Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you’re sick of having to dig up a couple dozen emails every time you want to send out the quarterly family newsletter, but every single tool that you check out to potentially make your life easier is built for marketing teams trying to, like, “monetize your subscriber base” and “drive positive revenues” — and not just make it easier to share what’s new with your folks on the other end of the country.
Buttondown is… a little bit different than what you may be used to. My first newsletter was exactly that — just for my friends from college and my extended family so they could follow me around on the West Coast. I built Buttondown to make that easier, not harder — and every tool I tried beforehand seemed dead set on the opposite.
Don’t get me wrong, Buttondown has some powerful features as well — you can hook it up to Zapier or take advantage of the powerful API to do some fancy stuff if you really want. But if you don’t want to do that, and just want an easier way to share your updates with folks, all of that fancy stuff recedes into the background and lets you focus on what’s really important: writing.
What is perhaps even more important than how Buttondown works, though, is what it does with your data. When it comes to your family and your personal updates, you don’t want your writing or your subscriber information mined for details and sold off to advertisers or shoved into third parties that you can’t trust. Buttondown’s stance on privacy is, bar none, the strongest in the industry — your data is not shared with any third party and is yours to delete or export at any time.