How Did You Come Up With a Name?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Ben: I've always loved monkeys, and i always brought them into my designs as well. We had this little saying, you know, when in doubt, insert a monkey. And so we said, hey, how about a chimp mail? And so we decided to call it chim mail. Then, of course, the domain was taken. The domain for chimp mail was taken. So we had to improvise and call it mal chimp instead.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.