Faxbutton

“Start blogging” is something that’s been on my to-do list since forever, but I could never bring myself to actually get the ball rolling. A while ago I decided to plough through the task, but ended up being faced with a huge challenge - making myself actually write something instead of spending weeks tweaking CSS, building custom features and optimizing Next.js builds, only to then abandon the whole thing completely.

I soon had to accept that if I ever wanted to get any writing done it’d do me more good than harm to go with a platform that already had styles and functionality come with it out of the box.

The two top contenders were Substack and Medium.

Since I wanted to send newsletters, Substack seemed a better choice. Newsletters were a core feature of Substack around which everything else was built, unlike in Medium where it’s just something that’s been added as a second thought.

However, Medium had its own advantage - discoverability. Medium has pretty high domain authority, which meant my posts would rank higher on Google, which in turn meant more people could come across them. They also show algorithmic recommendations at the end of articles, which could bring people who were reading something else on Medium to my posts.

While I was at this crossroads in terms of which platform to go with, I stumbled upon the fact that Medium had an API by which you could PUSH an article to your account, as well as set canonical links too.

This got the gears in my head spinning. What if I use Substack as my primary tool, write in it, use it to send newsletters, and then use the Medium API to publish a copy of that post on Medium, with a link back to my original post?

That way, I could have the best of both worlds. But oh no, my ambitions were much too grand for that. Why settle for the best of just two worlds? What if, instead, you could have the best of... all worlds?

Introducing Faxbutton

My dream for Faxbutton is for it to be the Segment of content. You merely set up a source and pick destinations from a list, and Faxbutton will intelligently transform your content into the form appropriate for each destination channel.

Imagine that you have a blog post, and with the press of a single button, can have it posted to Instagram as a card or carousel, Youtube as a video clip, Twitter as a thread, or heck even submitted to HN.

I’ve built an MVP for this. It currently publishes only to Medium as a destination, though you can select as many as you want in the demo. The UI is inspired by the old System 1 operating system that ran on vintage Apple computers. With a name like Faxbutton, I wanted the interface to look a bit retro.