. This is supplemented by one-off things like announcements that don't make sense on the changelog or thunderbolts of inspiration.

The abstract answer is the more interesting one: at what point did we decide it was a good use of our time and money to write stories about since-deceased competitor protocols to RSS? This is not exactly part of the content marketing meta right now (which is not to say that we don't have some more conventional ideas on the blog, too.

Here, as nakedly and simply as I can manage, is the answer:

1. Our goal is not SEO. This is for two reasons:
   • other companies can publish a lot of content (and they do), and they will always beat us on volume
   • our marketing site will always be a tiny fraction of search-engine-driven inbound relative to our web archives
2. Therefore our writing is for brand-building, not for lead capture. (Notice that there is no CTA at the bottom of our blog for anything but signing up to Buttondown.)
3. Our brand, much like our product, is idiosyncratic, esoteric, nerdy, and high-quality.
4. Our writing should be idiosyncratic, esoteric, nerdy, and high-quality.

Here lies normally the denouement of the essay, in which I gracefully loop back around to the postcards and, in my trademark rococo style, remind you that the postcards followed the same strategy. (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.) Instead, I wanted to pre-emptively answer the question of: "what if it's all just a giant waste of time and money, and none of these things move the bottom line?"

That is certainly possible! There are fatalistic afternoons that I look at our acquisition statistics and suspect that every single thing we do pales in comparison to the natural flywheel of the product itself, in which users migrate to Buttondown and bring their subscribers, who then get emails from Buttondown and learn about it, who then migrate their own newsletters to Buttondown, and so on.

But, in such a world where Buttondown's growth trajectory remains unbent by our efforts, which would you rather be left with: hundreds upon hundreds of Taboola-tier posts meant to be consumed primarily by indexers rather than humans, or some really, really nice postcards, and 63 people whose day was brightened (however slightly) by what we've done?