SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
ButtonDown Email Is Niche Mailchimp, Hits $5k in MRR
23 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I remember it was pretty substantial. Like even now, when I look at my historic signup graph, like that is a very prominent spike. It was dramatic and it was very useful.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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My guest today is Justin Duke. He works at Stripe, making it easier for companies of all sizes to understand and improve their core operations. Before that, he was the first technical hire at a commercial real estate startup and an engineer at Amazon, making it more fun for you to read books on your Kindle.
He created ButtonDown, which is the best tool in the world for starting and running your newsletter. Also created Spoonbill, a social media metadata platform. Justin, you ready to take us to the top?
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Chapter 2: What is ButtonDown and how does it compare to Mailchimp?
And one of the worst things an engineer can say to themselves is, I bet I could build a better version of this in a weekend, right? Because it was just like dumb stuff. Like it didn't support Markdown. Sometimes emails were getting dropped. Like all of these little paper cut things that I was just like, I'm a user of this and I'm getting frustrated.
Like, can I build something that just solves my own problem a little bit better? And especially for some of the very marketing-heavy tools like ActiveCampaign, like MailChimp, these are designed for folks who are sending out e-commerce blasts to potentially tens of thousands of users. And that's a very important vertical to handle.
There's also this entirely underserved market of people like me in 2016 who have a newsletter with maybe a couple thousand subscribers. They're blogging. They don't have this grand strategy.
Chapter 3: How does Justin Duke balance his work at Stripe and running ButtonDown?
They're not trying to track all of these things. They just want a really seamless, pleasant user experience.
That makes sense. Now, help me understand when you add... Excuse me. Coffee went down the wrong funnel. When you look at the average customer, and what the average customer is paying you per month, what does that come in at?
I'm good. I promise. Around $20 to $25 a month.
Okay, got it. And the flat fee is like $15-ish, something like that?
So the flat fee is 29 a month. So the average user is actually not on sort of that main premium tier. They're just getting the metered bill.
Oh, interesting. So your freemium product really is metered only. And then they move into unlock these other features. Then they move into the flat base plus plus metered. Exactly. Interesting. OK, so 2016, you launch. It's you're eating your own dog food. How do you get your first five customers?
For sure. After a certain point, I started getting inbound emails where it was like, oh, this isn't just friends asking to use the tool. It's people who saw it on Twitter, who saw it on Hacker News that want to use it, who have volume more than I was expecting. Let's hack some sort of pricing strategy together so I have a cohesive thing to offer them.
And it was entirely inbound, which was really nice. I think one of the advantages of all these soft launching tools, whether it's like Product Hunt or Beta Lister, all of those is you get a lot of inbound interest pretty quickly, even if it is very spiky.
Um, so I was able to get, I think it was my first like dozen or so customers entirely inbound people just emailing me saying, Hey, I want to use this tool. How do I sign up? What do I have to pay?
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Chapter 4: What is the revenue model for ButtonDown?
Yeah. They're right. Oh, got it. Interesting.
So that comes into the other feedback loop, too, of folks in that community who are using Bundown as a platform. When those posts go viral, I get a ton of inbound marketing there because it's all on the top level domain.
And it's happened multiple times. I mean, I see multiple posts here where there are more than 50 upvotes. There's one here with 286. Don't write documentation and markdown. There was one just last week or about a week and a half ago. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel. So this is a really nice feedback loop for you. I imagine you get a lot.
I mean, thousands of signups from this. Interesting. Okay, what about Product Hunt? Lightning in a bottle or you can strategize?
That was, I think you can strategize more in terms of the initial launch. Product Hunt is much more friendly in terms of letting people kind of glom on and being very sort of positive. Like the community there in general is nicer, but it's the opposite of a long tail, right? Like you're not going to be able to bring it up in a lot of discussions.
I think the state of discourse and like the actual people commenting on Product Hunt is much more less in volume. It's really just that first day. If you can kind of get in the top five, then you're gonna get a great spike of content, but it'll drop off pretty dramatically thereafter.
Yeah. July 10th, 2017, you got about 360 upvotes. Do you remember how many sort of clicks you saw to the site that day?
I don't off the top of my head. I remember it was pretty substantial. Like even now, when I look at my historic signup graph, like that is a very prominent spike. It was dramatic and it was very useful.
Interesting. Okay. So how many customers are you now serving today?
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