view past issues | RSS subscribe to list translate
Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.
MailChimp Newsletter
MailChimp News

The MailChimp family has grown since we last spoke.

Ivan the designerIvan The Designer has joined our team, and he's been working hard on the MailChimp website (particularly landing pages for marketing campaigns). His work is already getting noticed here and here.

BradBrad has joined the customer service team. He brings some email marketing experience with him from his last job, and he's a bit of a class clown, so you may get a little chuckle out of live chatting with him. 


LorinLorin has also joined the customer service team. He's extremely detail oriented, and unlike Brad, knows how to bribe the staff with bagels on his first day on the job. We love you Lorin.



Recent MailChimp News
We launched MailChimp V3 back in mid June.  It was a massive project, eight months in the making. We re-wrote every single line of code in MailChimp, to make it more scalable and efficient. The entire user interface was also re-designed, to be Ajaxy-fast and clean.

Then the fun part: we had to move 45,000 user accounts, who all managed more than 65,000 lists, containing more than 77 million subscribers, over to our new servers. Turns out most of those user accounts were old, and hadn't logged in to  MailChimp in a while. There were really only about 15k "active" MailChimp users with campaigns that had to be moved. We thought it would be a nice opportunity to just archive a ton of old dormant accounts, so we wouldn't have to migrate them over.

So we sent out a campaign telling everybody "We're launching v3 soon, and if you haven't logged in within a year, we're archiving your account." We figured it was good advance warning. Besides, all those dormant accounts were long gone anyway. We were wrong. Almost everybody started logging in, just to keep their accounts alive. Even people who hadn't logged in for years. And some people who had already left MailChimp wanted to switch back (guess they saw all the new features in V3 and wanted to give it a try). D'oh. So in about one week, we went from 15k to 30k "active" user accounts. In the end, we figured we might as well just migrate all 45k accounts.

And migration went well, for the most part (by the way, all big server migration stories have to end with that "for the most part" phrase). About 42,500 accounts migrated over in a matter of hours on launch day, and those customers could use MailChimp instantly. That was an amazing feat. Seriously. We would have broken out the champagne bottles, but about 2,500 accounts just wouldn't migrate. They all had something unique about their accounts that just didn't agree with our migration scripts. So we had to migrate them manually, which took us one full week (we did it in bursts, so as not to disrupt all the users who could already get into MailChimp). We thank all those customers who had the patience to deal with us through that migration.

After launch, things ran very smoothly (for the most part). Actually, there was this minor little issue. You see, our system had a maximum capacity of about 32,000 users. It was just the way we programmed it. Of course we planned to change that eventually, but it was one of those Y2K kind of issues, where you put it off till later, because "heck, we only have about 15k active customers." But remember how we jumped to 30k users almost instantly?

So that meant we had to go ahead and perform another major server upgrade almost immediately after launching v3. And it didn't help that we had already launched 3 major marketing campaigns, driving tons of traffic (and new signups) to MailChimp. We were running out of room fast.

So we had to call our data center, and tell them to add more servers. Luckily, v3's new infrastructure made MailChimp a lot more scalable, so it's really easy to just plug in more servers.

One minor issue: we ran out of rack space at our data center. So we had to move to a new location in the data center, so we'd have more room to grow. Anyways, that upgrade went well (for the most part), and now we've got tons of room to grow and add more servers (we've since already added a couple more).

What's Ahead for MailChimp?
Our goal is to make email marketing easy. For everyone. We don't care if you're a gigantic corporation, or a one-person small business. We don't care if you're just sending occasional newsletters, or creating segments via the API built on behavioral data in your CRM and sending that to an A/B campaign tracked via Google Analytics. Our one goal is to make all that easy.

So we've been adding more and more improvements in the system to make things easy for people to do extremely powerful stuff. MailChimp v3.2, due very soon, is chock full of unbelievably powerful new features that make MailChimp so easy, you don't even have to log in anymore. Ha.

We've also translated the opt-in process into 15 languages, so that companies all over the globe can more easily use MailChimp for their email marketing (here's a list of languages we'll be supporting). We have no idea where that'll take us, but we're doing it anyway. That's all part of the fun! MailChimp v3.2 is estimated to launch the first weekend in August.

Thanks for all your support,

The MailChimp Team
2008 Web Jam Session

Webmaster Jam Session
Aarron Walter (MailChimp's User Interface Guru) will be speaking at Webmaster Jam Session 2008, on the topic of Findability.

Ben Chestnut (MailChimp's VP of Monkey Drawing) will also be speaking at Webmaster Jam Session, on Email Marketing 101.

Web Jam Session 2008 is going to be an exciting event, with speakers like Nick Finck from Blue Flavor, and Chris Pederick from Firefox, Chris Heilmann from Yahoo, John Moore from Brand Autopsy, James Craig from Apple, and more...

Lunch-n-Learn
Aarron & Ben will also both be speaking at the University of Georgia's "Lunch and Learn" series on September 25th, and October 30th, respectively. If you're in the Athens area, we invite you to attend!


Face for Radio
Who's this nut job making the funny faces, and what's he talking about?
Weirdo making funny faces


MailChimp Is Hiring
Want to work for a dot-com startup? Neither would we. We're a software company with a laid-back atmosphere, but we're darn serious about simplifying complicated problems in innovative ways. We work hard, but we have fun doing it. Our formula is to hire smart people, pay generously, provide free snacks, and get the heck out of the way.

We're self-funded and have experienced over 100% revenue growth year-after-year since inception.

We're looking for a programmer and a marketing person. Know anybody? Must love monkeys.
MailChimp Jobs

Case Studies Wanted
We want more examples for our Case Studies page. 

If you've got an awesome campaign or MailChimp story to share, take this quick little interview, and we'll get you posted!

MailChimp Tweets
You may have heard of this Twitter thing. It's a place where people post extremely short little sentences on "what I'm doing right now." Yes, it's weird. But it's actually pretty useful for posting server status updates for MailChimp. If our servers crashed, and we were working furiously to get them live again, we'd have no place to update anybody. Until now. If you ever see any weirdness going on with MailChimp, hop on over to Twitter.com/mailchimp, and you'll probably find us tweeting about it.

Unless of course, Twitter is down. But for that, there's always:
isTwitterDown.com


MailChimp API
Ever wish there was some magical way you could sync your website or database up with MailChimp? That way, you didn't have to constantly upload your lists over and over and over? And you could pull stats from MailChimp into your company's dashboard? And maybe build segments based on behavioral data on your e-commerce system, and send to MailChimp?

There is a way.  It's called the MailChimp API.

And there are some crafty people out there who are using the API to create quick little plugins for Drupal, Wordpress, Zen Cart, and more. Check 'em out over at our MailChimp Plugins Page.


Our mailing address is:
MailChimp 512 Means Street NW Suite 404 Atlanta, GA 30318

Forward this email to a friend
Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp