I Tripled Revenue For My Simple Newsletter SaaS [Update]

Justin Duke

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Published: July 5th, 2024

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Justin Duke

Founder, Buttondown

$75K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Buttondown

buttondown.email

from Richmond, VA, USA

started December 2016

$75,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

platform

Heroku

customer service tool-icon

HelpScout

social media

Twitter

payments

Stripe

Discover what books Justin recommends to grow your business!

📗

Want more updates on Buttondown? Check out these stories:

1. Bootstrapping A [Profitable] $15K/Month Simple Newsletter SaaS With No Experience (2023) ➜

This is a follow up story for Buttondown. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 1 year ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

My name is Justin Duke! I run Buttondown, a newsletter software for the rest of us. I started Buttondown five years ago, while I was an engineer at Stripe, and grew it as a side project for many years until it became large enough for me to work on it full-time.

I built it to scratch my own itch — all of the other email tools out there were either super-heavy (like Mailchimp or ConvertKit) or wanted to own your entire blogging presence like Medium or Substack. There wasn’t anything that just let me drop in a <form> tag into my blog and automatically send out emails, so I built something just like that on a hunch that other people shared my use case.

There’s a lot of room in the world for incremental improvements to things, especially if you’re sufficiently opinionated about what those opinions should be.

Today, tens of thousands of customers use Buttondown to power everything from niche blogs about French real estate to YC-backed pre-launch startups. It’s been a huge pleasure to see that, contrary to popular opinion, you can dig into a specific use case and build for yourself and see that resonates with others.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

I’m proud to say that the business has grown pretty dramatically over the past year. We’ve more than tripled in revenue, made a strategic acquisition, and now I’m starting to break ground on what feels like the most exciting, rewarding part yet — hiring my first full-time employees.

There haven’t been any dramatic changes or new tactics to account for this growth: largely, it’s been borne out by slow, steady progress week by week, and accelerated even further by the competitive landscape making some serious errors in judgments (three competitors have made steep price increases; two others have had some rough P.R. cycles.)

buttondown-3c56dbd3-7447-409e-9259-12a87b275dbb

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

A lot of the day-by-day this time last year was focused on the product and the engineering side of things: I could fit the entire company, strategy, and customer base in my head, and outside of a couple part-time engineers and ops folks there wasn’t a lot of systems or documentation required.

Now, though, the company and landscape has grown too big for me to keep track of everything, and I’m finding myself trying to make up for lost time in terms of documenting processes, operational issues, and spinning up sales/ops pipelines.

If you can’t find a single paying customer, you shouldn’t be worried about engineering or product issues; if you can’t keep a single customer, you shouldn’t be worried about GTM or top-of-funnel.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

1) Don’t get distracted by the enterprise. I’m grateful to many of Buttondown’s enterprise customers who are lovely partners, but a couple folks who I had in the pipeline because I was unduly excited by their AOV ended up being bad fits for the product and the business I was trying to build.

2) Some things are easier than they appear. We’ve spent a lot of time tackling interesting technical challenges that appeared at first glance to be intractable for a company of ten times Buttondown’s size, let alone just me and a few friends. It turns out that with enough patience and elbow grease, most things are accomplishable by a small and motivated team — and tackling those things can be worth a lot of long-term durable value.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

I’m expecting my first kid in October, so the next twelve months is going to be largely in two phases:

Finish up hiring, and get Buttondown as a business in a place where it can grow and sustain itself on autopilot.
Take a nice, long paternity leave 🙂

After that, I think infrastructural and performance improvements are gonna be where we spend the majority of our time. Buttondown is fairly close to “feature complete”; now comes the rewarding work of making sure it’s as fast and ergonomic as possible.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Whenever I talk with folks who have hit a snag, the biggest thing they struggle with is being honest about what their problem is. There’s so much (good and bad) advice out there; some of it might apply to you, but some of it might be for someone whose business and profile is completely different.

If you can’t find a single paying customer, you shouldn’t be worried about engineering or product issues; if you can’t keep a single customer, you shouldn’t be worried about GTM or top-of-funnel.

It can be so tempting to flit between different parts of your business as your interest suits you, but the most effective founders lazer in on the chokepoint in their business, optimize that to hell, and then find the next one.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

I’m looking for some part-time customer service + success workers! If you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS and aren’t scared off by the prospect of debugging DNS or email issues, send me an email at [email protected] with your favorite Glossary entry from Buttondown’s docs.