Mailchimp

“Mailchimp's revenue fell almost 20% last year at Intuit.”

“And one of the things they did was lay off like half of the deliverability team, including the two folks that were the experts there at Mailchimp.”

“MailChimp hasn't lowered their prices ever that I know about. And we, I mean, I used to monitor their prices because we competed with them. Never saw them lower them. Salesforce certainly hasn't, and there's hundreds of competitors.”

“Because we know you can build a CRUD app, we know you can build Basecamp, we know you can build Drip, we know you can build MailChimp, right? It might take you a while, These are certain things that will happen. There's no technology risk.”

“With Drip, we were, what, 20% more than MailChimp, I think, 20 to 25%, and we were like, well, we were way cheaper than all the marketing automation, you know, Infusionsoft and such was like five, three to 500 and up. And we were like, 50 to a hundred.”

“MailChimp, you know, the email marketing company, you know, had two founders that owned 98% of the company, didn't raise a single dollar and sold it. And so they kept 98% of the sales proceeds as opposed to give it to an investor.”

“I ended up being really fascinated by the art, like to learn how it within like two seconds to convince someone on the internet to click something is, it became fascinating for me. And I, you know, that skill to like build, build something, an animation really…”

“Dan's he's into, he was a DJ, he's a music producer, he's into electronic music, and so he interviewed for the job thinking he was interviewing to write content about music, and halfway through his interview with, he realized that I was interviewing him to be …”

“And we just took the scrap code from the greetings website. Luckily we didn't delete it, and yeah, we used that to build MailChimp.”

“I ran out of check deposit slip and I said, I do not want to go inside the bank. We've got to find a way to build our customers online. And that was how we actually installed the credit card system. And that was when Mailchimp became an official SAS business.”

“And so we decided to call it chimp mail. And then of course the domain was taken.”

“There was definitely a stigma to email marketing. If we went to tech conferences and told people what we did, you know, things would get quiet. They'd walk away. You know, we were, they sort of thought of us as sort of like the dark underbelly of the internet.…”

“The web design projects are like 20,000 dollars by this time we had gotten pretty good at sales. And so it was a really hard thing to convince my co-founders like, Hey, let's abandon the web design business where we're making 20 grand, sometimes 35 grand a pop…”

“When we finally worked up the courage to do it, MailChimp revenue, if I recall correctly, almost tripled overnight.”

“And it took us a whole year to decide to finally put in those subscription fees, and we did, and that's when business really, really took off for us, too.”

“You know, for the first two, I started to think about it, because I really believed their pitches, and then by the 10th one, I realized they were all saying the same thing, they were all using the same playbook and it was always a scare tactic, like, if you do…”

“My angle was how freemium is great, but it's Rife with abuse, and you better have some good anti-spam algorithms like MailChimp does.”

“Importantly, you know, if you signed up and sent an email from the freemium plan, the catch was, you know, our logo was in the footer of your emails, and so it went viral. People would click on that and sign up as well.”

“So you're talking about having, you know, a few 100,000 customers at the time after six years of business. And then within one year of launching freemium, we ballooned to a million users and it just kept growing exponentially after that.”

“2010 is when You know, we're at a million users growing to two million fast servers were dying constantly. We were having to constantly move from data center to data center just to keep things alive.”

“I wish I could remember the timeline. It's been 20 years, you know, it's all a blur now, but we were making probably 10,000,015 million at the time.”

“We were totally self-funded. Investors still came, and, you know, they would say, you know, take our money, and we'd say, we can't, we don't know why we would need it. We, we're making plenty.”

“You know, you have to depend on just a handful of customers with the long tail. You know, we're serving You know, thousands or millions of tiny customers who pay small amounts of money. You don't rely on anyone too much such that, you know, they're sort of too…”

“I mean, I still remember the day when someone told, one of our employees said, I listened to this thing called podcasts on my drive to work, and I think we should sponsor a podcast. And I thought it was, you know, just a weird idea. I'd never heard a podcast, …”

“Yeah, and so we were the first sponsor.”

“And I mean, to this day, we look at our quarter four results and, you know, it's just like a bummer because the cereal, the quarter where we sponsored cereal did so amazingly well. It's hard to beat it every year.”

“The minimum revenue had to be two million in revenue, and, you know, we were, like, maybe at two hundred million or something by this time, and so I didn't tell them that. I submitted the form, and I said, you know, Yes, I make two million in revenue”

“We made a conscious effort to always keep it simple. No more than three themes. You know, it had to fit on a sticky note was always my philosophy.”

“I've had offers. The thing is, I love what I do, and I don't know, I, it's one of those things I, you know, you never, you learn over time, after 20 years of running a business, you learn, never say never, right? I think I have an open mind about it, but I can…”

“A few months after this episode first ran in 2021, the software giant Intuit announced it was acquiring MailChimp in a deal worth twelve billion dollars.”

“And they did get it done and they got it done through subtracting. They streamlined the experience. They took out steps that people were getting stuck on. They made things easier. They did the kinds of things that are rarely celebrated in the way that traditio…”

“Options and a recommendation is kind of the magic formula. I did when I was working with Mailchimp, we actually did a workshop with all the product managers at the company where we had people like, Role play trying to sell in a single option versus multiple op…”

“Lightweight marketing automation that doesn't suck was the H-one of DREP for years. So what does that imply? That implies, and then I named, because I wrote the whole copy for that long form landing page, I named Crap. Who was it? It was Infusionsoft. It was M…”

“I think like a 50% gross. That has enough expansion to still be positive is kind of fake. You know what I mean? Like low logo retention, but like an expansion dynamic, like that, that, that doesn't really, I mean, I think MailChimp probably had that, but also …”

“Constant contact IPO'd with a hundred million ARR when MailChimp was at two million ARR.”

“There's some rare instances where you can offer unlimited something but not your value metric, right? If you're measuring based on the number of email subscribers, there is no unlimited email subscriber plan with MailChimp or if I was starting an email service…”

“They sold MailChimp to twelve billion to Intuit. There are actually a lot of learnings, but one is they had a deal before that, that fell apart and it almost destroyed the team. He said, going to your point, it really resonated almost destroyed the team. They …”

“The reason we did is because I saw the ESP market, and I was like, MailChimp, and HubSpot, and whoever else, you know, Infusionsoft, and everybody charged per contact or subscriber. That's probably the way to do it. And I was aware of net negative churn and al…”

“I don't think we fundamentally understand brand marketing as SaaS in India. So whether you look at Dropbox or Atlassian or even Mailchimp when they started, they understood the value of brand marketing. We are more focused on this performance and quantitative …”

“Everyone sells, like I say this, everyone sells eventually. I never thought MailChimp would sell and they eventually sold, you know, I mean, really, I had all these examples and they've all sold except for I think Basecamp is probably the one that I think abou…”

“Everybody sells eventually.”

“I think that event, you know, we ran some analytics on this, I think, you know, a while, while ago, and there was definitely there was a bump, but I think people were surprised at how much there was kind of already these big, huge tailwinds and that, you know,…”

“Mailchimp, which is our direct competitor as well, but if we compete against Mailchimp, in 80% of cases we win against them, because we know that we drive way better value for those who sell online.”

“Currently we do have almost 200,000 links that refer to omniscient domain. Our main website, our blog it comes from 14.4 thousand unique websites, including like PayPal, Hubspot, Mailchimp is even quoting us. Google in the articles is quoting us. I mean, those…”

“It was 10 years in, 2010, 2000 nine-ish, when we launched our freemium plan everything took off. It was this rocket ride right after that. I mean, we went from, I don't know, tens of thousands of users to a million in the first year, and then it doubled and do…”

“We didn't even have a free trial before that. You had to pay.”

“It's a little bit weird with small businesses because sometimes with small businesses, they need like five years to figure it out and you know how it is. And so. We never really found the one show. What we found was that they just need lots of time to find the…”

“Once their list grew to about 2000, that's when they felt like it was more, it was less of like a forcing mechanism mechanism, but more like a celebratory. Right of passage. Like if they could get their audience to 2000 and they had to start paying, they felt …”

“We kind of went lower ARPU because we want a larger denominator. We want more and more small users than we do very, very big users.”

“Turned out small business customers running a small business is dismal. I've learned over the years and they really need like A ray of sunshine, some sense of hope some kind of humor in the app, and so I think that was sort of the, that was the thing that kind…”

“The thing about billboards and branding is one thing is I always wanted something tangible with our brand. I, everyone interacts digitally, but you need something to feel. So I always have like MailChimp toys, something that I want on your desk that you can fe…”

“It's actually the most economical marketing you do because it goes viral that people tell their friends about, and that's the cheapest marketing that you could pay for.”

“We'll still be looking act one for a long time until act two, except, you know, what, 30, at least 30% of our revenue is my philosophy. Then really act two has taken hold.”

“Not two years ago. No, small little teams that, that dabble a little bit, but you know, we just hired a chief customer officer starting in a couple of weeks.”

“I couldn't get funding even if I wanted to after the dot com bust. I was in Atlanta, so don't use me as a hero.”

“What that has led to is millions of small businesses importing their lists, and that has led to four billion email addresses and trillions of interactions that those email addresses have.”

“A lot of our small businesses. I love to believe that small business entrepreneurs log into MailChimp and do all of their marketing. A lot of them rely on partners. And creative agencies. Yeah. And we have to really communicate to them everything that we're do…”

“Yeah, so Ben Chestnut is the co-founder of MailChimp, and they started it in two, 2002 1001, and they sold it in twenty-twenty-one, so just about two decades, and they sold it for twelve billion dollars. It's considered by all measures the most successful boot…”

“It's gonna eclipse MailChimp, right? And it may even pass HubSpot as a, HubSpot's marketing piece because it's so valuable in e-commerce, right? Because you're so close to revenue.”

“And so MailChimp sale through campaign monitor, like a lot of these classic, like traditional ESPs are actually built around e-commerce and marketing, which is probably what most emails use for.”