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Business as authorship · Applied Cartography

jmduke.com · 2,802 words · saved by 1 readers

When Buttondown was a smaller company, the goal was to, quote unquote, stick around. That mostly meant making: for me to continue wanting to work on it. Now that all three of those things have proven themselves infinitely satisfiable, I'm sort of left with the existential crisis that comes from building a company without the explicit goal of world domination. The thing that I settled on as a North Star to justify continuing to work every day really hard on growing not just the product but the business itself is that I really want to show people this kind of alternate path for creating a software business: A business that is slightly more humane, much more sustainable, and provides substantial value and satisfaction to all involved without having to also bring Faust into the mix. I think any sort of ambition I have comes more from relative scale than absolute scale, if that makes sense. Leverage is a concept I think about a lot lately. It*'s way more interesting to me to work towards Bu

Business as authorship 2025/10/23 When Buttondown was a smaller company, the goal was to, quote unquote, stick around. That mostly meant making: enough money; providing enough value; and crucially, remaining interesting enough for me to continue wanting to work on it. Now that all three of those things have proven themselves infinitely satisfiable, I'm sort of left with the existential crisis that comes from building a company without the explicit goal of world domination . The thing that I settled on as a North Star to justify continuing to work every day really hard on growing not just the p

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