What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. This week, on Founders Journal, we're doing things a little differently.

We are dropping a mini-series full of case studies that lay out a number of lessons you can

learn from successful businesses. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday,

and Friday, this week we're giving you two, a new show that you won't want to miss,

plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. In today's classic episode,

originally published on September 20th, 2021, I am talking about MailChimp, the $12 billion

email behemoth that sold to the parent company of QuickBooks, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Min.

Let's hop into it.

So as I just mentioned, MailChimp was acquired and it was the largest private

bootstrap business acquisition ever in history. MailChimp sold for $12 billion to into it,

parent company of many businesses you know, like QuickBooks and Mint, and it's actually a really

cool thing for me to read because Morning Brew wouldn't be possible without MailChimp.

Back in 2015, when my co-founder Austin Reef and myself were starting the company,

one of the reasons we decided to start with email as our format versus an app or a website

is because it was a cost-conscious way to get in front of consumers in a way they were already

consuming content. And the first ever platform we used to send our emails was MailChimp.

I believe at the time we paid like $20 a month, it was one of our only costs as a business,

and it's what gave us the opportunity to be entrepreneurs when we had no funding whatsoever.

So that's our connection to MailChimp, but let me give you the quick backstory before

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