TL;DR

This year: really great. Built a lot, re-built even more, lots of happy new users, lots of emails sent.

Next year: will be really great. Localization, dark mode, re-building (automations, search, onboarding), new subscription flow, new archive themes.

2024, in review

It is with no small amount of pleasure and fortune that I re-read last year's end-of-year blog post and see that we shipped most of what we talked about shipping, like:

• A prettier, more modern archive theme.
• Rebuilt documentation.
• A much better writing and sending experience.
• A much better settings page (or, pages now I suppose.)
• A much better analytics experience.

And this is to say nothing of the other stuff we built! Like (and this is by no means an exhaustive list, and it's hard to pick just five):

• a live-updating demo site
• support for comments
• support for subscriber autonomy
• cross-posting support
• everyone's favorite feature, Naked mode

We only missed on three things we hoped to ship:

• Localization, which is still in progress and will ship in 2025! (The infrastructure is in place, but we're still working on the content.)
• ActivityPub support, which we're still iterating on to make sure that the investment and ongoing maintenance matches the value it provides to users (compared to the alternative of OAuth/API-based integrations with popular ActivityPub clients.)
• Native API bindings, which didn't quite meet the bar of "being substantially useful for a substantial number of users."

What to expect in 2025

In 2025, we're going to pivot to video double down on what you all tell us, time and time again, is the most important thing: being a rock-solid tool with a focus on reliability, focus, and ergonomics. We have some specific ideas around existing parts of using Buttondown that can be improved:

1. Launching more archive themes, and making it easier and more pleasant to customize your archives to fit your brand and voice.
2. Improving the automations experience to make it easier to understand how your automations are performing, and the structure of drip sequence-style automations.
3. Improving the speed and efficacy of the subscription form, particularly for paid subscribers.
4. Re-writing the search experience from scratch to make it faster (like, much faster) and friendlier.
5. Dark mode. (It's time.)

But those are implementation details — projects, rather than principles.

More than any individual thing you can expect to see us build, you can (and should!) expect us to keep investing in what we know is important not just for next year but for the next decade:

1. Stability, measured not just in days or minutes but in decades.
2. Service, because we know deeply that one of the reasons people choose Buttondown is because they hear the support is great, and one of the reasons they stick with Buttondown is because they know the support is great.
3. Accessibility, in every sense of the word — localization, screen reader support, mobile friendliness, and more.
4. Interoperability, and making sure Buttondown plays nicely with the other tools and apps you care about.

Coda

I wrote everything above in plurals: us, we. This reflects perhaps the most significant aspect of Buttondown's growth over the past few years: what began as a small hobby project in a Seattle coffee shop on a rainy Saturday afternoon is now a robust and growing company, used by tens of thousands of people to send millions of emails.

2024 was the first year in Buttondown's history that the majority of new code was not written by me; it was the first year, too, that the majority of customers talked to someone who wasn't me.

Whether you're using Buttondown to send updates to ten people or ten thousand, I — we! — do not take it for granted. Trust and support is hard-won and easily lost, these days more than ever; we promise to do right by you, not just next year but for all the years to come.

(And, as always, if you have anything you wish to tell me, I'm at justin@buttondown.email.)