The Ledger
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Mailchimp Founders Split $11.7B in Intuit Deal While Employees Received $500M
“Ben Chestnut and Dan Curzius each owned 50% of Mailchimp. In 2008, Mark Armstrong, the other co-founder, was bought out of the business. Three hundred million dollars was given to employees as bonuses for the deal, and two hundred million dollars worth of rest…”
Illiquid stock options frustrate employees in bootstrapped lifestyle businesses
“Employees would actually be really pissed if they were issued stock or stock options by the business, if the company had no interest in selling, and so basically employees would be holding onto stock for 30 plus years with no way to turn it into cash.”
Denk: Traditional ESPs are built for e-commerce, not content newsletters
“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.”
Intuit acquiring Mailchimp mirrors Salesforce buying Slack to complete product stacks
“The best analogy for thinking about this Intuit acquisition is them buying MailChimp Is to SMBs what Salesforce buying Slack and other companies is for enterprise. Basically, Salesforce has been trying to buy the full stack for enterprises to be able to grow a…”
Mailchimp grew profits 650% after launching a freemium tier in 2009
“The company increased its profits by 650% in that year. They went from 10,000 users to 85,000 users, and this is what put Mailchimp on the trajectory to become the company that it is today.”
By 2021, Mailchimp had 13 million users and neared $1B revenue
“MailChimp is an absolute monster. It sends a billion emails every weekday. It did eight hundred million dollars in revenue last year and is on track to cross a billion in revenue this year. With thirteen million users, 800,000 of which are paid”
Creator platforms like Shopify and Substack drastically reduce business failure costs
“And with tools like Shopify, Substack, MailChimp, Etsy, Patreon, Kickstarter, and all of these different creator platforms, the cost of failure in business today is really, really low.”
Lieberman says Morning Brew's first-year expenses were only a few hundred dollars
“And so when I think about the first year of morning brew, when I was a senior at the university of Michigan, the cost of our business was like a couple hundred dollars a month. Our only costs for the first year were MailChimp for sending out our emails Heroku,…”
Mailchimp's $12B Intuit sale is the largest private bootstrapped acquisition ever
“MailChimp was acquired, and it was the largest private bootstrap business acquisition ever in history. MailChimp sold for twelve billion dollars to Intuit”
Mailchimp was the first-ever advertiser on the hit podcast Serial
“Well, MailChimp was early on that train, and they were the first advertiser with Serial.”
Mailchimp Paid Hundreds of Millions via 19% Annual 401(k) Profit Sharing
“Mailchimp has participated in this concept of profit sharing for years. So if you go to Mailchimp's website, they talk about this idea of up to 19% of employees' annual salaries Being put into their four Oh one K each year and hundreds of millions of dollars h…”
Mailchimp's initial email app was built using code from an e-greeting card
“Ultimately, what happened was Ben Chestnut and Dan Curzius took the code from an e-greeting card idea that they had just built for fun on the side, and they ended up using that to spin up a simple email app.”
Alex Lieberman launched Morning Brew in 2015 for under $1,000
“In 2015, my co-founder Austin and I started Morning Brew for less than a thousand dollars. We had a 50 dollar filing fee in Michigan for starting an LLC, a hundred dollars for the domain morningbrewdaily.com, 10 dollars a month for website hosting, and a hundr…”