This kinda feels like one of those acquisitions where all the special sauce that makes the acquired company a great company is the exact opposite in the acquiring company.
That is, from all I've heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the "scrappyness" that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too.
Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for "regulatory capture" company. Also, since employees don't have equity (though I'm assuming they'll get fat bonuses for this), it's bound to cause some level of strife in the company.
For anyone who (like me) didn't know the first thing about intuit, I looked them up on Wikipedia. Some highlights:
> Intuit offers a free online service called TurboTax Free File as well as a similarly named service called TurboTax Free Edition which is not free for most users
> Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has lobbied extensively against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) creating its own online system of tax filing
> [I]nvestigations by ProPublica found that Intuit deliberately steered taxpayers from the free TurboTax Free File to the paid TurboTax Free Edition using tactics including search engine delisting and a deceptive discount targeted to members of the military.
I think much of Intuit’s “regulatory capture” is on TurboTax, and it’s offering for small businesses (Quickbooks) is actually a very competitive marketplace with other actors such as Square, PayPal, Wix, and Stripe actively expanding into each other’s markets.
In the next decade there will be market capture for one or two companies of the entire sub 50 employee retail business market segment. Everything from food trucks to floral shops will have one monthly subscription that covers pos system, employee scheduling/payroll, invoicing, tax, and much more in a platform of tools that resembles AWS or Azure. This is clearly Quickbooks expanding into fulfilling marketing needs for their clients.
Keep in mind it’s competitive in two ways. If businesses running Square have a competitive advantage because of tooling compared to businesses running Quickbooks than Quickbooks will suffer more churn and lose in the long run to Square.
http://Pilot.com (no affiliation but I've worked with some of the people there) is directly trying to compete with QuickBooks on QuickBooks playing field. Problem is, QuickBooks is the standard in the industry, like Adove Photoshop or Microsoft Windows in the 1990's. Square has the advantage that they already have the data, but then they don't have the same incentives to compete on bookkeeper tools.
> Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-Turbo... ]... Based on publicly available data and statements by Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on disability and minimum-wage workers.
Note as well that Intuit recently acquired Credit Karma for $8.1 billion - a company whose business model relies on granularly predicting what financial products will be most profitable when offered to consumers.
At the end of the day, it's often impossible to avoid using Intuit's B2B solutions like QuickBooks - as others have noted, they're an industry standard. But in the packed market of email service providers, is this the company who will set the most robust ethical boundaries on how to use a treasure trove of highly-actionable PII and purchasing data? Do we want to contribute to feeding our customers' data to such a company? That's a choice that those of us choosing ESP solutions should make with eyes wide open.
Having worked at a company that was acquired by Intuit, they gave fairly substantial retention bonuses that vested over the 3 years following the acquisition that ended up being about 4x the value of my original pre-acquisition stock options, though the retention bonuses varied greatly and not everyone got that much. So I’d expect that Intuit is taking care of the employees that are considered key to Mailchimp’s business.
I hope for intuit's sake they don't forget the fat bonus. It's an amazing place to work and I'm happy to have helped make Ben and Dan rich, but no skin in the game works both ways. I had no hesitation leaving, same with a few others I know that moved on.
Intuit gets a bad rap now and with good reason. But I read their book detailing their startup history about twenty years ago, it was quite interesting. Was as scrappy as any story you've heard here. Had to get out of Microsoft's way also, if memory serves.
Why is everyone complaining about taxes being regulatory capture when email is becoming also becoming a monopoly?
It is literally impossible to start up your own email server now and have it accepted by major email hosts like microsoft and gmail now without your emails ending up in spam or even worse, completely dropped.
People should be asking why email is so broken that companies like mailchimp exist and is being bought for billions.
> It is literally impossible to start up your own email server now and have it accepted by major email hosts like microsoft and gmail now without your emails ending up in spam or even worse, completely dropped.
I am 100% ignorant on the subject. If you have a moment can you provide the 30k foot view of what has changed to make this the case?
I'm not sure if anything has changed in the last two years after is stopped self hosting email but I ran my own server for 6 years and never had any issues with ending up in spam.
I had Intuit as a client. In the consulting I do I hear gripes fairly quickly.
The only gripes I heard were not really gripes just an expression of the challenge of grappling with the legacy of TurboTax. The team seemed intent on finding new ways to manage the complexity and they seemed very open to new tech.
Everyone seemed happy to be working there. The few managers i interacted with seemed to really care about their teams. The most surprising thing I experienced was how grateful some were that they weren’t working at Hooli across the street in Mountain View. I didn’t understand this sentiment till I wandered over to Hooli’s campus. Everyone there seemed as depressed as the folks on a particular insurance campus in Lansing Michigan I visited. Not scientific, just sharing my lived exp.
They were already making out like bandits. They have near zero capital costs and their company is essentially running itself (im exaggerating, but you get the point). Assuming each of the founders had 33%, it means they are each essentially taking in $100M/year in salary with no end in sight towards that either slowing down or it decreasing. This is a simple math formula for them - cash out $4B now, setup a family office and then never work again or never work again and just bring in $100M/year. They'd get to that exit by ~50 anyway.
Too bad they closed a bit too late.
The proposed tax plan now has QSBS benefits limited to 50% of gain (vs 75% or all) if AGI is > $400k.
Those founders will be happy, but not as happy as would have been a day or two ago.
Not quite - many of their customers are paying $$ a month for medium to large marketing sends. Their biggest customers probably count for 30% of the overall revenue.
It's unusual seeing a company that sells goods and services for money be valued highly in silicon valley ;)
Small tidbit: mailchimp was a major pivot into SaaS (before that was a phrase) from another already successful services business (building websites). The team realized scaling a software product was a better idea than selling their time.
Oof. Hope there are some nice bonuses to go around, then.
From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to work. But I guess most of that will change when the corporate overlords decend and start optimizing things.
Basically Mailchimp did nothing to enrich the Atlanta startup community with a bunch of people making nice exits via stocks etc.. Instead it is another example of the Atlanta startup sharecropping model. A few years ago a reporter for the Atlanta Business Chronicle referred to Atlanta as the Bangalore of the South. Up until a few years ago, salaries didn't really compete with other locations and most companies that were opening up engineering offices in ATL did it as a cost cutting measure (IE: Bose, Pandora/Sirius etc..) COVID has opened up opportunities for developers living in Atlanta to have other options that are more lucrative.
Mailchimp had run it's course. It was a marketing play, and e-mail marketing has become a commodity business. Atlanta is, at it's heart, a marketing town. But even there, that can only take a marketing company so far.
Bangalore has changed. There are so many high paying dev jobs in Bangalore now where you take home salary after taxes + rent would be more than that of many US and European cities. People are no longer incentivized to take a massive loan and immigrate to US. That ship has sailed.
Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp? It seems to me like the only way to send emails is via a service provider. When I try to get a hosting server to send emails myself, it seems like all of the server ips have been blacklisted and flagged as spam.
I run an email forwarding services https://hanami.run so I can share quite a bit about this.
Oppose with what many said, delivery to gmail.com is easisest. Now, where it's land is another question. Their spam filtering also very quick to learn.
icloud and hotmail are the worst because no way to get unblocked. You just fill in the form and wait in the dark. If you got luckly enough, they work on your ticket and unblock the ip. And here is the thing, they outright reject connection so your email cannot event reach the spam inbox.
Any host providers that are cheap are most liklely has their IP blocked by proofpoint or microsoft already.
My strategy was to use server on Hetzner, then try to buy float IP then I can attach to any server. I have to try like 40 before I was able to get a pair of IP that aren't blocked by proofpoint/outlook.
Then I tried to warm up and build reputation by having a bunch of inbox email each others like 100 email per day then up to 1000 email per day.
Even with that I got blocked by proofpoint for no reason time by time...
So it's hard but with right strategy you can still do it. Just take more time and plan to build up and keep good reputation of your IPs.
But if I can offer a suggestion, it sounds like you were blocked by proofpoint while actively trying to spoof legitimate traffic in order to avoid detection by proofpoint. That's hardly "no reason at all," despite your having the best of intentions.
That's incredibly insightful. But what made you buy your own server, ip etc instead of using say SES? Was it the cost thing or are you getting better delivery rates doing this?
Yes sending emails yourself is just as impossible as hosting a payment processor yourself.
Even though all the docs and technology is there, you really can't do it without the help of a big company like Amazon due to the following reasons:
- almost all residential ips are blocked.
- most data center ips are mostly blocked because there are like 100s of blacklists and every blacklist has it's own unique way of getting delisted.
- every big email provider has its own version of FBL and it's often a big black box. For example till date gmail won't even give Amazon access to its fbl(1)
- spam filtering is not an exact science and while there are things like spf, dkim, dmarc etc to ensure the authenticity of message at the end of the day it all comes down to your reputation as a sender and managing it is nothing short of a full time job.
yup. I use protonmail and even that apparently gets blocked by gmail recipients occasionally. Rolling your own, you're lucky to have anyone ever see your mail
Yeah, this is the big moat that big viral email companies have. You can only get around spam filters by building reputation which takes time and volume so it's really hard to bootstrap. The shortest path would be to start with low-level managed service like AWS SES and build value adds on top of it.
It's not easy but it's not that hard. I've bootstrapped many mail servers on AWS and others and, although the initial outgoing emails might be flagged as spam AND you may have to remove yourself from Spamhaus and others, it's been mostly painless.
Echoing what a lot have already said. I worked for a large email marketing provider that was acquired by Salesforce about a decade ago.
The number one thing you are selling is deliverability. The second thing you are selling is the tracking (opens, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.). Next, you are selling segmentation for subscriber lists (i.e being able to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time). You have to be diligent about your customers too, because if you are letting bad actors use your system... there goes your reputation and there goes your business.
But deliverability is the key. We had relationships with ISPs so we could fix $MAJOR_CORP's million email pre-holiday sales campaign while it was sending and we staffed the teams to do that, 24/7. This had nothing to do with programming and everything to do with company mission, reputation, contacts at Google, MSN, Yahoo, ..., and the history of having done it. We were "lucky" enough to have started as the industry matured.
* I say "lucky" because the founder's really caught this vision at the right time (2000/2001) and made it happen.
I hate to recommend what is just another service provider, but there are many cloud hosting providers that offer email sending (i.e. AWS, GCP, etc.) and dedicated email companies (Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc.). The cost to send email via any of these services is a tiny fraction of the amount you would pay to Mailchimp.
The value in what Mailchimp does is not so much just sending email, but in all the things around it, like managing subscribers, tracking opens, easily creating nice-looking emails that look good in a variety of mail clients, etc.
Contrary to some of the replies you've received here, it definitely is possible to run your own mail server with good deliverability, and we routinely did this for companies, even fairly small ones, physically on-prem and in datacenters, and cloud. It is not trivial, but far from impossible, and will likely involve communicating with a human when getting a static IP to find a good one. With that being said, I do not recommend you run your own mail server starting out, that is probably not the problem you are trying to solve.
Even the state of Utah seems to be failing at this. They recently started to snail mail vehicle registration reminders again. I signed up for email reminders on all my vehicles multiple times and I've never received an email from the state. Apparently others haven't either because the state now has a massive problem with expired plates. My own assumption about why the system doesn't work.
You need to bring your own IPs and warm them up with legit emails. People abuse shared cloud IP addresses for spam, so you're going to run in to problems if you want to use them.
Ah I need to buy my own block of ip addresses? Is that what I need to do? And then connect those ip addresses to my computer that I run at home / office?
Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
I have a feeling that other than owning your own IP blocks so that you can manage reputation for them, a lot of it is just legwork. Finding out which providers are blocking your emails, tracking down their dispute process, using it… working with providers to make sure you stay unblocked… building relationships with them so that they are willing to work with you on that.
You also need to monitor your customers to make sure they aren’t doing things that will get you blocked.
"Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp"
It will always be a dance. I own a small IT company in the UK and have always managed to run local SMTP. I've done it for about 22 years. I could not run a Mail Chimp.
For starters, I could not live with myself! I don't do spam. MailChimp is a spammer for hire by definition. Your idea of spam and mine may be different. OK: Unsolicited Bulk Email is the key phrase. At which point are you solicited or unsolicited? Opt out or opt in? Where do you get your lists and how do you monetize this beast? How do you vet your customers or do you even care? What standards of ethics do you ascribe to?
I could possibly create another MailChimp because I know rather a lot about SMTP and own a fair few IPv4s and could cycle them and I'm fairly IPv6 savvy so I'll use that to get some more mileage. I know DMARC/DKIM/SPF and all the rest and can play those little games to up the authenticity score.
Can't be arsed to spam the world. I prefer to host recipients than senders.
can you teach me what you know? I want to learn but there's only so much I could find. Most of my googling always gives me a full list of "AWS" and other service provider articles.
The problem is that ideally mailchimp and any alternative should not even exist. 99% of the stuff they fire out is legitimately spam, usually unwanted and unrequested by the recipient.
So asking "How do I start my own spamming service and not get spamlisted" is kind of a silly question.
I don't know how much it really counts as "like MailChimp" but Substack is relatively new, and seems to have found its way past the spam filters at least enough to get top-tier VC backing, so if I were trying to solve this problem I'd probably look at how they did it.
I imagine its a fairly difficult undertaking nowadays. Your best bet is to probably use Mailgun or similar for the actual sending and let them deal with the reputation management headaches
My experience with Intuit's Quickbooks Online suggests that all Mailchimp users will be paying 2-3X within 3 years for a worse product. I'd plan on transitioning soon. They're awful.
Intuit has a stack to send invoices and receive payments from customers via email. Mailchimp has a stack that allows non-technical users to create complex emails, lists, track opens and responses. Together, this would allow a small business to build and monetize an email list of customers. They are creating an ecommerce channel via email to augment/compete with web stores.
I think this is a good point. It also acts as a diversification/only-to-gain scenario; if Intuit's main business suffers due to increased scrutiny in the tax filing space, that have another source of steady revenue.
Exactly. Intuit gets a list of and intro to all of mailchimp's customers.
Which alone is probably worth a substantial amount of the purchase price in advertising / sales time equivalency.
Intuit is also pivoting themselves to being a data aggregator, who sells products powered by that (see: Mint purchase). And they seem to realize that whoever owns the collection point wins (see: Google). Consequently, mailchimp gets them a durable product and data coverage of a difficult to target and lucrative market (SMB).
Here I am stressing out because I am going to have to figure out a MailChimp replacement for my partner's service business and now you have me worrying about the multiple non-profits that I have migrated from WordPress hell to Wix. Fingers crossed that it is Squarespace as I determined that it was a ridiculously bad option due to no backup functionality.
Intuit Inc. is an American business that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. As of 2019, more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the United States.[3] Intuit's products include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint and the small business accounting program QuickBooks.
I feel the same - Cue the pundits in the business press writing articles titled "Why the Intuit acquisition of Mailchimp makes sense" as if they would have predicted it years prior.
we often think of synergy being where you can apply your skill in solving problem Y to problem X even though the markets for those solutions are wildly different.
but you can also think about the "thing" as being "selling to a particular category of customer". you can cross sell, bundle, gain some forms of economy of scale.
this is basically the internet equivalent of WB Mason selling you toner, coffee, paper, chairs, and water coolers.
they are moving into ecommerce. They've acquired tradegecko last yr and rebranded it as quickbooks commerce.
Also, if you look at mailchimp recent product changes with addition of MC stores, they are positioning themselves to compete against ecommerce platforms. This could be planned beforehand to be part of the package for the acquisition.
It's counter intuitive, but the best acquisitions are the ones with little synergy where the acquirer pretty much invests money in the acquiree and leaves them alone to continue as they were, but with a bigger budget.
Always love looking deeper into businesses that bootstrapped their way to large revenues, you can tell they were relentlessly focused – and yet still underrated in the mainstream narrative
Readit News
That is, from all I've heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the "scrappyness" that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too.
Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for "regulatory capture" company. Also, since employees don't have equity (though I'm assuming they'll get fat bonuses for this), it's bound to cause some level of strife in the company.
> Intuit offers a free online service called TurboTax Free File as well as a similarly named service called TurboTax Free Edition which is not free for most users
> Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has lobbied extensively against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) creating its own online system of tax filing
> [I]nvestigations by ProPublica found that Intuit deliberately steered taxpayers from the free TurboTax Free File to the paid TurboTax Free Edition using tactics including search engine delisting and a deceptive discount targeted to members of the military.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboTax
In the next decade there will be market capture for one or two companies of the entire sub 50 employee retail business market segment. Everything from food trucks to floral shops will have one monthly subscription that covers pos system, employee scheduling/payroll, invoicing, tax, and much more in a platform of tools that resembles AWS or Azure. This is clearly Quickbooks expanding into fulfilling marketing needs for their clients.
Keep in mind it’s competitive in two ways. If businesses running Square have a competitive advantage because of tooling compared to businesses running Quickbooks than Quickbooks will suffer more churn and lose in the long run to Square.
> Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-Turbo... ]... Based on publicly available data and statements by Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on disability and minimum-wage workers.
Note as well that Intuit recently acquired Credit Karma for $8.1 billion - a company whose business model relies on granularly predicting what financial products will be most profitable when offered to consumers.
At the end of the day, it's often impossible to avoid using Intuit's B2B solutions like QuickBooks - as others have noted, they're an industry standard. But in the packed market of email service providers, is this the company who will set the most robust ethical boundaries on how to use a treasure trove of highly-actionable PII and purchasing data? Do we want to contribute to feeding our customers' data to such a company? That's a choice that those of us choosing ESP solutions should make with eyes wide open.
It is literally impossible to start up your own email server now and have it accepted by major email hosts like microsoft and gmail now without your emails ending up in spam or even worse, completely dropped.
People should be asking why email is so broken that companies like mailchimp exist and is being bought for billions.
I am 100% ignorant on the subject. If you have a moment can you provide the 30k foot view of what has changed to make this the case?
https://www.theverge.com/22300931/mailchimp-company-culture-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mailchimp-mass-exodus...
Does HN live in a bubble because of ycombinator where they think it's unusual for companies to be able to self start?
Is there any more detail on that? I'm not sure why they wouldn't.
https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-pr...
The only gripes I heard were not really gripes just an expression of the challenge of grappling with the legacy of TurboTax. The team seemed intent on finding new ways to manage the complexity and they seemed very open to new tech.
Everyone seemed happy to be working there. The few managers i interacted with seemed to really care about their teams. The most surprising thing I experienced was how grateful some were that they weren’t working at Hooli across the street in Mountain View. I didn’t understand this sentiment till I wandered over to Hooli’s campus. Everyone there seemed as depressed as the folks on a particular insurance campus in Lansing Michigan I visited. Not scientific, just sharing my lived exp.
Deleted Comment
Mailchimp has ~13MM users and 800k paying customers. In 2019 they had revenues of $700MM. In 2020 they had EBITDA of ~$300MM.
They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside funding.
https://www.brownadvisory.com/us/theadvisory/qsbs-tax-exempt...
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/bidens-propos...
https://www.forbes.com/profile/ben-chestnut/
https://www.forbes.com/profile/dan-kurzius/
It's unusual seeing a company that sells goods and services for money be valued highly in silicon valley ;)
(12 billion purchase price / 800000 paying customers)
But can't fault them. Congrats to the entire mailchimp team! You all deserve all the rewards, especially for bootstrapping.
Hope everyone there made out like bandits, and may this give them the financial freedom to pursue new passions in their lives.
For those curious about the founding story, How I Built This did a podcast with Ben Chestnut (released July 12, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-ches...
Small tidbit: mailchimp was a major pivot into SaaS (before that was a phrase) from another already successful services business (building websites). The team realized scaling a software product was a better idea than selling their time.
From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to work. But I guess most of that will change when the corporate overlords decend and start optimizing things.
Mailchimp had run it's course. It was a marketing play, and e-mail marketing has become a commodity business. Atlanta is, at it's heart, a marketing town. But even there, that can only take a marketing company so far.
Mailchimp is also paying out $300M in bonuses https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499
Oppose with what many said, delivery to gmail.com is easisest. Now, where it's land is another question. Their spam filtering also very quick to learn.
icloud and hotmail are the worst because no way to get unblocked. You just fill in the form and wait in the dark. If you got luckly enough, they work on your ticket and unblock the ip. And here is the thing, they outright reject connection so your email cannot event reach the spam inbox.
So when launch a new IP, you should check on https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com and https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.a...
Any host providers that are cheap are most liklely has their IP blocked by proofpoint or microsoft already.
My strategy was to use server on Hetzner, then try to buy float IP then I can attach to any server. I have to try like 40 before I was able to get a pair of IP that aren't blocked by proofpoint/outlook.
Then I tried to warm up and build reputation by having a bunch of inbox email each others like 100 email per day then up to 1000 email per day.
Even with that I got blocked by proofpoint for no reason time by time...
So it's hard but with right strategy you can still do it. Just take more time and plan to build up and keep good reputation of your IPs.
But if I can offer a suggestion, it sounds like you were blocked by proofpoint while actively trying to spoof legitimate traffic in order to avoid detection by proofpoint. That's hardly "no reason at all," despite your having the best of intentions.
Even though all the docs and technology is there, you really can't do it without the help of a big company like Amazon due to the following reasons:
- almost all residential ips are blocked.
- most data center ips are mostly blocked because there are like 100s of blacklists and every blacklist has it's own unique way of getting delisted.
- every big email provider has its own version of FBL and it's often a big black box. For example till date gmail won't even give Amazon access to its fbl(1)
- spam filtering is not an exact science and while there are things like spf, dkim, dmarc etc to ensure the authenticity of message at the end of the day it all comes down to your reputation as a sender and managing it is nothing short of a full time job.
(1) https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487
Genuine questions, how do companies like Mailchimp get started then?
The number one thing you are selling is deliverability. The second thing you are selling is the tracking (opens, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.). Next, you are selling segmentation for subscriber lists (i.e being able to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time). You have to be diligent about your customers too, because if you are letting bad actors use your system... there goes your reputation and there goes your business.
But deliverability is the key. We had relationships with ISPs so we could fix $MAJOR_CORP's million email pre-holiday sales campaign while it was sending and we staffed the teams to do that, 24/7. This had nothing to do with programming and everything to do with company mission, reputation, contacts at Google, MSN, Yahoo, ..., and the history of having done it. We were "lucky" enough to have started as the industry matured.
* I say "lucky" because the founder's really caught this vision at the right time (2000/2001) and made it happen.
The value in what Mailchimp does is not so much just sending email, but in all the things around it, like managing subscribers, tracking opens, easily creating nice-looking emails that look good in a variety of mail clients, etc.
Contrary to some of the replies you've received here, it definitely is possible to run your own mail server with good deliverability, and we routinely did this for companies, even fairly small ones, physically on-prem and in datacenters, and cloud. It is not trivial, but far from impossible, and will likely involve communicating with a human when getting a static IP to find a good one. With that being said, I do not recommend you run your own mail server starting out, that is probably not the problem you are trying to solve.
Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
You also need to monitor your customers to make sure they aren’t doing things that will get you blocked.
It will always be a dance. I own a small IT company in the UK and have always managed to run local SMTP. I've done it for about 22 years. I could not run a Mail Chimp.
For starters, I could not live with myself! I don't do spam. MailChimp is a spammer for hire by definition. Your idea of spam and mine may be different. OK: Unsolicited Bulk Email is the key phrase. At which point are you solicited or unsolicited? Opt out or opt in? Where do you get your lists and how do you monetize this beast? How do you vet your customers or do you even care? What standards of ethics do you ascribe to?
I could possibly create another MailChimp because I know rather a lot about SMTP and own a fair few IPv4s and could cycle them and I'm fairly IPv6 savvy so I'll use that to get some more mileage. I know DMARC/DKIM/SPF and all the rest and can play those little games to up the authenticity score.
Can't be arsed to spam the world. I prefer to host recipients than senders.
So asking "How do I start my own spamming service and not get spamlisted" is kind of a silly question.
Mailchimp emails are well known for having 1 click unsubcribe by default.
There has been a huge resurgence in email newsletters for companies and content creators to have a direct relationship with their audience.
Mailchimp have done well because email seems to continually survive as a medium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack
I’d guess that’s for personal, product, and customer service emails respectively.
I’m just not seeing the “synergy” between these two companies other than they both focus on SMB.
Which alone is probably worth a substantial amount of the purchase price in advertising / sales time equivalency.
Intuit is also pivoting themselves to being a data aggregator, who sells products powered by that (see: Mint purchase). And they seem to realize that whoever owns the collection point wins (see: Google). Consequently, mailchimp gets them a durable product and data coverage of a difficult to target and lucrative market (SMB).
Intuit Inc. is an American business that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. As of 2019, more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the United States.[3] Intuit's products include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint and the small business accounting program QuickBooks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit
we often think of synergy being where you can apply your skill in solving problem Y to problem X even though the markets for those solutions are wildly different.
but you can also think about the "thing" as being "selling to a particular category of customer". you can cross sell, bundle, gain some forms of economy of scale.
this is basically the internet equivalent of WB Mason selling you toner, coffee, paper, chairs, and water coolers.
Also, if you look at mailchimp recent product changes with addition of MC stores, they are positioning themselves to compete against ecommerce platforms. This could be planned beforehand to be part of the package for the acquisition.
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"You can simply start a business, run it to serve your customers" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-...