How we welcome new customers at Buttondown

Let’s say you sign up for Buttondown as a new customer. Hi! Welcome! Okay, now what?

I’ve been tasked with answering this question. It’s a surprisingly hard question! That’s because Buttondown customers have a wide diversity of:

• needs (migrating from somewhere else? running automations?)
• experience levels (never run a list before?)
• backgrounds (business? creator? just for fun?)

Looking at some examples, you can see how this would break down:

• If I run a small business with lots of automations and I’m migrating my list from a competitor, then I’ll want someone to help with migrating everything, set up analytics, and I’ll probably need to invite other team members.
• If I’m a journalist with paid & free tiers, I’ll want to move my readers over, get set up on our billing, and turn on analytics.
• If I’m building a brand-new newsletter for my block club, I’ll want to set a name and figure out how to share it with my neighbors.

Yes, there’s some overlap, but it all comes down to one thing: our customer base is diverse, and their needs will vary. We can’t really figure out what to do with a new customer by guessing. We have to ask them.

We’ve historically done a lousy job of this. We know roughly who our customers are, because we pay attention and talk to them a lot. We don’t know this with any degree of precision. We’re guessing as to what they do next.

Worse yet, there’s a bit of an unknown-unknown problem, where we may not know that some cohorts exist. We’re guessing as to the categories. Any guess is informed – but, by definition, will never be fully correct.

Welcome to Buttondown. Help us help you.

And so, as I’ve begun creating an onboarding process for Buttondown, I’ve broken the process down into three steps:

1. Who are you?

Think the basics, like name, email address, user name: the bare minimum that you need to run a newsletter from us.

2. What best describes you?

This is where we get to answering the question in this post. We want to know the answer to this for two reasons: it radically affects what we’re about to ask you, and as a business, selfishly we want to know who our customers really are.

For the time being, we’ve broken that into four categories:

• Casual
• Creator
• Technologist
• Business

If you answer “casual”, then you don’t get another question. For the others, we want to know what type of creator, technologist, or business you are – with the classic “other” option for all of the types we’ve forgotten.

We say “for the time being” because we fully plan on changing these lists of categories & sub-categories over time. It is truly hilarious to ship something that we know we got a little wrong, but here I think it’s the right move, since there’s no way we’ll know how we got it wrong until we put it in front of real people.

3. Can you do what we think you need to get started?

Based on how you respond to who you are, we’ve then created a series of custom-tailored steps that help you get started with Buttondown.

Every step is skippable. In fact, the whole process is skippable with one click.

Here, we’re also shipping something that we know is “wrong.” As our customers skip or fill out various steps, we’ll learn more about how to serve future customers like them – which will allow us to remove steps and avoid hassling people.

Oh right, the home screen

In order to make this all work, we also had to build a brand-new home screen for all customers in Buttondown. Doing so gives us a place to ask these questions and get people acclimated to the product, and it also helps existing customers better understand the health & progress of their lists at a glance.

Launch, adapt, repeat

As we roll out the first version of this process, I meet the moment with no small amount of excitement & nervousness. If you’re new to Buttondown, I hope you take our brand-new first impression as a sign of our wanting to help you make the most of your newslettering experience. And if you’ve been around for a while, thanks for sticking with us while we threw you into a blank screen with no life preserver. We made it better now.