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Notes on Buttondown.com
- jjwtieke 2y agoLove buttondown. Have been using it for 3-4 months now and it’s everything I need without all the bullshit. Also thanks for your prompt problem solving whenever I find a bug!
- ktosobcy 2y agoI opened the page and still have no clue that buttondown is...
- sccxy 2y agoAnd there is also not a single clickable link to the domain also in that blog post. Really annoying to copy and paste urls.
- croisillon 2y agoi believe it's some kind of Substack but yeah, some context missing
- noelwelsh 2y agoMailing list manager. Like MailChimp but it doesn't suck. I use it, and it does everything I want (handle subscribers; send emails written in Markdown) and a lot more. I've interacted with the owner / developer a couple of times and they are a great person. See https://buttondown.com/ https://buttondown.com/ for more.
- ktosobcy 2y agoI'm sorry but even main page is lacking, first sentence: > Email platforms have been in a weird place lately. Platforms grow and stop supporting you. Or they’ll shut down, despite the fact that you need your email to work like it’s a utility that you can depend on. Or they’ll hike their fees, forcing you to go through a stressful migration. Or they’ll add dozens of features that you’ll never want to use. Or they’ll just turn flatly evil. My first impression would be yet another email provider…
- 4ar0n 2y agoI just signed up for Buttondown after researching and comparing a dozen other newsletter platforms. I told our CEO that Buttondown is exactly the kind of scrappy startup we'd want representing our own startup. If it's helpful for the HackerNews community, I've made my comparison spreadsheet free to view: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P9FyAYDdFZvTzmXVQi8A-pfKSa7gPG1c2v0L3-GH8uU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P9FyAYDdFZvTzmXVQi8A... (I'm not an employee and have no financial incentive, I'm just a fan.)
- stanislavb 2y agoThanks for sharing. I love it. It's funny to see Mailchimp right at the bottom. Is Mailchimp becoming the "GoDaddy" of email.
- sixtyj 2y agoI remember Mailchimp from their very beginnings. Things naturally evolve and somewhere on the road they lost their mojo.
- popcorncowboy 2y agoBut picked up about 12B. Mojo. 12B. Mojo. 12B. 12B.
- xnorswap 2y agoIt's clearly not objective, or at least not well explained, MailChip appears to be given a "pricing score" lower than most others that are listed with a higher price.
- 4ar0n 2y agoGood catch, thanks. According to the pricing page, Mailchimp starts out around the same as the others, but as soon as you go over 500 contacts, the price jumps from "Standard" $20/month to "Premium" $350/month. I'll add that as a note to the Drawbacks field.
- nine_k 2y agoSo, switching the domain to buttondown.com brought an uptick of traffic quickly. People apparently still hear a word, type it, and press Ctrl+Enter, or a mobile equivalent. Whoever has been parking the domain likely had made a wise investment, and now received $85k for it. Not millions, but still a new car.
- jorams 2y ago> So, switching the domain to buttondown.com brought an uptick of traffic quickly. Where did you get that from? The blog post says no such thing.
- Sebb767 2y agoIt does: > I went in expecting SEO traffic to be hit as Google renegotiates legions of canonical URLs; it hasn't, at least thus far. Instead, everything seems to have just bumped fairly healthily. (emphasis is theirs)
- jorams 2y agoAh, I interpreted that as the traffic moving over, but it could indeed mean an increase in traffic.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoYou don't want upticks in traffic, you want upticks in conversions. People probably go to buttondown thinking they can get a shirt.
- sphars 2y agoIf Buttondown.email ever wanted to sell merch, a Buttondown button-down shirt is perfect
- jrflowers 2y ago> people stop referring to Buttondown as "Buttondown Email", a personal pet peeve of mine This is funny because I only remember Buttondown Email because I love the name and domain. I am either going to keep remembering it as Buttondown Email or eventually forget it as Generic Noun Unrelated To Product 9000
- jmduke 2y agoHonestly, as long as you don't call it "Buttdown"... (this happens more than you'd think.)
- dreadlordbone 2y agoI would recommend setting up a 301 redirect for www (also recommend having this support both http and https)
- jrflowers 2y agoThat’s actually not too bad of a name for the service — like “sit your butt down and read this email”
- mwidell 2y agoFor context, Buttondown is like Mailchimp but stripped down to only the essentials. It is simple, has everything I need, but not 1 million things I don't need. I love it.
- jicea 2y ago> We ended up using hurl as a test harness around HAProxy, something we probably should have done three years ago. As maintainer of Hurl [1], this makes me happy! [1]: https://hurl.dev https://hurl.dev
- brazzy 2y agoAs a happy user of Hurl, thank you!
- w-ll 2y agoimma be honest, if i get a email that comes from a buttondown.com server, for something i have never signed up for, im gonna mark as spam... email is hard, and it seams every time a new sender service pops up, It seems to get a lot of bad actors. Your homepage says "and our spam protection is best-in-class." is that for your client inbox, or mine?
- dewey 2y agoAlmost all the spam I'm getting is coming from some weird re-purposed domain of an old business or unsecured mail server. I can't recall receiving "spam" from Mailchimp, Buttondown or other newsletter companies. Especially because before you can send a significant amount of emails on these providers you have to pay a lot, or get your account verified through different means. Seems like a bit of an overreaction on your part.
- iamacyborg 2y agoThe nice thing about mailchimp et al is you can just forward the unsolicited mail to abuse@ and they’ll generally deal with the bad sender.
- dewey 2y agoThat's pretty much table stakes for every ISP to have a way to quickly report abuse on their network or service.
- iamacyborg 2y agoYep, but for most b2b spam that is being sent through google suite it’s not an option.
- Nullabillity 2y agoIf mailchimp et al blocked their bad senders then they wouldn't have any senders left. Mailchimp in particular kicked out all their good senders years ago, when they made Mandrill require a Mailchimp subscription.
- buss_jan 2y ago[flagged]
- mft_ 2y agoA minor point to feed back: for me, https://www.buttondown.com/ https://www.buttondown.com/ fails to load, while https://buttondown.com/ https://buttondown.com/ works.
- teekert 2y agoGood call and I agree, I personally don't like using the www subdomain but I would definitely redirect it to the main one, especially on important money-making domains! There is a lot of discussion about it online, like [0]. But whatever arguments there are, there is a whole generation that thinks that urls should start with www. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/486621/when-should-one-use-a-www-subdomain https://stackoverflow.com/questions/486621/when-should-one-u...
- Kye 2y agoThe generation that thinks that remembers when WWW was a new service next to stuff like SMTP and FTP and NNTP. Why wouldn't you put www to distinguish it? It's the new crowd that forgot or never knew about all the other stuff going on behind a domain and wants to hide away all the useful signals.
- teekert 2y agoI was more talking about people that just start typing www when entering a URL. I see it a lot, perhaps more in older people indeed, but certainly mostly in non-techies. Recently I set up some websites for pensionados with a startup, they found it weird their website didn't start with www and asked me to add it. Edit: If I ddg for NewYork Times, first hit is "https://www.nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com", and https://nytimes.com https://nytimes.com redirects to that URL.
- _dan 2y agoI came here to say this. Yes I know https://no-www.org/ https://no-www.org/ is a thing, but browsers have a ctrl+enter shortcut that'll top and tail the domain with https://www https://www. and .com - having that go to an error page is not great particularly given the reason to do it was partially ease of access by customers.
- jwr 2y agoThe pricing page (in the FAQ section) has a "c..e@buttondown.email" address, so the grep must not have been complete :-) (I've migrated a domain from .io to .com, I can relate) I'm a possible customer, so I looked at the service and its pricing page and… I'm not sure if this is a service for me. I send both transactional and non-transactional E-mail, but I don't need "list management", just E-mail processing. Buttondown would be $29/month + $50/month for whitelabeling, while Postmark would be $15/month. Am I missing something?
- jmduke 2y agoNah, if you don't need list management you're definitely better off going with something a little bit closer to the metal. We actually keep a price guide for comparing MTAs here (https://buttondown.com/comparison-guides/esps https://buttondown.com/comparison-guides/esps). I do happily recommend Postmark; they're a little bit more expensive than their peers but are worth it, IMHO.
- the_gipsy 2y agoWe bought the dot-com-domain and managed not to shit ourselves in the process. Is this company HN sponsored? Why do these marketing pieces reach the frontpage?
- quantumwoke 2y agoIt's one of those HN-adjacent sites that has been posted here since inception, similar to bingo card creator, oxide, starfighters, etc. I'm not opposed to it.
- dewey 2y agoBecause people like to read about "indie hacker" projects built by one person developing and growing? Personally I find these the most relatable stories as someone who's also trying to build profitable side projects.
- ahaapple 2y agoI'm going to switch from buttondown to resend
- jmduke 2y agoAuthor here! Happy to answer any questions folks have. (I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I am grateful to HN for introducing me to what was called microISVs a decade ago, "indie hacking" five years ago, and now I suppose is mostly called "building in public" / "lifestyle businesses". I was inspired to start Buttondown in no small part due to reading about Candy Japan, Appointment Reminder, et al, and learning that there was a different yet equally valid path for growing a SaaS)
- rexreed 2y agoWhy was getting the expensive buttondown.com necessary and important? I might have missed that in the post.
- jmduke 2y agoDefinitely not _necessary_ — I was more or less resigned to not having the domain, since the sticker price was $170K and my mental "is this _really_ worth it?" number was high five figures. As for why important: a melange of reasons. I had heard a _lot_ from customers and prospects that they couldn't find the site because they searched for/navigated to buttondown.com; I was faintly worried about SEO/brand impact from using a vanity TLD like `.email`; I was faintly worried about a more well-financed competitor buying it and redirecting to their own property; there are a very real number of legacy pieces of software that do not _accept_ `buttondown.email` as a valid domain, which is important when you're dealing with UGC. (When I was debating what a reasonable purchase price might be, the framing that helped me make a decision was: "if this helps my overall conversion funnel grow by 2% in perpetuity, is it worth it?", and that answer was yes. Time will tell, of course, to see where that number actually lands!)
- rexreed 2y agoCould you have structured the deal in a more cash favorable way seeing as you are paying for it from cash flow? That way it would have been less of an immediate impact on finances. For purchases like this, a revolving line of credit is helpful, even tho there's cost to that, because it lessens the impact on cash flow.
- teekert 2y agoOh so nice those fancy tlds and domain names. I have been too "clever" about 2 domains in my life already: First is my private email which has only 4 letters and our national .nl tld. I always have to spell out the domain because it is not really a word, and it sometimes confuses Americans (non-techies) that there is no .com. The second domain is my business domain which has .bio as tld, and now I often see people waiting for more when I say my address, like: "Hi, my address is blabla.bio", "... and?" "No, that is it, .bio is the end." So I guess "normal" .com is just the way to go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (although in both cases that was just too expensive for me and I like short domains a lot myself, I once met someone who had (pattern) xx@yy.dk, apparently the whole company did, I kneeled.)
- Kye 2y agoEvery so often I discover a neat domain that isn't taken outside the Classic Trinity, remember that it would be impossible to share in person for this reason, and give up the dream.
- karagenit 2y agoHah at least it’s two/three letters, my personal site is at .software and most people get really confused by an eight letter TLD.
- big_hacker 2y agoAmazon SES is $0.10/1k email.
- hk1337 2y agoI'm a huge proponent of AWS over other providers but it's also _very_ manual and detailed. Sometimes it's nice to let someone else do the detail work and pay to get the benefits.
- alberth 2y agohttps://buttondown.com/ https://buttondown.com/ Clickable link, since the blog didn’t have it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dangus 2y agoAs someone who has never heard of Buttondown before this, I do wonder if this is a strong enough brand name to be worth the expensive domain. It’s not like hey.com or something, it’s kind of a clunky name in the first place. I would have considered renaming the company and picking up a cheaper domain in the process.
- hk1337 2y agoButtondown is intended for marketing emails, like Mailchimp, right? It's not necessarily for business email like O365, Google Apps, Fastmail, etc?
- flippyhead 2y agoI am sure it's me, but I couldn't figure this out by looking at their website. I wanted to think they have a web UI like gmail, but don't see screenshots.
- mycodendral 2y ago[flagged]
- ezekg 2y agoLast time I tried to buy my .com, the seller countered at $500k. No thanks. Not convinced it'll ever be break-even at that ridiculous price. Not sure I'd even pay $85k. The return on that investment just seems... low.
- duggan 2y agoI remember when Teamwork's founder bought a round of drinks for everyone at a local tech meetup to celebrate acquiring the domain (teamwork.com). I think they paid something like half a million quid for it? It was an absolutely eye watering amount to me at the time (and I think them, in fairness), but past a certain size having your .com was and probably still is big for trust. Which is to say, congratulations! You must be delighted.
- benjbrooks 2y agoWe’ve been running our company’s friends and family newsletter on buttondown for more than a year and love it! Congrats on the domain purchase.