The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“We've never had any kind of sales or customer success ever.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“Freemium was something that we kind of accidentally fell into, didn't really think much about it, and that turned out to be this thing that kind of, I think we were probably, you know, in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of users at the time, and the…”

“Because of my mother, I think I never called our customers small businesses. I never said small, I would say businesses, or I would talk about their dreams of becoming big, but I never like called it. It's useful, you know, internally to call it a category SMB…”

“Sick and tired of the whole process, by the way, because it takes away six months of your innovation and your inner, you know, your momentum and stuff. It's distracting.”

“Mailchimp was making hundreds of millions of dollars and we were on the cusp of a billion ARR when the acquisition happened. So, I mean, we were already doing really, really well, highly profitable.”

“We were so, with Freemium, we were getting, you know, I remember, 10,000 signups a day from new customers.”

“And after a year, he said, it's impossible. Your code sucks so bad. Let me just keep it one product and just make it free up to a point. And really, that's where freemium came from.”

“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 a coder and he had no idea how to code HTML. And so he totally lied totally lied to me a…”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.…”

“If I could, the best that I remember our agency business ever doing was something like between two and 300 grand a year. That was the best we had ever done. And that was through 2005 here, by the way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“After a few years in MailChimp might have been making a few 100,000 dollars at the most. And our agency business was making a little bit, just barely more than that, but it was flat.”

“Oh, the Intuit deal took, ah, a little more than a year to happen.”

“I mean, it was, I remember it was like six figures a month was the revenue that we were getting.”

“We were in Atlanta, Georgia, and nobody bothered to fly over until one of our competitors, Constant Contact, went public in oh seven, and then suddenly people in suits started to show up at our door”

“Neil got us from like zero to three hundred million. Farrah got us from 300 to seven hundred million.”

“Nine years into the journey.”

“Within a year we had gone from like several 100,000 users to a million, and then by the next year we were at two, two million, it's all a blur to me now, ah, but it just kept growing.”

“The best that I remember our agency business ever doing was something like between two and 300 grand a year. That was the best we had ever done, and that was through 2005 here, by the way.”

“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 …”

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

“It's all a blur now, but we were making probably 10,000,015 million at the time. We were doing really, really well.”

“And I mean, to this day, we look at our quarter four results and, you know, it, 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. It's like, darn it, that's cereal. It just…”

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

“I still maintain that Mailchimp is really just the end of a series of pivots from grade school.”

“We got a 13,000 dollar project and a 32,000 dollar project before even getting a business license.”

“You could be a complete goof off, but make a lot of money doing it, because it was really, really a rare skill.”