Happy Thanksgiving!
Hello everyone, it's that time of year again. MailChimp's been unbelievably busy delivering holiday campaigns in time for Black Friday. It seemed like everyone on the planet was trying to deliver their campaigns yesterday. Delivery volume across our servers was at a record high. We've never seen this many database connections per second (and I've never seen our lead engineer watch our "server load" graphs so closely). But we made it through yesterday, which seemed to be the peak. Our recent load balancing and server upgrade efforts are proving to be a wise investment. I'm going to shut up about all that now, because I'm just jinxing myself. On to other things...
So What's Been Happening?
It's been a while since our last official newsletter (July) so there's a lot to catch up on. Below are some highlights. But first, do you like this spiffy holiday template? Want one for your own company? Here ya go.
New MailChimp Logo
We got the famous Jon Hicks (who helped design the Mozilla Firefox logo) to redesign the MailChimp logo. We felt that MailChimp had matured from a simple email newsletter tool, to a super-sophisticated, powerful, Web10.0 (but still easy-to-use) email marketing engine. And we wanted a cool monkey mascot to show it. Ha. So here's the story of the re-branding effort.
Chimpnapped!
Two MailChimp members recently spoke at the WebJam Session 2008 event here in Atlanta. We were also co-sponsors of the event, so we ordered a life-sized, standing MailChimp sign, and stacked 2 crates (40 pounds or so) of bananas next to him. Here's what it looked like with all the bananas. Hey, I know it's a non-traditional kind of display, but I've been to lots of conferences, and I usually hate their breakfasts. Just gimme some strong coffee, and a banana please.
Anyway, while we were speaking, someone stole our MailChimp sign.
At first, I thought it might've been the hotel staff, moving the giant monkey sign out of the lobby (maybe it was some kind of fire hazard or something). But when we started asking around, I slowly came to the realization that MailChimp was stolen.
Then, this picture surfaced on the internet:
Notice the newspaper serving as "proof of life." We jumped into action, using Twitter, our blog, and our network of friends to try to solve the mystery. For a while, everyone just thought this was some kind of guerilla "gorilla marketing" stunt we were trying to pull off ourselves. Luckily, that seemed to aggravate the real chimpnappers, who wanted to take full credit for it.
More pictures of our chimp in captivity surfaced, like this one, where MailChimp appears to be in front of a restaurant somewhere in South Carolina:
Ken Seals chimed in with his conspiracy theory, which got more and more concerned web designers (with pent-up Photochopping skills) involved. Naturally, things just got weirder:
MailChimp Amber Alert:
Botched MailChimp Rescue:
Here's a full timeline of what hapened, in case you're interested.
The beautiful part of all this is that we truly had nothing to do with it. The Chimpnappers sent private messages to us over Twitter, assuring us that MailChimp would not be harmed, and that he would eventually be returned. We told them to just run with it, because we honestly just wanted to see "how it all played out." Cool to see our brand just taking on a life of its own like this. And it was tremendous fun for our staff trying to track down the culprits (it was Jesse, our lead API engineer, who eventually tracked them down via WHOIS records and a handy password reminder loophole. heh. nerdpower!).
MailChimp "For The Google Generation"
I recently stumbled upon a "top ten review" website that compared the top 10 email marketing services side-by-side, and made recommendations. The review was nice, even though they seemed to be looking at an old version, and it had some inaccuracies, but one thing they got dead-on target was this quote: "MailChimp was designed for people of the Google generation." Amen to that.
MailChimp is all about innovation (afterall, our parent company is "The Rocket Science Group"). We're about making email marketing easy. For everyone. We're not focused on large business. We're not focused on small business. We're not focused on "enterprise" or SMBs. We're focused on "people who want to get email marketing done." So we're innovating and making email marketing easy for everyone, whether you're a huge company with a tiny list, or a tiny company with a huge list. If it's a complicated concept, like A/B splits, or ROI tracking, we'll make it one-button easy (and fun). Want your campaigns to be mobile-friendly? We'll take care of it automatically. Need an email template designed, but don't have a graphic designer? We'll automatically design it for you. And we've got some more tricks up our sleeves coming soon.
Well, after the holiday season. We're not launching anymore major upgrades during the crazy holiday email rush. We have to keep everything niiiiice and staaaable, at least through mid January.
Speaking of new features...
If you don't read the MailChimp blog, or sign in to your account on a regular basis, you might have missed out on all the new features we've been launching and announcing over the last few months.
Here's a list to get you up to speed:
http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/whats-new-in-mailchimp/
- Mobile-friendly email campaigns
- RSS-to-Email campaigns
- E-commerce and Analytics integration
- Email design tools
- Multi-language support
- and so much more.
MailChimp Labs
Ever wonder where all our crazy ideas come from? How do we keep innovation going for a topic like "email marketing?" When---let's face it---not a lot of people get excited about email anymore. When, if you mention that you're in "email marketing" at any given party, people look at you like you're a flesh-eating-zombie (who sends spam). Email is just---email, right? Not to us. We have tons of fun with email, because it's still the most popular thing to do on the interwebs (more than search?).
It's because of MailChimp Labs. It's sort of like a "skunk works" where we get to dabble in all kinds of new technology. No, the MailChimp Lab is not an actual laboratory or room in our office. It's kind of an attitude. We'll be in the middle of a meeting, and have some whacky idea that takes us totally off track. And that's good. We take that idea, and we do it, all the while knowing it'll probably never see the light of day. That's not failure. It's totally okay. Because it can sit "in the MailChimp Lab" for future use. It's sort of an "idea parts bin." That way, we get to do cool, inspiring, out-of-the-box stuff at the same we're maintaining good ole MailChimp. There's no pressure to instantly monetize new ideas. We let them incubate a little, then we put them into the product.
Check out some of the experiments from MailChimp Labs here, and see if you can spot any technology being used in our app.
What's Ahead for MailChimp?
Our focus on innovation and making everything easy and fun is always at the top of our list. But right now, we're also focused on scalability. Sounds kind of boring, huh? But we're talking about scalability across the board. Not just our servers and databases. We're talking about scaling up our customer service, our innovation, our API, and---everything. This is not to make ourselves "more efficient." Although I have to admit it is kind of neat to have over 50,000 users and still be only 12 people. No, it's not headcount we're concerned with. We simply want to be scalable because that's the only way we can spread our monkey love to everyone on the planet.
Thanks for your time, thanks for being a MailChimp customer, and please have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.
- The entire MailChimp team. Eep eep!
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