Thank goodness, not another overnight success story:<p><i>Mailchimp, named after their most popular e-card character, launched in 2001 and remained a side project for several years, earning a few thousand dollars a month. Then in 2007, when it hit 10,000 users, the two decided to commit full-time.</i>
'unlikely tech unicorn' ....why is it unlikely? Someone was going to dominate the smb tier of email marketing and mailchimp have executed really well.
The whole valley 'unicorn' schtik is what's unlikely, it's just glib VC speak for fast bucks and easy money
MailChimp is perhaps the most "on brand" B2B startup I can think of. It's also perhaps the best case example of what a brand mascot can do for your business.<p>I can't make out the difference between all its competitors - Aweber, ConstantContact, iContact. But I can figure out MailChimp from a mile away.
> Chestnut and Kurzius have worked to keep that lifeline affordable: Mailchimp’s customers pay nothing for the first 2,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails sent, and then $10 a month after that. The low cost translates potentially into a big upside.<p>Hardly. Only the first part of that statement is true. It's $10 a month AND UP... and it goes up pretty fast: <a href="https://mailchimp.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://mailchimp.com/pricing/</a><p>We switched to phplist + Amazon SES several years back after calculating what our MailChimp bill would be for our list size, and are glad we did.
Good on them, but they’ve completely flubbed their absorption of Mandrill, and these days Mandrill suffers frequent production outages unbecoming of a serious email provider, and their support is abysmal. I guess part of building a big business is squeezing your customers to boost your margin.<p>Has anyone migrated off of Mandrill in the past few years? Where’d you go, and how was the transition?
Who could forget the Mandrill screwjob? <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056</a>
> $600 million in revenue<p>Napkin math time. Assuming 30% profit (very achievable for a tech biz that size), thats $90M a founder per year (if they want). I would take that over the risk of trying to get to a $1B sale any day of the week. There aren't very many industries that can achieve something like this. What a time to be alive.<p>Note - I understand their are so many assumptions here, but I think my point still remains.
Always been a fan of MailChimp, kudos to them for bootstrapping all the way to this point. Few can say the same. They started out building a product for their website customers and brought some wit and life to an unsexy market.
I've used it and i find it expensive.<p>Aren't their services which use our AWS SES account (with automatic setup) and offer same features as MailChimp but much cheaper?
Good on them. Now, as someone who deals with end users and e-mails with links on a regular basis, could they--and all of the other mail sending services out there--<i>PLEASE</i> invest some of that money in making click-tracking links less terrible?<p>It is so, so, so very difficult to get my users to stop clicking on phishing links when they, correctly, point out that legitimate links in real e-mails look virtually identical. Why does<p>www.ecommercesite.example/products/brown-boots/buytoday<p>have to turn into<p>ecommercesite19.ie.randomdomain.otherstuff.xd/lists/email/4910/598gjweo5g8er7485hwog8u3eo8whfo8wc2o38fh38f/totallynotphishing/9384gjh34fgoiu34hgffh/noreallywepromise/?utm_stuff=2928&utm_things=morewords&utm_whyareyoustillreadingthis=lolmoney<p>At the <i>absolute minimum</i>, these e-mail campaigns should only contain click-tracking links that originate under the recognizable domain of the sender.<p>emails.ecommercesite.example/products/brown-boots/buytoday/4918ac7<p>would be so much easier to understand and use as examples when showing my users.
Perhaps I'm alone in this, but when a tech company is solely owned by a small group of execs, that's a huge red flag as a potential employee. In my mind, it says they truly only care about themselves in a very tangible way.
I wish they made it easier to manage the lists I'm subscribed to because I didn't ask to be on most of them. In their defense, unsubscribing works, but I wish I had a view where I could see all the lists I'm on and be able to unsubscribe from there.<p>Cory Doctorow asked about this once:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641642822286753792" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641642822286753792</a><p>And they basically said no. I wonder if now that GDPR is a thing if they have to provide this information?
More power to them! MailChimp is more deserving of unicorn status than vast majority of unicorns. It solves real world problems and helps real world businesses communicate with real world market. A happy MailChimp user here!
I'll never hate on another company's success but I remember one of their engineers speaking at an event back in like 2013 and it was really politically incorrect. Made me uncomfortable and I'm not exactly squeamish. Doesn't seem like the type of company I'd like to work for.