Responsive-sm with smaller buttons?

I’m trying to figure out how to use the responsive grid on a portrait phone with buttons that are not 100% width. Using the defaults for responsive-sm, I get 100% width buttons, but my ideal is to have a truly responsive grid of buttons, mocked up like so:

<div class="row responsive-sm">
<button class="colbutton button-clear button-small" ng-repeat="..."> <a href="" ng-click="...">{{r.shortName}}</a></button>
</div>

Gives me:

while

<div class="row">
<button class="col col-20 button button-clear button-small" ng-repeat="..."> <a href="" ng-click="...">{{r.shortName}}</a></button>
</div>

gives me:

Any ideas? Do I have to define some special CSS for this?

Thanks for all of the great work! Other than this Ionic has been a breeze!