How Mailchimp grew from an agency side product to a $12 billion sale without outside funding

Ben Chestnut was a struggling young designer in the late 1990s when someone suggested he try designing for the internet instead. A few years later he and two co-founders launched a web design agency. According to NPR’s How I Built This, the agency had included email marketing almost as an afterthought, and that service began taking off among its small-business clients.

The founders named the service Mailchimp and launched it in 2001. In 2007 they pivoted to it full-time. Wikipedia lists Chestnut and Mark Armstrong as the 2001 founders, with Dan Kurzius joining later.

The company never took venture money. In a 2019 TechCrunch interview, Chestnut said Mailchimp never needed funding because small businesses badly needed a product like this, while enterprises were already being served by email vendors. TechCrunch also reported that the company had turned down acquisition offers.

The first customers were the agency’s own small-business clients, the people who were already paying the founders to build websites. Their need for email marketing was the product spec, and the relationship meant nobody had to be won over from a cold start.

Pricing mattered too. Business Insider’s summary of Chestnut’s NPR interview says that, unlike bigger rivals at the time, Mailchimp did not require customers to pay a $50 subscription fee upfront. Small companies could grow their lists first and pay once they were big enough to need premium features.

The biggest single move was going freemium. Wikipedia, citing Mailchimp’s own 2010 blog, reports that the company began as a paid service and added a free option in 2009, and that its user base grew from 85,000 to 450,000 within a year.

Brand personality did the work that an ad budget would do elsewhere. Chestnut told NPR and Business Insider that the offbeat, quirky tone created kinship with entrepreneurs, and the company was willing to try new marketing formats early. One example is its 2014 sponsorship of the Serial podcast, which Chestnut said took the brand beyond the tech and entrepreneur world.

By 2019 Mailchimp told TechCrunch it was on track for roughly $700 million in revenue, with about 11 million active customers, and was expanding from email into a broader marketing platform. NPR cites revenue of $800 million in 2020. On September 13, 2021, Intuit announced it would acquire Mailchimp for approximately $12 billion in cash and stock.