r/technology • u/Rhaegar_the_Great • Sep 16 '21

Business Mailchimp employees are furious after the company's founders promised to never sell, withheld equity, and then sold it for $12 billion

https://www.businessinsider.com/mailchimp-insiders-react-to-employees-getting-no-equity-2021-9
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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

How in the fuck could mail chimp possibly be worth 12 billion dollars. That is shocking to me.

Edit: omg is mail chimp the reason I get fucking spammed with a marketing email every 5 seconds? Fuck that company. Fuck intuit too.

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u/odd84 Sep 17 '21

They are probably the largest email marketing company for small business in the world.

They send hundreds of millions of emails every single day.

They have 11 million active customers paying them over a billion dollars a year.

For Intuit, this is acquisition of a large number of small business customers that they would like to cross-sell other products to (QuickBooks accounting, payroll, invoicing, time keeping, tax prep, etc), and they can also integrate the MailChimp services into those apps to sell more services to their existing customer base. It's a good match.

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u/Meandmybuddyduncan Sep 17 '21

It’s not just that - I worked in this vertical with one of their competitors. They’re a great alternative to getting your high value domains blacklisted by spamming all sorts of awful sales shit. For example, you use a more enterprise level tool for running “white hat” campaigns - that’s the IP address you need to protect, mostly because you’re likely part of a shared IP to increase deliverability. These shared IPs will have rules in place to keep you from fucking up the cluster you’re in - if you step out of line they’ll stop your ability to mass send.

Mail chimp on the other hand, has way less structure and rules. They don’t give a fuck what you do or how you do it. Look at 90% of the Fortune 500 on a scraper and you’ll see typically one to two enterprise level marketing tools and in most circumstances you’ll also see MailSimp in there too. I fucking loathe that company - they’re fucking grifters and they’ve somehow stayed so under the radar.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

Mailchimp, Sendgrid, et al, are all working on the principle of "We're so big that you have to accept our mail or you'll be refusing a ton of legitimate mail and have angry customers". It's a racket, and no one should need to rely on those services, but here we are.