58 | FORBES ASIA OCTOBER 2018
stakes worth $2.1 billion each.
Mailchimp’s success is built on the
backs of America’s small business own-
ers. Its most popular service—email
marketing—might seem a low-tech, un-
sexy medium in 2018. But small busi-
ness owners usually can’t afford mar-
keting teams or social media pros. To
the 20 million people on Mailchimp
today, the ability to send a sleek, on-
brand email with just a few clicks can
mean the difference between bankrupt-
cy and success.
Chestnut and Kurzius have worked
to keep that lifeline affordable: Mail-
chimp’s customers pay nothing for the
first 2,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails
sent, and then $10 a month after that.
The low cost translates potentially into
a big upside. At Stringjoy, a Nashville-
based maker of custom guitar strings,
owner Scott Marquart says every dollar
he spends on sending a weekly email
through Mailchimp’s software is good
for $20 in new sales. “Customers feel
like they know me,” he says.
In Chestnut’s oice at Mailchimp
headquarters, an old Sears warehouse
northeast of downtown Atlanta, there’s a
photo of a boxing glove accompanied by
an apocryphal Mike Tyson quote: “Every-
body has a plan until they get punched in
the face.” Chestnut is no boxer—though
he met his wife in high school in kara-
te class—but he relishes the sentiment be-
cause his career started by absorbing a
couple igurative jabs to the chin.
The son of a serviceman and his
Thai spouse, Chestnut transferred to
Georgia Tech in 1994 to study industri-
al design, only to realize he wanted to
learn how to build websites—something
the school didn’t teach in the mid-
1990s. So he taught himself by reading
technical books in the aisles of his local
Barnes & Noble bookstore and eventu-
ally got a job at Cox Interactive Media.
Once there, Chestnut hired Kurzius, a
part-time DJ and former competitive
skateboarder who’d bluffed about his
own coding skills, to work with him on
the company’s dot-com-era MP3 music
service. After just a few months, the
unit folded in the tech crash.
Kurzius landed elsewhere at the
company, but Chestnut was laid off,
spending the next few months as a free-
lance website builder. He still remem-
bers the sting of losing his job. “What
a feeling that was, walking out with a
box in your hand,” he says. But Kurzius
and Chestnut kept tinkering together,
first on an e-greetings site and then a
service that had personal resonance.
It wasn’t just Chestnut who had found
himself jobless in the spring of 2000.Kurzius had witnessed his father’s bak-
ery go bankrupt; Chestnut’s older sister
lost her hair salon. What if a simple site
could allow small business owners to
easily email their most loyal customers?
It might not save them, but it certain-
ly couldn’t hurt in an ever noisier and
more competitive environment.
Mailchimp, named ater their most
popular e-card character, launched in
2001 and remained a side project for
several years, earning a few thousand
dollars a month. hen in 2007, when
it hit 10,000 users, the two decided to
commit full-time. Mindful of what can
happen when outside investors get con-
trol, they shunned venture capital cash
and bootstrapped from their proits in-
stead, vowing to ship a new feature each
month to outpace their better-inanced
competition.
Mailchimp pitched employees on
profit-sharing over equity stakes and
stability over rocket-ship growth.
But it grew at a viral clip anyway, on
the strength of word of mouth and
savvy marketing, like its 2015 spon-
sorship of the breakout podcast Seri-
al. Email remained its bread and butter,
but Kurzius started canvassing cus-tomers about the features they wanted
next, making eight to ten cross-coun-
try trips each year to talk to small-
scale entrepreneurs. Identifying him-
self as just “Dan,” he learned that store
owners and small business operators
wanted help advertising on Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram. So Mailchimp
added simple tools to run social media
campaigns. Ease of use remains a high
priority.
“Mailchimp has made my life easy,”
says Hrag Kalebjian, a third-genera-
tion coffee roaster at Henry’s House
of Coffee in San Francisco. “It lets me
focus on the other parts of the business
and not worry about leakage of people
going out my back door.”
Now, after months of behind-the-
scenes work, Chestnut and Kurzius
are unveiling what Chestnut calls “Act
Two.” Some new efforts are decidedly
low-tech, such as testing printed post-
cards; their customers sent 25,000 this
summer. Others are much more sophis-
ticated. By tracking a business’s cus-
tomer base across every point of inter-
action—Facebook, email or in-store,
for example—Mailchimp wants to sup-
plement the email lists that gave the
company its start, adding more tar-
geted groups: say, customers who
haven’t made a purchase in the last six
months. Such capabilities are already
standard with much more expensive
software, like Salesforce; Mailchimp
is trying to make them affordable for
small businesses. “We can democratize
that technology,” says John Foreman,
Mailchimp’s head of product. “Like
stealing fire from the gods.”
That new challenge keeps Chest-
nut and Kurzius locked in to what
both see as lifetime tours of duty with
Mailchimp, even as they launch fam-
ilies. And family foundations: Chest-
nut’s is first, allocating $10 million to
help Georgia nonprofits. Go public?
Not worth the headache, Chestnut says.
Sell? The founders look incredulous.
“To this day, it’s just a fun feeling that
we can help,” Kurzius explains. Chest-
nut chimes in: “I want people to see
that the past 17 years were just a warm-
up.”FORBES ASIA
MAILCHIMP
F“I WANT PEOPLE TO SEE THAT THE PAST 17
YEARS WERE JUST A WARM-UP.”