LLMs and Buttondown

Buttondown has grown a lot in 2026; some of that growth is uncomfortable. I've talked to enough people about this in real life that it felt worth writing some of it down while it's fresh — if for no other reason than to revisit in a few years' time. First, the headline. Our month-over-month growth rate in Q1 2026 was double our growth rate in Q4 2025. Buttondown has, roughly, grown a little less than 2x every year of its existence; this — its eighth year — is poised to shatter that, if trends hold. Almost all of that incremental growth, meaning the growth in addition to our historical trend, I attribute to LLMs. We ask people when they sign up what brought them here, and an answer that went from surprising to banal to overwhelming over the course of Q1 was: an LLM. Users of all stripes cite an LLM as the reason that they ended up at Buttondown's front door. These users, broken into their own cohort, have some interesting numerical properties. They both activate (i.e. send their first…