
The New Atlanta Billionaires Behind the Unlikely Tech Unicorn MailChimp - andygcook
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/10/08/the-new-atlanta-billionaires-behind-an-unlikely-tech-unicorn
======
msie
Thank goodness, not another overnight success story:

 _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._

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olivermarks
'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

~~~
steve1977
Also, aren't unicorns kinda unlikely by definition?

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stephenr
The tech industry has terrible, ironic names.

A unicorn isn’t _unlikely_. It’s imaginary. It doesn’t exist.

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wolco
The name may apply well. The billion dollar valuations are as imaginary as the
profits.

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puranjay
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.

I can't make out the difference between all its competitors - Aweber,
ConstantContact, iContact. But I can figure out MailChimp from a mile away.

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arbuge
> 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.

Hardly. Only the first part of that statement is true. It's $10 a month AND
UP... and it goes up pretty fast:
[https://mailchimp.com/pricing/](https://mailchimp.com/pricing/)

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.

~~~
shostack
Longer-term, you may need to consider things like, "how easy is our email
setup for Marketing to own" because it makes a lot more sense for an
experienced email marketer to own things than an engineer at a certain level
of scale, both from an experience and head count cost standpoint.

There's also the consideration of "should all emails live in one platform?" It
may very well be that high-volume, low-impact transactional mail should
absolutely go through something like SES, whereas higher value emails go
through an actual marketing ESP like Mailchimp or something more robust.

It isn't a black and white situation.

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beager
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.

Has anyone migrated off of Mandrill in the past few years? Where’d you go, and
how was the transition?

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adrinavarro
We choose SendGrid long time ago to unify all our mail infrastructure under
one provider and it was a significant mistake. Now, we're heavily relying on
SendGrid but some systems still depend on Mandrill and we're slowly migrating
those as we make changes to them.

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WrathOfJay
Please elaborate on why SendGrid was a significant mistake for you. We are
looking at moving to them from Mandrill, since their stability has been
terrible for us.

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adrinavarro
Oops, sorry. Brain fart. I meant Mandrill, Mandrill was a significant mistake.
SendGrid is working great for us. So sorry.

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sexy_seedbox
Who could forget the Mandrill screwjob?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203056)

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mbesto
> $600 million in revenue

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.

Note - I understand their are so many assumptions here, but I think my point
still remains.

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erikb
30% profit. You might consider a career as fantasy author.

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kondro
They only have 500-1000 employees.

~~~
erikb
My toilet paper at home has four layers. (Same amount of relevance)

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bra-ket
? not a single Forbes 400 tech fortune hails from New York

how about Bloomberg

~~~
pauldix
Agree, Bloomberg was a tech company long before it was a media company. And
Bloomberg himself would probably be in the top five of the richest list if he
ever took it public (he owns 88% of the company).

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new_here
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.

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sixQuarks
I tried Mailchimp a few years ago and left in frustration. I found their tools
and admin to be terrible, and know a few others who feel the same way.

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choot
I've used it and i find it expensive.

Aren't their services which use our AWS SES account (with automatic setup) and
offer same features as MailChimp but much cheaper?

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fbelzile
Yes, I use one called Sendy ([https://sendy.co/](https://sendy.co/)).
Subscription-free, one time payment of $59 and emails sent through Amazon SES.
As a small business owner, I have no idea why someone would use MailChimp over
this.

~~~
arbuge
You can get even cheaper than that by using phplist instead, which is free,
and setting that up with your AWS account.

Hard to beat $0.10 per 1,000 emails...

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techsupporter
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-- _PLEASE_ invest some of that money in making click-tracking links less
terrible?

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

www.ecommercesite.example/products/brown-boots/buytoday

have to turn into

ecommercesite19.ie.randomdomain.otherstuff.xd/lists/email/4910/598gjweo5g8er7485hwog8u3eo8whfo8wc2o38fh38f/totallynotphishing/9384gjh34fgoiu34hgffh/noreallywepromise/?utm_stuff=2928&utm_things=morewords&utm_whyareyoustillreadingthis=lolmoney

At the _absolute minimum_ , these e-mail campaigns should only contain click-
tracking links that originate under the recognizable domain of the sender.

emails.ecommercesite.example/products/brown-boots/buytoday/4918ac7

would be so much easier to understand and use as examples when showing my
users.

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codeulike
What you are suggesting is actually quite complex. Mailchimp would have to
install a bunch of stuff on customers servers (which are probably run by a
third party) and/or control some of their customers subdomains.

Maybe you just need to invest some money in better spam filters, and user
education.

~~~
slivym
I'm sorry but there is no level of user education that will protect a large
organisation from phishing links. The attack surface is way too large and
safety depends on how the user is feeling on any given day when a random email
turns up. There are no high reliability systems that require manual user
interaction on a frequent basis especially on low-effort low-concentration
tasks.

~~~
hyperpape
I agree about the insufficiency of user-education.

I think we need go further: what we need to do is kill the idea that email is
an good vector for notifications inside of big organizations (or maybe even
outside of them). I should have a dedicated app with a whitelist based system
that official notifications go through. This could be not only a security
improvement, but also a stab at better UX, better productivity, and avoiding
notification fatigue.

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jamestimmins
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.

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forgingahead
Their employees get a share of the profits (like many regular businesses).
They are also quite firm in their goal to stay private, so why would equity be
relevant to an employee any way?

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paxys
What share of profits though? The most recent article I can find
([https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-
pr...](https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-profit-
sharing/)) boasts of contributing "up to 19%" of annual salary to employees'
401k. While obviously not a bad deal, it's a far cry from options/RSUs and
other standard annual bonuses offered at other tech companies.

~~~
tomschlick
> What share of profits though?

The share that goes into your yearly salary, bonuses, raises, and benefits
(like the 401k match you disregard).

They owe you nothing else, and each employee is free to ask for more or leave
for greener pastures if they are unhappy.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Shares are often a much more tax efficient way of rewarding employees and
having an actual share has numerous advantage's in term of morale retention
and so on.

Also shares keep on producing income after you have left a company.

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ajcodez
“Also shares keep on producing income after you have left a company.”

If I was making $120k per year working at MailChimp the last thing I would
want is 30% or more of my net worth tied up in private shares. What employee
wants that much exposure? It’s a private tech company with no plans for
liquidity potentially ever.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Private company shares can pay dividends though.

~~~
ajcodez
It is severely limiting. You can’t sell private shares on the open market to
buy a condo, pay off college debt, invest in your own company, quit and travel
the world, etc. It could be decades before you receive the full share value.
If hypothetical employee is working full time it’s probably because they don’t
have enough assets 2M+ to live off passive income and need to work. Let’s say
they are frugal and save $40k per year. If you have comp like a public co and
receive $40k+ per year in shares does it really make sense to have 50%+ of
your net worth in a single private tech company? It would probably work out
great but 10 years is a long time to wait. I’m pretty sure there is issues
with tax too but I don’t know the math.

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criddell
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.

Cory Doctorow asked about this once:

[https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641642822286753792](https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641642822286753792)

And they basically said no. I wonder if now that GDPR is a thing if they have
to provide this information?

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wprapido
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!

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_RPM
I just got started using the mailchiml api for a custom sign up form. It took
about 5 minutes.

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mortond
My understanding of unicorn is that it's worth 1 billion+ without generating
profit?

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CSMastermind
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.

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ai_ia
Mautic is pretty good opensource replacement of MailChimp.

