I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no 'big bang' where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.
This is a strong _advantage_ of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017—2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn't drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn't going viral or spending money on ads.
I'm going to answer for op here and point out the product exponentially self-advertises. As more people send emails using the app, even if there isn't a "Sent with Button-down" it's easy to find out the email-sender so customer's receiving the email think to themselves, I could do that, and use that nice product!
Interestingly, this is exactly how I found about Buttondown, which I've been using for years to send my own newsletter.
It also helped that it was priced way more sensibly than many alternatives, in a way that grows linearly with the number of subscribers (which is also how, theoretically, ads returns from a newsletter can grow): my then provider would meet me with a massive cliff-edge, going from $0 to about $30/month, if I recall correctly. It's a common behaviour – lock in first, then charge A LOT :)
Which makes me wonder – maybe a simple, overlooked way, to start side hustles is to replicate a service, but offer better pricing that works for niche/bootstrapped contributors, as opposed to creating niche versions of the service?
I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no 'big bang' where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.
This is a strong _advantage_ of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017—2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn't drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn't going viral or spending money on ads.