Ben Chestnut + Aarron Walter

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
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**Debbie Millman** (0:28)
This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman from designobserver.com. On this program, Debbie Millman talks with Mailchimp, Ben Chestnut, and Aaron Walter about their careers, about email marketing, and about how to create creativity.

**Ben Chestnut** (0:46)
You know, when Aaron came on board, I told him why I needed him, what we needed, and I just gave him the keys, it's really getting out of the way.

**Aarron Walter** (0:54)
When companies say failure is not an option, success is no longer an option either.

**Debbie Millman** (1:00)
Here's Debbie Millman.

**Debbie Millman** (1:02)
I have here in my studio two men who are responsible for sending over 3 billion emails per month. And no, they're not from Nigeria. They're from Mailchimp.
Mailchimp helps people create, send, and track email newsletters. And as the name implies, they make it fun.
Ben Chestnut co-founded the company in 2001 along with Dan Curzius. Aarron Walter came on in 2008 to do a redesign. Ben and Aarron are now, respectively, the CEO and user experience lead at Mailchimp. Ben and Aarron, welcome to Design Matters.

**Aarron Walter** (1:45)
Thanks so much for having us.

**Debbie Millman** (1:47)
So, more than 3 million people and companies of all sizes in 200 countries use Mailchimp to send out about 5 billion emails every month. And you love helping them do it.
Really? You really like helping people send email?

**Ben Chestnut** (2:10)
You know, it's more like empowering them to do it.

**Debbie Millman** (2:13)
Really?

**Ben Chestnut** (2:13)
It's a self-serve app and we love making it easy for them to do it. I'm not in there pushing the send button or anything.

**Debbie Millman** (2:20)
But you still get great joy out of knowing that this is happening.

**Ben Chestnut** (2:24)
Oh yeah. To watch a small business make money.

**Debbie Millman** (2:27)
So I want to give you some stats. Now, because people are sending email as we speak, these are probably not in real time accurate statistics, but from like over the weekend, let's say, these are accurate.
34,796,235,769 emails sent to date.
270 million email addresses in the Mailchimp system. You send about 95,332,152 emails a day. You get 6,000 new customers a day. You have 15,445,000 campaigns. And you state that Mailchimp is self-funded, profitable, and slowly taking over the world. First of all, it doesn't seem that slow. But what do you attribute this success?

**Ben Chestnut** (3:29)
The chimpanzee?

**Debbie Millman** (3:31)
Yeah, Freddie? Freddie is the reason.
All right, give us all the details on how that happened.

**Ben Chestnut** (3:36)
Certainly not my business acumen or anything like that. I think we're just making work fun.
It's sort of this ulterior motive that we have.

**Debbie Millman** (3:45)
I'm going to ask you more about that in a minute. So let's start. Let's go back in time a little bit. Let's figure out how you got here, and then we'll talk about what you're doing while you're here. So Ben, your brother is a painter and a musician.
Your sisters are in the graphic arts. Your mom is an aspiring chef. And you wanted to be a cartoonist. And I understand that when you were 10 years old, you started your very first business. Your entrepreneurial DNA came out, and you started selling cartoons at school when you were 10 years old for $0.50 apiece.
So tell us about that. First of all, what kind of cartoons were they, and what made you decide that you wanted to sell them, and how much money did you make?

**Aarron Walter** (4:29)
Very competitive pricing, by the way.

**Debbie Millman** (4:32)
For 10-year-olds.

**Ben Chestnut** (4:33)
Like I said, my business acumen is just up there. I think I started with comic books, and then I wanted to get into 3D comic books, so I would make my own 3D goggles.

**Debbie Millman** (4:45)
Really? How do you do that?

**Ben Chestnut** (4:46)
My brother always had cellophane for making radio-controlled airplanes. Of course. I would always sneak in his room and steal.

**Debbie Millman** (4:55)
So you were an entrepreneur, and you were also somewhat fearless.

**Ben Chestnut** (4:59)
And a thief.

**Debbie Millman** (5:00)
That's the definition of entrepreneur, I think. So Ben, can you describe some of the comics that you created?

**Ben Chestnut** (5:10)
It was a really, really lame superhero that I called No Face, and it's because I couldn't draw his face. It was really lame.

**Debbie Millman** (5:17)