Tech entrepreneur Justin Duke from Buttondown discusses Django's evolution, workflow logic, email industry challenges, and desired improvements to Django including modern authentication options and enhancing the admin tool for better customization.

Justin Duke, the founder of Buttondown, shares his journey of building a bootstrapped email tool. He discusses how he grew the team to eight while maintaining a passion for his work. Justin emphasizes the importance of calculated risks and sees competition as an opportunity for growth. He talks about his unique marketing strategies and focuses on catering to technical users. Finally, he reflects on balancing passion, innovation, and sustainability in business as he navigates his entrepreneurial path.

Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email newsletter tool without all the bloat. In December 2022 Buttondown was around $15k MRR. He also runs Spoonbill, which is a way to stay updated on what people change on their social profiles. At the time of recording this Justin was an engineering manager at Stripe so you’ll hear references to that, but he’s since left to go all in on being a founder.👉 Join the Indie Bites membership here.Timestamps00:00 Intro01:57 Origins of Buttondown03:25 Buttondown launch05:37 Keeping Buttondown as a side project07:47 A pricing conundrum09:26 Having a free plan10:20 Finding balance12:31 Are Stripe side-project friendly13:56 RecommendationsRecommendationsBook - The Great Beanie Baby BubblePodcast - MetamuseIndie Hacker - Amy HoyNewsletter - Matt Levine Money StuffFollow JustinTwitterPersonal siteMy linksTwitterIndie Bites TwitterIndie Bites YouTubeJoin the membershipPersonal Website2 Hour Podcast CoursePodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)This Indie Life PodcastSponsor - AhrefsThank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools