Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 1990s, Ben Chestnut was a struggling young designer interning at an appliance company, when somebody suggested that he try designing for the internet instead. A few years later, Ben and two co-founders launched a web design agency, only to discover that the service they'd included almost as an afterthought—email marketing—was taking off among their small-business clients. The founders named that service Mailchimp and pivoted to it full-time in 2007, choosing a winking monkey as their mascot, and stumbling onto the Freemium model before it became mainstream. But their most impeccable timing came in 2014, when they decided to sponsor a new podcast called Serial, a move that catapulted the winking monkey into popular culture. Over the years, despite management jitters and a public reckoning over office culture, Mailchimp has remained profitable and self-funded, with revenue of $800 million in 2020.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	When you leave home, can you ever really go back?
0:12.0	Made a version!
0:13.0	Soccer legend Leo Messi and I both left Argentina as kids.
0:17.0	You know you're that piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere.
0:20.0	To so many immigrants, football is a way to reconnect.
0:23.0	Listen to the last cop in the embedded podcast feed
0:26.0	to hear the latest collaboration from MPR and Fuduro Studios.
0:30.0	People were raising their hands saying,
0:34.0	so what's the strategy?
0:36.0	You know, in my answer, as a startup founder,
0:38.0	we don't need no stinking strategy.
0:40.0	We've got this, you know, and half the audience would cheer
0:43.0	and say, yeah, we don't need no strategy.
0:45.0	And the other half would say, yeah, we do.
0:48.0	And I remember thinking, oh my god,
0:51.0	there actually is no strategy.
0:53.0	And so the whole meeting just completely flopped.
0:57.0	And I remember going back to my office
0:59.0	just sitting there alone, thinking about
1:02.0	what in the world just happened to me.
	...

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