Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Guy Raz** (0:39)
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**Ben Chestnut** (1:42)
People were raising their hands saying, so what's the strategy?
You know, and my answer, you know, as a startup founder, is we don't need no stinking strategy. We've got this, you know? And half the audience would cheer and say, yeah, we don't need no strategy. And the other half would say, yeah, we do. And I remember thinking, oh my God, there actually is no strategy.
And so the whole meeting just completely flopped. And I remember going back to my office, just sitting there alone, thinking about what in the world just happened to me.

**Guy Raz** (2:20)
From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Ben Chestnut and his partners used a monkey logo and gorilla marketing to build Mailchimp, a B2B brand that grew into a big business by focusing on small business.

**Ben Chestnut** (2:45)
This is I This.

**Guy Raz** (2:53)
Mailchimp is an online marketing platform, probably best known for its email automation. You may have heard their ads on podcasts, and you might be familiar with their logo. It's a smiling monkey wearing a postman's hat. But it's also a company that helped usher in the era of SaaS businesses, software as a service. The SaaS market, think Salesforce, Adobe, Twilio, HubSpot, is expected to reach more than $270 billion in global sales this year. Last year, anticipating this gold rush, investors poured over $30 billion into SaaS startups in the US alone.
But what makes Mailchimp stand out from the crowd are a few key differences. For starters, the founders never took on any outside investment. The company also grew slowly at first. Very slowly, as you will hear. But it was profitable from the start. And instead of launching in California or in Seattle, Mailchimp was founded in Atlanta in 2001, long before the city became the tech center that it's becoming today.
But perhaps most importantly, Mailchimp focused on small businesses, which turned out to be a stroke of great luck because small businesses helped turn Mailchimp into the giant it is today. Forbes recently estimated that if Ben and his co-founder, Dan Curzius, sold the company now, it would fetch at least $4 billion. And initially, Mailchimp wasn't even the intended product. Ben and Dan had started with a web design company and built Mailchimp as a side project, almost as an afterthought. But through a series of smart decisions, especially around cheap and creative marketing, Mailchimp has grown into a company that did around $800 million in revenue last year.
Ben Chestnut wasn't a particularly techie kid growing up. He spent hours playing football and basketball and exploring his neighborhood on his bike. He grew up in a small town in Georgia called Hephzibah back in the 70s and early 80s, not too far from a military base.

**Ben Chestnut** (5:12)
The neighborhood I was in was just outside of the city limits of Hephzibah. And I don't really know how to describe it. It's not predominantly anything. It's highly diverse.
Lots and lots of immigrant families lived in our neighborhood. Germans, Asians, and when I say Asians, I mean Japanese, Korean, it's the Philippines, Vietnamese, all over the board, African Americans as well.