[jmduke]

Author here! Happy to answer any questions folks have.

(I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I am grateful to HN for introducing me to what was called microISVs a decade ago, "indie hacking" five years ago, and now I suppose is mostly called "building in public" / "lifestyle businesses". I was inspired to start Buttondown in no small part due to reading about Candy Japan, Appointment Reminder, et al, and learning that there was a different yet equally valid path for growing a SaaS)

[rexreed]

Why was getting the expensive buttondown.com necessary and important? I might have missed that in the post.

[jmduke]

Definitely not _necessary_ — I was more or less resigned to not having the domain, since the sticker price was $170K and my mental "is this _really_ worth it?" number was high five figures.

As for why important: a melange of reasons. I had heard a _lot_ from customers and prospects that they couldn't find the site because they searched for/navigated to buttondown.com; I was faintly worried about SEO/brand impact from using a vanity TLD like `.email`; I was faintly worried about a more well-financed competitor buying it and redirecting to their own property; there are a very real number of legacy pieces of software that do not _accept_ `buttondown.email` as a valid domain, which is important when you're dealing with UGC.

(When I was debating what a reasonable purchase price might be, the framing that helped me make a decision was: "if this helps my overall conversion funnel grow by 2% in perpetuity, is it worth it?", and that answer was yes. Time will tell, of course, to see where that number actually lands!)

[pentagrama]

How did you handle that users with saved credentials on password managers for.email now didn't get the autofill feature when redirected to .com?

[bww]

Just FYI, you’re still using buttondown.email in your HN profile.

[jmduke]

And my old blog domain to boot! Exactly what I meant by "The hardest part of the process was the stuff you can't grep for..."

(T/Y — fixed.)

[secondbreakfast]

Congrats! Huge get :)