There was definitely a stigma to emale marketing. If we went to tek conferences and told people what we did, you know, it things would get quiet. They'd walk away. This was a time when am there was no solution for spam, right? People were like, osts, you gass for spammers. And like, end of discussion. I mean, i knew that there was demand. Small businesses were constantly signing up soi, i was never dissuaded from it.
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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