July 19, 2020
Marketing, hovering over the "merge" button.
It is so tempting:
And if we scroll up a bit, we see just how tempting (and scary, tbh) it is:
The copy has been mostly edited, the site has been mostly tempted. I fully anticipate a broken link or three, and there are still some bits that I should do but don't quite have the energy for (more demos, some better testimonials, that sort of thing.). But it feels ready to ship: it is unambiguously better than the existing marketing material.
The last page to come was the pricing page:
The pricing grid itself is kind of boring, which I'm not worried about: the pricing overhaul is probably going to come in a month or so.
This is feeling exciting! I am going to probably write some self-promotional material about how I went about the redesign with the constraints I had, but mostly I just want to watch the new pages live and grow a bit.
Internationalization, surprisingly far along.
I had a handful of productive evenings this week and was able to really knock out some progress on the internationalization work. I ended up going against my better instincts and pulling together a only-slightly-janky script to download Google Sheets data into JSON (for Vue) and gettext (for Django):
This....is actually all I need. The script is still an offline script (so I need to run it manually and push the new strings into version control), but I don't anticipate a lot of new translations so I'm actually really excited about this — things are much further along than I realized, and I can probably start gating folks in in a week or so.
To wit, here's a test newsletter in Turkish (please ignore the footer, which is still ugly, and the newsletter description, which is randomly generated):
Thinking about the next big project.
I'll want to spend a few weeks after getting both i18n and marketing-v3 across the line in reactive cleanup mode (bug fix here, copy fix here, that sort of thing), but the mind is already wandering as to what the next substantial chunk of work will be. A couple items that jump out:
- New writing interface. This would be fun! I've wanted to punch up the interface for a while, moving to CodeMirror and something a little more full-screeny a la Dropbox Paper. This also wouldn't move the needle in any substantial amount: I don't think the interface is a weak link by any means, and I don't think it'd really help the bottom line.
- New billing & pricing model. This would be stressful! I've wanted to simplify Buttondown's pricing for a while, and I think it'd legitimately help the bottom line (plus save me time to answer the question of "why does my invoice look so weird?" every week), but it's hard to get particularly excited about it.
- Finally add support for multiple users per publication. This is something I know needs to happen, and it's going to be an absolute bear of work, but it is a pretty good differentiator (even if it moves me upmarket a bit) — and it scratches my own itch.
The meta-point here is that my planning process has gotten away from me a bit. My roadmap has become particularly gnarly and unwrangleable, and I think I need to figure out how to re-organize it, because I've shifted into "fly-by-seat-of-pants" mode a bit in terms of where to spend my time and it unsettles me.
But that's a problem for Future Justin. For now, my efforts remain with wrapping up these two projects.