In my latest blog post, I wrote a bit about how we’ve created onboarding for Buttondown and how we plan on adapting it. In this piece, we’ll talk about what it means to understand the customer.

I’ve been a customer of Buttondown for longer than I’ve worked here, and as I talk to the team I often find myself shifting from “design consultant” to “customer” and back. But I am also not representative of all Buttondown customers, and I might not even be representative of the kind of customers that Buttondown even wants.

As the local researcher on staff, my goal is to figure out who our customers are, what drives them, what they say, what they do, and then figure out how we will serve them and what we want them to be. That is a lot of things to figure out, and they are all deeply interconnected. That’s because any one research method is helpful but fundamentally incomplete:

• Through analytics, you can figure out what people are doing, but not why.
• Through interviews, you can figure out why people came to your business and what they’re excited about, but not how they actually work with your product.
• Through usability testing, you can figure out what’s broken, but you don’t get any real insight into the motivations that drive customer behavior.
• Through surveys, you can learn more about what types of customers you have, how fluent they are with using your product, and what held them back from purchasing, among many other things – but seldom do you get any real insight into real-world usage.

In our onboarding, we put together surveys that help both us and you. By asking what type of customer you are, we’re customizing your onboarding experience so you don’t have to answer or skip a bunch of irrelevant questions. In doing so, we also learn a lot about who the customer is.

After a month, we’ve learned a lot of fun things!

85% of you are starting a newsletter from scratch

Most of our onboarding is focused on helping new customers migrate, and if you answer “no” to that upfront question you skip all of it.

This one shocked us: only 15% of you are migrating data from elsewhere, be it subscribers or old emails.

70% of you are “technical”

Later, we asked the question: “Do you consider yourself technical?” Which means a lot of different things to people. “Technical” can mean computer fluency; it can also mean writes code for a living. Still, 70% of you answered “yes.”

Half of you identify as writers

If you answer that you’re a creator, we ask you what you primarily make. Of all of our creators, just under half of you identify as “writer” first.

This makes sense to me, since while biased I think Buttondown’s editor is truly best-in-class for writing. We know what we’re good at!

Most of you responded, bless your hearts

We were mortally terrified that nobody would answer the survey questions, even though they are actually very useful for you. Thank you to the 74% of new customers who proved us wrong.