Summer's over / Buttondown 2.0
Hello from the skies, and sorry for not checking in too much in August. Between a very nice vacation and a not very nice stomach bug, I was not availed of too much dedicated writing time. (I spent most of my time keeping on top of emails and working in fits and starts on the new writing interface.)
The end of August roughly marks the end of three months since having Buttondown be the most important professional activity in my life, and maybe ~one month since I started seriously ramping up my time on it. It has been really delightful (in no small part to the cohort of folks who upgraded to higher-end plans and emailed me to say it was explicitly to support my work — those of you, you have my undying thanks!)
I've shipped features at a higher cadence in the past three months than any time since Buttondown started collecting paid users back in 2017, and it's felt quite nice. That being said, I very much feel like it's time to spend my time less on features and more on core improvements, using this time and energy to make long-overdue improvements to the most important parts of the existing functionality. (I'm referring to this in my head with the appropriately overblown title of Buttondown 2.0, which of course does not refer to any actual new codebase or anything.)
The short list of what I have in mind here:
- A new writing experience (as you've already seen!)
- A new analytics page, with a focus on a full conversion funnel
- A new settings experience, to wrangle the current jungle of mismatched and poorly organized settings primitives
- A new paid subscriptions setup experience, so that I can rid myself of what is truly the single ugliest view in Buttondown
The goal here is to lay foundation, and to work on things that don't just make Buttondown useful but pay down significant dividends and make the most obvious slate of "feature work" (RSS integrations, rich subscriber filtering, and so on) significantly easier and more obvious. I'm pretty jazzed.
It's also going to be interesting to shift towards longtermism with the majority of my work, which is something that I've struggled with. I think the goal will be to start every day with one small thing from the roadmap that makes the product just a little bit better — I'm a sucker for streaks, after all — before diving into the redesign stuff.
(And the redesign stuff is going to feel good. I'm excited to share some more screenshots; by the end of this year, I think I'll be able to stop apologizing for the vast majority of things I find myself apologizing for in Buttondown.)