jmduke

8 ms·

31.
by jmduke 3y ago
I did this. I grew my project, Buttondown [ https://buttondown.email ] from high three figures to low five figures while doing it as a nights-and-weekends thing at Stripe and then quit to work on it full time. It was a great decis
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by jmduke 3y ago
Last year my goal was "I can take off for a week or two and the technical infrastructure is fine"; this year it's "I can take off for a week or two and the business infrastructure is fine" (meaning, there aren'
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by jmduke 3y ago
I agree with many of this essay's points, but the flamboyant headline is a reductive way to view software (and a bit of a dangerous meme.) Your job as an engineer is, amongst other things, to identify the (sometimes rare!) instances in
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by jmduke 3y ago
To be clear, the approach outlined above _is_ based on just HTTP; there's no javascript involved.
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by jmduke 3y ago
One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so yo
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by jmduke 3y ago
Going from 0 → 1 migrated route was "medium difficulty", I'd say — there was a non-trivial amount of scaffolding I had to build out around auth, error codes, and so on, and django-ninja's docs are still a little lacklust
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by jmduke 3y ago
I'll preface all of this with a couple esoteric design goals that I had in mind: 1. I actually _want_ an SPA. You might not need an SPA, if you don't need one then Vue/React/etc are overkill, etc. 2. I want to power as m
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by jmduke 3y ago
My app is a Django backend and a Vue frontend. There are large swathes of Django that I ignore, but to me the core of Django — its ORM, routing and middleware system, and admin interface — are worth their weight in gold. The migration from
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by jmduke 3y ago
(Delayed, but...) Yeah, a lot of the pricing guidance here varies wildly depending on if you're thinking about things from a B2C vs. a B2B context. I think the hard part about hitting something in the sub-$5/mo price point is the
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by jmduke 3y ago
Totally reasonable question, and you'll get a very candid answer! I wrote more about the pricing strategy here ( https://buttondown.email/blog/pricing-page-driven-developmen... ) but — when Buttondown first launched
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by jmduke 3y ago
I run Buttondown, so it pains me to suggest a competitor (I kid, I kid) — but to my understanding, EmailOctopus has the best free tier around at the moment, at 2500 subscribers / 10K emails.
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by jmduke 3y ago
> I know this is a side point, but I imagine people might be interested in the challenges of being able to work a second job while not annoying your employer. How did you manage it? I ran my company ( https://buttondown.email&#
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by jmduke 3y ago
Good. I'm someone who a) uses Google Suite (or Workplace, or whatever it's called) b) runs a newsletter service [buttondown.email] that sends millions of emails every day, most of them to Gmail. The amount of cold email I get from
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by jmduke 3y ago
If you're interested in similar approaches to the space, I've been slowly migrating some of my blog content + structured data onto Keystatic ( https://keystatic.com/ ). Very similar philosophy; used structured flat
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Show HN: Free tool for improving email confirmation rate(sniperl.ink)
1 points by jmduke 3y ago|0 comments
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by jmduke 3y ago
I'm not saying you're wrong (I've never tried to raise a round!) but I meant that in the context in which I've encountered it, which is in sales to enterprise/larger users who absolutely do expect that if I am hit b
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by jmduke 3y ago
I'm glad I could help! Always happy to answer more questions, either here or via email (i'm justin@buttondown.email).
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by jmduke 3y ago
(Context — I run Buttondown ( http://buttondown.email/ ) as a solo founder, with a handful of contractors on support/documentation but no other W2s.) 1. You need to either a) have an answer for "what happens if you
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by jmduke 3y ago
Applaud the effort, and I think this kind of project is a really good substitute for an info-product or ebook: relatively low effort to get started, lots of room to scale + grow if it goes well, and in general a good way of "getting in
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by jmduke 3y ago
I use very little of the outbound/link-building things, but find the alerting on broken content and notifications of which specific pillar pages are hitting traction very actionable and useful.
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by jmduke 3y ago
A friend of mine who was at one point a GH employee gave me a (lifetime? it was around four years ago) F&F discount that IIRC amounts to $200/mo free across all SKUs.
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by jmduke 3y ago
Love this! I published a similar one last month: https://buttondown.email/stack --- A couple notes on where I differ/concur from OP: 1. ahrefs is absolutely worth its price in gold. 2. IMHO intercom is overpriced relat
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by jmduke 3y ago
Done! T/y.
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Every single paid service my SaaS uses(buttondown.email)
2 points by jmduke 3y ago|2 comments
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by jmduke 3y ago
You might find https://howisfelix.today/ ? interesting, as both inspiration/prior-art/cautionary tale.
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by jmduke 3y ago
I run an app with a bunch of separate processes managed in a Procfile invoked by Overmind ( https://github.com/DarthSim/overmind ): ``` app-web: cd app && poetry run invoke server app-vite: cd app && pnpm
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by jmduke 3y ago
I think this verbiage is a little bit more provocative than is necessary, but it's still _true_. I've met with, worked with, and chatted with a lot of founders (both in the 'indie hackers' / lifestyle businesses sen
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by jmduke 3y ago
As context: I live with a partner and run a SaaS with a handful of contractors. I think this is important context, because most productivity tools and systems fall down when you have to introduce state outside of your control, and half your
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by jmduke 3y ago
A while back I built out a quick guide comparing all of these alternatives, because the core value prop was pretty similar and it was annoying to compare between pricing plans. (My personal vote goes to Fathom.) https://buttondow
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by jmduke 3y ago
Two immediate nits (and I mean these from a place of love — I am a sucker for docs tools): - Your splash page's hero image is indistinguishable at first glance from basic Markdown. More than that, it's the kind of thing I'd e

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