One extremely compelling form of blogging, both for the reader and the writer, is the admission of defeat. Seriously: whenever you find yourself faced with an empty iA Writer window and a dearth of ideas, ask yourself "what have I been wrong about this week?" and let the digital ink flow.

With that as an ominous intro: we have officially concluded the first week of Buttondown's new onboarding flow. (Of course I am not going to share a screenshot. Try it out yourself on the demo site.)

It's a simple survey meant to scissor our customer base twice, into what seemed to me like the most pertinent and binary-search-y categories:

1. First, divide them into "people migrating from another platform" and "people who don't have any data";
2. Second, divide them into archetypes ("casuals", "creators", "technologists", "entrepreneurs").

The goal of these things vary from organization to organization. Our goals are twofold:

1. Better tailor documentation / lifecycle emails / empty states / etc. based on the information provided.
2. (And this is kind of the embarrassing one) unironically better know the customer base. Buttondown's grown a lot; I know longer have the touch-feel sense of who every customer is, and I am routinely surprised by who is using us and to what end. We have some existential questions to answer about where we want to start building up our infrastructure, and who out of our increasingly diverse customer base is going to be (relatively speaking) marginal to our plans.

So, the admission of defeat. Or, admissions: the survey has been running for a week, which is not long enough for statistical significance but long enough to garner interesting results. I have been shocked by not one but three things in this little survey's short life:

1. 70% of new users fill out at least one question. This is way higher than I expected (as someone who is routinely guilty of mashing the "skip" button on every post-registration survey I come across).
2. Our user base is, unfortunately, precisely divided across those four archetypes. Each answer has at least a 20% share of the pie chart, which is good news insofaras we have a good understanding of our four core segments and bad news insofaras those four segments are extremely broad.
3. Here was the legitimate shocker to me, and the one that means I have to go back and rethink our onboarding and positioning: eighty percent of new users have never had a newsletter before. In my head it was around fifty-fifty.