The first ever newsletter I sent out was entitled "Hello World" and sent on September 2013 to a grand total of 17 people, 2 of which were my parents.
I had just moved out to Seattle, having graduated from the East Coast, and was feeling both excited and a little lonely at the prospect of carving out a new life for myself.
I did not start out with a particularly clear or grand mission. My newsletter then, as it is today, 13 years later, tended to be half technical and half personal, having steadily grown along the way – not enough to be a household name, but enough that I could not name the number of conversations I've had that opened with "I subscribe to your newsletter, and...". Email is a lovely thing in a world increasingly dominated by The Feed: I treasure the blessing of knowing that every time I send an email, I will get a handful of warm and meaningful responses back from it from friends known and unknown, and that there is nothing any corporation or conglomerate can do to take that away from me.
Somewhere along the way, I encountered the bad idea of building Buttondown. (I say "somewhere" despite remembering the place exactly: 425 15th Ave E, better known as Ada's Technical Books, in Seattle.) The tool I was using at the time to send my newsletters was called TinyLetter. If you've been around the internet for a very long time, you might remember TinyLetter and perhaps cherish it as much as I did. They were purchased by MailChimp, and after a while, the benefits of a company being frozen in amber (no new features that get jammed down your throat, no surprise pricing changes) dimmed relative to the drawbacks (the app is broken, and one develops a faint sense of worry with every button press that something is going to explode).
I bring this up because Buttondown began not with grand designs of "changing how creative work gets funded" or "democratizing access to marketing tools." Buttondown began as an act of preservation: its original design was as a home-cooked meal, and only when I started sharing screenshots and updates about its development (on my newsletter, no less) did the roar of positive feedback convince me to make it something it for public consumption.
Just like with newsletters, the world is overflowing with confident and contradictory advice about how to build and run a software company. I quickly realized it was tempting but foolish to pay too much attention to this advice unless it was given by practitioners (who have walked the walk themselves) whose goals and values aligned with my own. And much like the writers from whom you'll hear in this book, the most common through-line is – whoa, whoa, that's spoiler territory.
Though at least that is a useful segue to the purpose of this book. If you are reading this, you are smart enough to realize that the newsletter company has a vested interest in people wanting to write more newsletters: but much more than that, as the team who runs Buttondown talks to more and more authors we've realized that the accumulated wisdom from watching thousands of authors grow their newsletters doesn't exist anywhere. This book is meant to be a collective answer to everyone who has emailed us asking "how do I grow my newsletter?", and if there's one thing I will spoil it's that, despite our incentive to convince you otherwise, the answer has nothing to do with us or any other tool on the market. (The word "Buttondown" only appears five more times in this book, and only in the context of authors mentioning that they use Buttondown.)
This book is only useful if it compels action: the best possible outcome is for you to take the next step that you've been mulling for weeks, whether that's sending your first email or your fourteenth. (And if you do, email me – you'll make my day.)