How Linus Lee uses Buttondown

– Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.

I think a lot about tools and how people use tools, everything from kitchen knives to spreadsheets to the Arabic numerals. If you've somehow come across my work at all at some point, it was probably something related to the idea of tool-making.

The main tool in my life is programming, which I learned during my small-town-Indiana high school years, while I was trying to put together little websites for school clubs. At the time, having a website seemed like such a sign of legitimacy for anyone doing anything of note. I really struggled through learning CSS and HTML for weeks and weeks at the beginning, which is funny looking back from today, when I see my friends making websites in minutes by describing exactly what they want in sentences.

Over time, I also started writing on my website, and this year was my eleventh year of writing online. I've made most of my friends and gotten most of my jobs through writing online, which seems crazy until I remember that I've been doing this for over a decade, leaving a lot of time for serendipity to do its thing. I've written about almost every major moment in my life — some, like job changes, more literally, and others, like relationships, more obliquely. When I first moved to New York, I wrote about how that made me feel. It was surreal to run into a stranger at a cafe in my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago referencing that blog post.

– What do you write about in your newsletter?

I don't really have a theme for my newsletter or blog. To be honest, if I had to stick to one subject matter, I don't think I would have been able to keep it up for so long. I write about whatever keeps coming up in conversations in my life or whatever I can't seem to stop thinking about.

The most popular topics I discuss relate to my professional focus, which revolves around human-computer interaction and design, interfaces, software, community-building, and technology. But some of my favorite newsletters or posts have discussed things like the sense of wonder, relationships, and love.

I'm really proud of the variety of things I talk about online, because it reflects the kinds of things that occupy my mind in real life. I don't just go through my life thinking about how to build more efficient user interfaces or whatever. I also think about how to make friends and where I want to live, like everyone else! The blog is a reflection of me as a person, not a professional feed.

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

When I first started writing, I began on Blogger because it was the easiest and most flexible place to start. Since then, I've tried everything from really advanced email marketing tools to just writing my own newsletter management tool, but all of them created a lot of complexity. I didn't need or want to deal with the technical burden of managing spam or deliverability on my own, but a lot of products out there try to treat me like an email marketer for a business when really I'm just trying to let people know what I'm up to in life.

I heard about Buttondown first through Justin Duke, who has shared a lot about his journey building Buttondown as a product and business online. After that, I realized many of my friends and writers I follow online in my corner of social media — mostly designers, computer history enthusiasts, and founders — were also using Buttondown for their email updates, so I moved to it for good.

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

Writing is a part of my personal life more than a professional platform, so the best thing I can say about Buttondown is that it is reliable and gets out of the way, except at times when I want to think about it. I like that it automatically generates an archive that people can discover online, and that it appears to readers like a real human email from a real human being instead of marketing junk mail.

Migrating to it from a home brew solution, I enjoy that I can depend on it to do its core job of accepting new subscribers, confirming them, and delivering my emails to them reliably, without trying to up sell me or my readers, without trying to get them to sign in or make an account, and without me having to worry about whether I've set up some complex automation or dashboard correctly. I can forget about it until the moment I want to say something, and then it provides a clean, welcoming place for me to write and share. Having been around doing things online for a while, I appreciate the sense that Buttondown won't suddenly change its business model and decide to inject paywalls in my writing or resort to other unsavory tactics to survive. 

It's just a reliable tool that feels like it respects me and my writing, which feels like it should be table stakes, but I've grown not to take such things for granted.