November 27. 2019
I am back from San Francisco! It was filled with Philz and, as always when I am removed from Seattle for too long, a deep sense of longing.
Instead, this week’s sense of chaos (or, a word that has alarmingly emerged into parlance, randomization) comes from home, where I am hosting my brother and parents. Family is, like any good thing, draining and rewarding.
Marketing?
Unfortunately, that means I don’t have too much to report. I am reading Obviously Awesome, a very good book with a very bad name about positioning, and how to think about marketing and investing in Buttondown’s presence in 2020.
One of the most interesting metrics for a software business is Customer Lifetime Value (sometimes thought of as ARPU, or Average Revenue Per User). This metric is exactly what it sounds like: how much money do you make for a given user (or for a given user averaged across a given cohort, or averaged across all cohorts)?
I’m blessed that Buttondown has pretty high ARPU: as soon as someone starts paying for Buttondown for Professionals, they don’t stop paying, which means that (and of course this is lossy because some folks are just new customers) ARPU is in the ~$300 range. This is a big number that becomes smaller once you squint at it: as soon as someone stays on Buttondown for Professionals for ten months, they hit that mark.
This means that it’s not just rational but extremely profitable to spend a bunch of money on acquiring such a user. If I could hand someone a hundred dollar bill and convert them into a long-term customer, it’s a no-brainer.
It’s never that simple, though; every customer has their own set of feature requests, their own set of eccentricities and edge cases that I need to account for. My biggest hangup on really diving into paid acquisition is that my favorite customers are referrals — the folks who truly love Buttondown bring in other folks who truly love Buttondown, and I’d rather make sure they’re nice and comfortable.
Mailserver arcana.
I need to share this with someone, and so I am sharing it with y’all: Russia’s largest mailserver provider, yandex.ru, has a bug. They are returning 522 error codes (which means “this inbox has too many messages, please stop sending email to it) when a certain class of email delivery times out.
The more time I spend in the weeds of so many primitive Buttondown questions (how do you send reliable email? how do you vet subscribers? how do you render HTML?), the more I am flabbergasted by how these are problems that we have had for the past twenty years, that we will have for the next twenty years, that there is no end in sight. I cannot decide if this makes me optimistic or pessimistic.