How Jenny Zhang uses Buttondown

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.

I'm a writer and programmer–I like to say that I write code for money and words for my sins. I've been writing software professionally for about twelve years, and I'm most proud of my work in government digital services and open source tech. In my spare time, I read a lot of speculative fiction, collect memes, and solve inscrutable puzzles with friends.

What do you write about in your newsletter?

I run a website called Show Up Toronto, which is a calendar of organizing, advocacy, and activism events in the city of Toronto. If you're rallying your neighbours or mobilizing to make the city and the world a better place, I want to know about it, and I want to make that visible and accessible to other people. The Show Up Toronto newsletter goes out weekly on Tuesdays, and it started out just being a listing of all the events on the calendar for the upcoming week. Pretty soon, I found myself using it to talk about what was happening in the city more generally, as well as calling out things readers can do immediately like contacting elected representatives or showing up to an encampment defense. I've written about the Air Canada flight attendants' strike, the difficulty of engaging with Canada Day, and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, to use a few examples. 

Even though I live in Canada, American political news dominates our landscape and media ecosystems, and it's been really nice to have a space where I can slow down and focus on what's happening locally, which is where I think we as individuals can have the greatest impact. The newsletter has been running for a little bit less than half a year, but I've already gone to events and met people who found out about those events from my newsletter, which is an incredibly cool feeling.

The main thing I want readers to take from the newsletter is that you don't need to be an expert, and you don't need permission to start doing good work. The political and ecological climate is so scary right now, and I think a lot of us are feeling slightly at a loss for how to best channel our energy. Since I started the newsletter, there have been consistently 20-30 events a week at least, with some weeks going up to 50. Each of those events represents dozens of people who care enough about making the world a better place to put real effort into organizing with each other. I hope readers can take inspiration from the fact that there are this many people in their city who care as much as they do, and that all you need to do to get started is to get a few friends or neighbours together and start talking about your concerns. We have the numbers on our side; we just need to organize.

I am currently trying to think through how to better showcase groups in the city that are doing good work that don't host public events. For example, Toronto has some pretty active community fridge/pantry groups, and they don't host public meetups–you just raise your hand to commit to helping maintain a fridge in your neighbourhood. That's super worthwhile, and I want more people to know they can be empowered to do things like that, but it's a little bit more unstructured than an event, so figuring out how to integrate that is the next step for the newsletter. After that, who knows! 

The main thing I want readers to take from the newsletter is that you don't need to be an expert, and you don't need permission to start doing good work.

Where did you first learn of Buttondown, and what made you decide to give it a try?

I don't quite remember where specifically I learned about Buttondown, but I'm pretty sure it was because someone had linked to something Justin had written about Buttondown's financial costs on social media. I definitely remember that factoring into my decision to try it out in 2021, as I was quite impressed with the ethos around transparency. At the time, I had a dormant personal newsletter on Tinyletter and had been thinking about starting up something new, so I took a shot at migrating. I ran into a weird sign-up bug, emailed support, heard back from Justin within a day, and have been an evangelist since. 

Once a week, I pull up Buttondown, write directly in the CMS UI like a heathen, and hit send, and then I don't think about it again for six days. Honestly, all software should be like this. 

What are some ways Buttondown has helped you run your email?

This is kind of a hard question to answer because the thing I love most about Buttondown is that it just gets out of my way. It's super easy to get set up, super easy to start writing, and I don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about how to configure it or making sure my settings are correct. Once a week, I pull up Buttondown, write directly in the CMS UI like a heathen, and hit send, and then I don't think about it again for six days. Honestly, all software should be like this. 

What are some things you’d be excited to see Buttondown build in the next few months?

Personally, I'm very happy with the product as it is now, and can't think of anything I want for myself. 

For the platform as a whole, it would be nice to have better UI features for building out a homepage around your newsletter, like what Ghost offers. I sometimes have friends asking me for recommendations of alternative newsletter platforms to Substack, and my non-technical friends have a little bit harder of a time finding an entryway into Buttondown because it's harder to build a whole website around it (or even customizing the archive view) with no engineering skills. I think that would go a long way towards making the service more accessible to newcomers. 

Anything else you’d like to add?

I love that every time I email I hear back from a real person. I hope it's as nice of a place to work as it seems from the outside! Y'all are keeping the dream alive that it's possible to have a viable business where you just make something useful for the people who need it, without falling prey to hypergrowth or any of the other nonsense financial incentives the tech industry sometimes likes to heap on its darlings. Keep doing what you're doing!