Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anodyne yet pointed Email for you. Yes, you.

Historically, we've called Buttondown a 'newsletter tool' — the h1 before this was 'The best way to start and grow your newsletter.' This was really nice and effective, but I talked with a number of folks who felt a little turned off by that word "newsletter", as if it felt amateurish or insufficiently "haha business" (for lack of a better term) for their use case.

So I started toying around with replacing "newsletter" with "email" as the proper noun that we'd rally around (and email has its own baggage, to be clear — there's a handful of people who sign up thinking that we're, like, a Proton Mail alternative.) And the more I liked "email", the more I hated "email " — email automation, email marketing, email campaigns all felt very corporate and stodgy in a way that betrayed the unique voice I think most of our marketing copy has. Eventually I landed on "email for people like you", which I liked but lacked... a certain punch, if you know what I mean.

Finally, I was batting around ideas and landed on the current two-sentence structure, which I think accomplishes a handful of things:

1. Tells the user, frankly, nothing about our product or positioning besides "email" (and therefore invites them to learn more)

2. Immediately gives us a certain voice and friendliness that is, uh, missing from the Constant Contacts of the world.

Two other notes:

1. This current iteration — much like the current iteration of the site, brand, and vibe of Buttondown, comes just as much from the inimitable nickd as it does from me. ^[1] One of the virtues of Buttondown being around this long and having the user base that it does is that when I work with people, they already get what we're going for.
2. I've said this a couple times already, but — the best part about running a software business is the freedom to have fun with things, and part of that freedom is recklessly changing your H1 as often as you like. We do seasonal H1s ("Email software that's all trick, no treat"; "New year; new you; newsletter.") — even if they tank conversion for a few days, it's fun.