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Mailchimp invoices for Higher Education

foreign I just saw entrepreneurialism as breathing you know it's just a thing you do in life only the MailChimp brand can get away with the kind of content that we're publishing most people think of this as just sort of a software company but we're here to empower we're here to empower small businesses they have a story to tell they've got some cool idea for their brand and when they log in I don't want them to have to worry about how to make it work I just want them to go in and tell their story you're gonna have mistakes and setbacks everybody does nobody's smarter nobody knows what they're doing that's actually tremendously frightening comforting and scary at the same time but it's the truth prepare for many long nights just when you think it couldn't get worse it's going to get worse it's going to be like a storm and you're going to be at the front of the ship just holding on for survival much order is really horrible I think my job is to find ways to ways to create if you build a successful brand is because it's different by definition no Playbook first I dream I look into the future in what are the goals our brand is sort of one the permission of small businesses to expand into more [Music] so I am so pleased to have been here I did not know until we did our prep call that back in the day I was the ICP for MailChimp we'll talk about it but we all have our hero apps and I remember back in the day when first I was a SAS founder two things happened um I had no marketing help and I wanted to do a Blog and an email list so I had to figure out what blogging software to use and I'm like I had over a hundred people on my list from a trade show and I wanted to email them and I don't know how I found MailChimp we'll talk about it but I loved it and then I had this moment as a Founder this is a while ago where I'm like God this SAS stuff's hard will it ever get big and I'm driving on 101 and there's this that MailChimp billboard with just like the I know I'm colorbond The Greener the yellow was it was it one on the 101 it was like a little blue yeah yeah and I was like oh my God how much does that cost a billboard it must be like a half a million dollars MailChimp must be huge but it it inspired me that hey like this SAS stuff could be pretty big so it was very inspirational and fast forward today we we required last year for how much I can't remember uh 12 billion 12 billion dollars so pretty crazy Journey but not only is it crazy it's a company that was fully bootstrapped and pretty consistent to its original vision from the beginning right so we're gonna dig all of it but it's definitely a hero story and again Ben was kind enough to do us digitally during um during the craziness and we asked him every year but he he came this year so um I do feel I do feel blessed so we'll we'll I want to dig into a bunch of things especially some things I learned about MailChimp that are not obvious from smbs because I think it's super interesting and then we do have a little time at the end because there's not another session on this so folks want to leave after half an hour to go to another session I don't know if Ben will be insulted I won't be but we can stay for a few minutes of question so think if you have a few we have a little more time than I thought um but first just deal stuff M A's so nichy but this was interesting to me tell us how how long the deal took to happen oh the the Intuit deal took uh a little more than a year to happen a year a year from first aid yes okay and so what what as much as you can tell us about I think some of it's public but how did it happen did you get a random email or a DM or how did how does this process happen for 12 billion how do they get started we had been through sort of a little bit of an informal round with another couple of potential buyers yeah and you know it it didn't end with a a good deal so we walked away from it and I was I had sworn I would never listen to another offer again I was done with it I was going to move on and just run my company for the rest of my life and then you know maybe within a couple of days I got a call uh from Catalyst actually I'd been working with them for many years and they said just take one more call you're gonna like this one oh it's into it so I took a call with Alex Chris uh my my new boss and uh I mean we hit it off immediately he's a small business entrepreneur uh he's been with Intuit for 17 years by then but uh he had run a business got Acquired and he knew the passion required to manage small companies and he knew the pain that they suffered from it he knew what drove us at MailChimp and we just got along really well but they are also a very careful company they care about uh culture fit and they did a lot of culture diligence and that all which I loved I love that they cared that much and but but that did mean one year of uh kind of wooing each other so you went there's a couple interesting things in this we could spend all the time on this but you went through another deal that didn't happen that took months and months and months of doing action yeah it didn't happen which is so fresh for whatever reason it's so frustrating right and then another year to complete this a full year to complete this of getting to know each other right yes and um and you didn't um you you didn't actually usually I find these relationships these come out of a relationship right and you hear of something but this wasn't a pre-existing relationship not at all so you had to build it after that initial initial meeting lots and lots of Zoom calls phone calls and text messages between you and Alex I mean it was during it was during like P craziness too right he was yeah is that better in some ways it actually kind of helped me I'm a little bit of an introvert and so uh not having to meet him in person kind of helped in the early days yeah uh so it was kind of nice and you know I got to talk to sassan uh the CEO and also the founder Scott Cook who had given me some great advice many years ago about how to evolve MailChimp to the next level and uh it was just kind of weird and full circle for them to come back around and think about acquiring us and they knew so a year and you didn't know him but of course everyone knew about MailChimp how did they think about MailChimp obviously it's an iconic brand but what was in their head what got them excited since they didn't know you personally we both kind of hit it off very fast Alex and I and the the common Vision that we had was to have one great uh platform for a small business season we would both Works we're talking to our customers and noticing that they were using so many different SAS applications yeah paying so many different fees and we just thought you know I had always dreamed of maybe we handled the front office very well at MailChimp but what if we could build back Office Solutions and the same thing happens over there at QuickBooks there they manage that back office very well for 38 plus years and they wanted to help their customers grow their audiences with the front office and so it was sort of a match made in heaven now with and I don't I'll admit I'm a long time into a customer but I don't know all the products but maybe being marketers being less less their their core Focus right is is there is there a DNA Challenge and they have to get get to know marketers better was it a non-issue or how does that how does having this a similar but adjacent buyer work out I think it's still very early days and they're very open to learning from us uh and uh teaching teaching them the ways of uh being weird I think it's I think it's all a matter of like teaching them how to embrace the kookiness and weirdness of the MailChimp brand that's what's appealing to marketers and and you know brand managers out there they love that weirdness whereas I think if you're running back office and and you're doing taxes uh you have to be like I mean they have personality and character but I mean different I think I think creativity is frowned upon in accounting taxes so they they're having to learn a little bit there yeah so that's an evolution embracing the weird yeah it's a journey cool and then and so one last thing on this is just at MailChimp scale right we we passed a billion although you notice instantly it was right after the acquisition right yeah you don't really need to integrate the apps do you you just need to Thrive integration is not a huge deal at your scale is it it's not a top priority they've really made it a mandate to make sure that we keep our independence yeah and so far so good you know keeping it weird thing can I just say we've got a campaign going on now with like a dancing rug and weird roles and I didn't lead that campaign I'm usually at the heart of a lot of the weirdness and to their credit this one was straight from into it and our new CMO Michelle and I'm sort of looking at as half Spectators just saying damn mailchimp's weird now I see what everybody else sees I'm like this is what's the rub thing like it's it's kind of kooky so they are they are learning fast is the weirdness bar gone up now that we see more weird I don't know it's just it could just be that you know step back as CEO and now I'm looking at it with a fresh set of eyes and yeah and I am I'm walking around the halls and when you're a CEO you just focus on day to day thinking about next step and 10 steps from now it's like a game of chess and then I've stepped back as CEO and sort of I'm walking the halls and looking at some of the fun stuff we've done over the years and I'm like wow we are weird yeah uh it's kind of cool so I mean you have a background as a designer we didn't chat about but this weird thing is interesting yeah what how did you come to weird like I I remember in the old days of e-signatures my co-founder wanted us to be the bad boys of these signatures and I'm like I don't think that's gonna work like this is a product yeah 99 of the world doesn't trust and I know you're a great marketer but this is too edgy for back in the day right so how did what did you want to get out of weird what was your vision here I mean it was really probably coming from our small business customers uh my co-founder Dan and I just believed in really we didn't try to strategize that much or come up with all the answers ourselves we just went out to the customers and when we talked to them they were kind of kooky themselves I mean whatever small business it is that you're trying to run it's probably been done before but each founder thinks I'm gonna do it better I'm going to do it my way and that's their personal brand and I don't know that was the first couple of uh iterations of our brand they were a little bit weird and funny um in a kind of a monkey kind of way that was really the theme and they just loved it and we just sort of rolled from there and you know I think one of our one of our teammates uh uh kind of encapsulated perfectly I think she came up with uh we got you because we get you I think that's the appeal of our brand for small business owners we get them look at us we're weird like you or we're kooky and unique like you and just it's just work for 21 years it is I want to go on but one interesting thing you brought up on the in the on the acquisition was that for the first time you added a CS team right in terms of customers files or customer success ever and how what did you learn from that what did you learn I mean you you made it pretty far without a CS team with small businesses what did you learn from that I mean we we started to I mean we we just did so well with with smaller businesses and then we noticed as they grew and uh you know maybe they would hire VPS of sales or VPS of marketing and they would start to use MailChimp their needs change suddenly it wasn't the founder who loved our unique and kooky small business brand it was a new person uh and they were they they treated us differently and so I would go out and visit some of them and you know I would say what do you think about our brand uh where where does our brand you know rest in your brain with other brands are we next to Nike are we next to Apple and I remember one one marketer told me uh uh know your brand lies next to my microwave oven and I you know it kind of broke my heart a little bit and I said well what do you mean in your microwave oven he said you know my founder liked you he loved the brand but I've got to grow this business and I need you to be reliable and if it doesn't cook my food in a minute I want someone to call and answer my questions and just get it running again I don't want to have to read KB articles blah blah blah so you know that told me gosh we've got to like spool up a customer success team of some sort and it's been a long journey we've got some great new executive leaders that are and into it's got a lot of experience with this and they're going to take it to another another level but we talk let's let's jump into that um because it was so interesting when we talked before of where where the break point is for your brand and product and we talked about this break point when marketing comes in when a VP of marketing comes in and whether you want to retain them always as a do you always want to retain them as a customer it's tough It's it's real it's a com it kind of requires a different culture you know I mean for 21 years we built one culture very well for the self-serve SMB market and when you start to serve a completely different kind of customer set you have to learn some new tricks and we used to get very comfortable saying well I mean if we're not right for you then sorry you'll have to find a new provider and then we we learned that we were letting a lot of customers down they really wanted us to grow with them it is a it is a tough challenge I feel like you know if they get started with with your with your small business brand and they love the little chimpanzee yeah you know and then and then the founder hands the keys to a VP of marketing they really their job is to take it to the next level they wanted almost a different brand you know and I've struggled over the years many years to try to to build that sort of MailChimp Pro that second level MailChimp it's a it's tough it's tough it's tough to build one great iconic brand to try to build two uh I don't know I don't have enough years well it's your own version of champion change right yeah we talk a lot about Champion change but really it's founder to VP the VP they might like a worse product right but they probably have some different different experience right and uh does the founder want to use does they do they want to use their chip to stay with their favorite app when a VP babies do something else right right that's right yeah um and so this going back to this MailChimp Pro thing so you never did build it would you could you see in the data like I could imagine I mean MailChimp um you can use it a lot but I could imagine around five thousand a thousand dollars a month you might guess that there could be risk right in the account did you look at signals or anything like that we didn't look at those kinds of signals because we could when you serve some of these small businesses especially with e-commerce if they're in that industry you could have a small business with two or three employees but their database is in the millions it was really wacky to try to look at the data points what we looked at was um if the founder set up a sub account you know with send a username and password to their VP you're basically making a copy of the keys for a VP that was the potential Breaking Point God that was our red flag if a new VP comes on they're not going to read the instruction manual like the founder did uh so another admin another core use you that's right that was the signal right right and they're starting over with a fresh set of eyes and competitors are there ready to talk to them and do the sales pitch and we're like our TFM read the manual not a great experience but mostly you um and wildly successfully you stuck doggedly to SMB right and where our hearts were I want to talk that's what I want to talk about just for a minute is it is it just your DNA yeah your DNA as Founders because those are when you we talked about I think you said Uber was like a big account you lost right and that always that hurts us all as Founders right but you didn't change MailChimp you didn't radically change you didn't bang your maybe you did I don't think you banged your shoe on the desk and said we're not going to lose another massive customer did you I I felt like um we it was a technical challenge to me to just stay true to our roots and our brand but make MailChimp more performant for those larger customers so yeah I kind of flipped on it yeah yeah a little bit I mean it was I remember it was like six figures a month was the revenue that we were getting it's a lot now you don't just sort of brush that off I mean that's a Learning lesson for any founder um but I just I kept challenging my team to like just just make make it more performant for those really large uh databases and they and they really did it was a great kind of constraint or technical challenge that made MailChimp it ended up making better for like the millions and millions of small businesses and as for the larger customers it's sort of a rite of passage you know if you if you go through high school and college and you have your Honda Civic and you graduate and you get a great paying job do you upgrade to the Honda or do you get your Beamer or Tesla or something something new and we saw that rite of passage and we also saw that if we stay true to ourselves and kept improving after a few more years they realized that darn Beamer is hard to maintain and they come right back to us and they kind of use uh the back door they use the MailChimp API and that's where really really massive businesses still use MailChimp were you able to track like Word of Mouth in terms of and related in terms of customer acquisition and Boomerang so you have did you have a sense of how much came from Word of Mouth you know what we were so we didn't have a team that would track that sort of thing we were so with freemium we were getting you know I remember 10 000 signups a day from new customers we were so busy trying to control that flood of new users and trying to prevent server outages I don't know that we ever really had the time to look at retention yeah it's interesting on that one we we chat about what's what's super interesting to me and maybe to folks in the audience is that because because of that Top Line growth in tour end yeah nrr even I don't know we're not important to you as long as you hit the Top Line number right yeah you didn't you didn't I mean we're all talking about Lighthouse metrics like s b how can we get to 100 nrr like Enterprise 130 and and measuring grr and every metric but this was never a lighthouse metric for me I don't know and I never had investors so I never had to do reports that could be a part of it no business plan I never I had a monthly bank statement and I said what's the starting balance and what's the ending balance ending should be bigger yeah and it always was bigger I still and but and even at even as you approach the building as you brought in more Seas more and we can talk maybe look talk next about a couple great hires they didn't push you more on this stuff as you brought in more DNA you were this hyper SMB DNA for so long they probably got tired of trying to teach me it and then they just gave up on me they did it quietly somewhere I got it but I'm not aware of it well let's let's talk about it let's come back to the team but let's talk about bootstrapping for a minute maybe we'll just use one more slide as a prop we probably don't need them but it is different right and before we get there just because on the internet and with Founders there's so much discussion of bootstrapping versus venture-backed but yeah I don't think it's usually a choice was it a choice for you for a long time did you when you were when you were an agency in the beginning or starting did you turn away 10 million in seed funding it wasn't a choice was it I don't nobody really visited us yeah yeah we were in Atlanta Georgia and nobody bothered to fly uh over until one of our competitors Constant Contact went public in 07. and then suddenly people in suits started to show up at our door and I just didn't understand it you know I I I'm a product of the.com days I was laid off in April 2000 during the.com bust and there was a lot of distrust for for a lot of that sort of like the VC world it was a movement to do more pragmatic programming yada yada so we kind of avoided that for many years and then they started showing up around 07 and I I always invited them in let them buy me lunch and just try to learn as much as I could but MailChimp kept growing and growing and we never really needed money uh where they would offer it and I would try to figure out what would I spend it on and we just made plenty uh and we ultimately never never needed any kind of investment yeah so we were the other you know one of the other iconic bootstrap company I mean there's a few but is atlassian and we were talking before Michael Cannon Brooks when he was at saster said I mean years ago he said I probably couldn't do it lasting the same way today because I had four years to go really slowly when we're bootstrapped right and I think Alaskan probably started in 2000 right um what could you have done as great a hero story as the bootstrapping side could you have done it the same way now is the or is the world too fast I could do it again no I I think at that time so they started in 2000 we started in 2000 that was a different time Cloud was new that was a new word sass hadn't really even been invented just yet I mean everything was Sony it was a time of um it was like an unbundling who was that who's that guy uh Barksdale yeah he wants somebody asked him for the secret to Tech running a tech company Jim Barksdale and he said it's Cycles bundling and then unbundling and that was kind of a joke he gave but it's true it's really true and so like at that time 2000 everything was unbundling from desktops and mainframes or whatever we were using back then PCS and going to the cloud and there was like you needed a marketing Cloud you needed sales the CRM everybody was willing to pay for all of these different um unbundled uh Point Solutions and now I think that we're at a different time when people want it bundled back together again and the cycle is just going to keep continuing I think right now I don't know that you could do what we did uh yeah I think there it will happen when there is a great unbundling again and what is for MailChimp what I mean this bundling is interesting right because we get busy we have a trusted vendor we want to buy more from them but in Innovation happens right maybe that's part of the gym what is what does bundling mean at MailChimp today what what is a core what does that mean versus four or five years ago well for for us right now it's sort of this hypothesis with uh into it that that we had that oh that's a super bundle yes small businesses really want one platform where they can manage their business with QuickBooks and then grow their business with MailChimp got it well that'll be a big experiment right um it's the biggest related to that we chatted before um about product expansion I learned some interesting stuff from you but what works and what doesn't right and what worked for you I think we talked about landing pages being a surprise right and e-commerce being harder than you expected to expand in right yeah e-commerce e-commerce was a bit it's it's a challenge to break into that World um but and and we we built all kinds of things for our small businesses um landing pages was one that we built I kind of thought they were boring uh not really a big deal and it was probably one of our most popular features over the last in recent years I mean it just took off and sold like hotcakes and I still to this day can't explain it I'm just thankful that we had this culture at MailChimp to constantly not we didn't even use the word innovate as far as I can remember I always just said Tinker I said just keep tinkering with code and just keep trying little make small bets I didn't want Moon shots they were too expensive I just said make little small bets and fail fast and then just kind of like recalibrate and landing pages is one of those little tinkering experiments someone did who knew I mean it just took off well that's that's a little bit of nonsense it's interesting it's a little non-standard of like as you get bigger the bets have to be bigger right they have to be material but maybe that wasn't how you thought about it you still wanted to try and maybe it's the bootstrapping mentality but landing pages turned out to be much larger than you thought it was it was it wasn't planned on a whiteboard that's right I don't know if they need to be able to I guess they do need to be bigger like if you're a public company and you have to care about Wall Street I mean but I think you need a lot of those uh those little things baking in the oven because you never know which one is really going to take off it's tremendously hard to kind of manage that and then also run your business at the same time that's tough yeah I just we as we're learning back in the day we had Jeff Lawson from twilio come on just after IPO and he's like I'm gonna do 100 experiments I'm gonna do this type of SMS and Eminem's and we're gonna see what sticks and the next time he's like well I'm gonna buy seven years in a segment because I got to get scale yes like I get like the experiments have to be really big um and then we had Peter gastner from viva who said your experiment has to be bigger because you're gonna if mailchimp's coming up at a billion and I want to do two billion my experiment better not do 50 million yeah you're right you get to a size and maybe you just don't have the expertise in-house you have to acquire the talent and bring it in yeah I get it yeah but you said but the landing pages you said one of the reasons it took off and I think it's learning we've all figured it out is it's it's the same buyer right versus e-commerce maybe is more complicated to sell to yeah I think with landing pages what we what what we overlooked and we went back and talked to small businesses what they had their e-commerce solution and they loved it and they had MailChimp which they used for the email marketing but you know the marketer uh is different they have different needs they need to move fast when they want to modify their Commerce with their shopping cart they've got to ask for technical help from an engineer and those two worlds tend not to like to talk to each other very much and so marketers really wanted their own little solution that they could use without talking to any engineers and they love the ability to spawn up really quick landing pages inside of MailChimp that connected to their carts through the API and sell their stuff so yeah that was that was the Insight that we had and the the uh it was obvious to me when you said it but the core ICP is the same today at a billion which is someone who wants to get marketing going without any engineering resources right that's the designer background was at the ICP you intentionally or someone intentionally went after and it it scaled right uh what's ICP well the target the target buyer user of your product yeah yeah I mean I mean with for the very small business the run your own company to a billion you don't need to know any of these things mrr ICP they don't they don't matter just the Top Line Target buyer then yeah why do we say ICP Jason come on come on [Applause] uh yeah it's the marketer it's really the small business founder who who you know when you start a small business I don't know I don't think that you're thinking about your CMS or your CRM or anything I think you're thinking marketing first how do I sell my stuff that's the first thing you're thinking of so we're thinking about that we're thinking about that founder um and going back to one that we we skipped on a little bit but we but it's always interesting now that you can reflect a little bit right yeah um that I laughed too loud I'm sorry uh it's sort of like erasing old CEO habits is is what I'm trying to do yeah but yes reflect let's call it reflect um two or three top game-changing hires two or three top game changers on the journey um my gosh uh in the early years uh we had an engineer a lead engineer named Chad we called him the Chad because he never slept uh he I mean really he never slept uh and he was constantly building stuff he was amazing he was the one we we hired him to turn MailChimp into two products uh to take our old code divide it into two make one one of them the list building for your blog and the other one if you wanted to send emails that's when we charge you money that's when I'd get you um and he worked on that he was a machine uh and after a year he said it's impossible your code sucks so bad um let me just keep it one product and just make it free up to a point uh and really that's where freemium came from yeah so he was amazing Aaron Walter our first designer he was the first person I hired to take over my job as designer he really cared about the brand and the ux and kind of melding that into one great customer experience uh man that was transformational and I've had two CEOs prior to Intuit uh Neil Bannon was our first CEO and he was sort of at that time our adult supervision like Eric Schmidt uh managing Larry Page and Sergey at Google and he was their adult supervision and Neil was my adult supervision and he was an amazing CEO that I think I don't know if you're a Founder like me you can be pretty abrasive and I don't know you're obsessed over the product and kind of in that weird Steve Jobs Ian kind of a way and Neil was a really good buffer from me so a lot of people just went to kneel instead of me and I could really push Neil to to make the product better and then pharah our next coo was also just that buffer Neil got us from like zero to 300 million pharah got us crazy 300 to 700 million uh and when did you we all want this magical Co that can hide our warts and issues right um when did you the first one when did you decide you needed him how'd you find him uh well I mean with Neil he was really more adult supervision he was a mentor to be honest so your VCS didn't force him in it wasn't anything no there was no forcing uh I think I just think that he was just a good balance I mean he knew we knew our boundaries our roles and responsibilities I think they say now but we knew he was really good at the operational stuff and he was very senior to me um you know he was in his late 40s I was in my late 20s at the time and I needed that experience in-house and a lot of people really liked talking to him he was like our father um so I mean he was just a really it was a sort of a yin yang thing did you go recruit him did you hunt him or how did you do it he he basically uh joined our.com right before we were all laid off together there yeah yeah we sort of kept the relationship uh I gave him a lot of branding advice he gave me a lot of marketing advice uh and then eventually our our paths crossed again and he joined okay I wanna we'll take some questions but I want to hit two other things one a fun one on acronyms do you think there's such thing as plg what [Laughter] I'm looking for freemium one because it's successful but two because you decided later right two to three years into the journey to that was the big accelerant right was going freemium right nine years into the journey nine years into the journey okay we should chat about that we chat about but half this audience wants to know about plg they want product-led growth they want a magical product that when I get my little chip in my email or I open it up or something happens on the page all this is this is half the marketers in this room want to inject plg into the product but it doesn't sound like even today that's a that's a top acronym at MailChimp a product lead growth yeah I mean that was everything to us was I mean Innovation new features was marketing for us yeah I could not so nothing new there's nothing new in your book right yeah I don't know that just that's like common sense to me when you call a plg we just called it building stuff well we didn't used to call it SAS or Cloud but we kind of have to go in with these acronyms don't we silly stuff yeah it's uh it's become a Holy Grail all right one last thing I want to hit and we'll do some questions but a billionaire are right a couple things first of all did you think 22 years ago MailChimp would get there did you think you'd get to a billion I Had No Limits I'd hoped that we would get massive yeah I I was I'd studied the art of it though and I'd learned from a lot of CEOs and Founders out there that you could probably get up to 800 million in that last 200 million is the hardest you'll ever get and that was absolutely true yeah yeah what was so hard just pandemic didn't help what's that the pandemic did not help no it didn't help no it didn't no it helped with half of our customer base that we're e-commerce yeah yes but we had a lot of uh bricks and mortars oh yeah we really suffered that one side or the other yeah yeah yeah and so it's it seemed it didn't so it didn't seem crazy to you um is there a ceiling I mean I know you can't speak so much on behalf of Intuit but can can MailChimp do 10 billion can all these products do 10 billion is it going to do more like is there any ceiling for this stuff I don't see why there should be I mean I think if we just keep that plg mental technology mentality and just keep innovating and listening to small businesses and understanding what they need and pivoting fast and building for them I don't see why there's there needs to be any limit I used to think a trillion dollar market cap there's no way and then now it's happening left and right it seems like it is left and right right I mean that that was a theoretical limit uh before a company would implode and it's not I don't see them imploding and even into it I should know but I tell me how much revenue into it soon but I think they grew over 30 last quarter right I mean MailChimp helped right it's crazy isn't it crazy crazy right at that scale that a company of into its yes I mean I don't track numbers so I don't even I know but it's a lot of growth right so last one on this and then we can take some questions so please ask something but yeah the enduring side of SAS um in 2042 is MailChimp still around is it a brand and a product and is it similar to today I absolutely see it's still around yeah around yeah yeah I see it really baked into QuickBooks and I think that we're really just getting started with this it's still very early days and I just see customers managing their lists uh managing their customer base in QuickBooks paying their bills and then saying you know when you look at that invoice that's been paid you say damn that's a really great customer how do I find more customers like them yeah that's a button they can push and then MailChimp will take care of that let me find similar customers just like that we have the data to do it I see that really being sort of the next step of where we go with that you're thinking like 21 40 to 24 for when the last internet is used it's an email I mean it's like it could be the last I think it's like the first thing on the internet I think it may be the last thing we do on the internet too isn't any email right I mean it's an amazing protocol they've been telling me for 21 years emails did and it's stronger than ever right it's going just fine all right yeah all right we may need some help but any guys have some come on up and ask a question hey Rob hey Ben congrats I never see you in Atlanta we have to come all the way out here to see each other Austin Texas for get everyone together right so Ben for Founders who might think they don't ever want to be acquired what advice would you give them and maybe what was persuasive to you along the way wow Rob that one's that's a long one if you don't ever want to get acquired never open the door to anyone because because here's it really honestly if you open the door and let one in you have to bring your executive team in with you eventually and once everyone gets in on that it's very tough to back down after that when you say well that one didn't work let's forget about it all together and go back to running our business people it is tough I can't put that toothpaste back in the tube so if that's what you really want never do that but then I would warn you like you should never say never uh and uh you know they're they're gonna come these weird times these Cycles in the market where my gosh it's gonna seem like every one of your competitors is getting way more funding uh they can print equity in lieu of actual cash like I've never understood that and then it starts to get more attractive for people to join those companies and you start to wonder should I do that should I do that and uh you know my advice would be like maybe wait maybe wait a little bit you'll see the cycle turn again but I think all of those factors started to make us think uh about doing it and it helped it convinced us to open the door and then once that's open it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle so thanks for that question hey Ben a big fan Atlanta founder as well cool um so I can imagine you can relate in the fact that one of the biggest problems in Atlanta right now it's not access to Talent at Georgia Tech Emory Etc it's not a lack of Founders being there because you walk around got ATV at DC a lot of hubs I would say its access to Capital um so I'm curious Founders like yourself Tope Carl Porter exiting recently do you think that having that into the Atlanta ecosystem is actually going to change that Capital flow into the ecosystem to get more Founders funded um what you're a Founder in Atlanta what's your company um Arkham we do turn mitigation for credit card processors or Merchant acquires they had to give them some air time yeah uh I you know it's a good question I don't know much about creating access to Capital I never had it never cared for it very much I I remember reading something about how ecosystems startup ecosystems get started and a lot of it comes from Acquisitions and talented people finally leaving your company to start their own and I remember reading that many years ago and thinking wow there's so many talented people at MailChimp and they won't leave because it was such a great place I I we we made it such a great company you know and and I think after an acquisition happens people they get transaction bonuses they want to go out and start their own thing like I did and I think that's the best sort of stimulant so uh I I hope that MailChimp helps Atlanta in that way thank you but I think if you want access to Capital if you want investors to come to the city I think they finally learned that Atlanta is a great City to come to and I think it's it's really on Founders to build great businesses worth worth the flight over and we've got a lot of those in Atlanta now it's much flatterer too than it used to be right I mean I invested in sales off pre-revenue so I've known Kyle and I introduced him all those VCS because no one would go to Atlanta that's right I introduced them to emergency I've invested too an emergence and insight but today everyone gets it so I just think coven makes it easier yes because everyone's it's not that it's it's still easier to be here don't get me wrong you can walk around and meet 500 VCS but every investor is hunting if not globally across the U.S so it's not I think it's the talent it's exactly balance the big thing the capital has become a little bit a lot more flat than it was before but but you know if you're going to start a b tube B yeah Enterprise company California is absolutely the best place to be B to C like a consumer brand you can't beat Atlanta we've got Coca-Cola Home Depot UPS Delta Airlines Chick-fil-A like top top brands are all right there in Atlanta thanks for the question thank you thank you hi Ben hi my name is Jerry and like you we are also building a bootstrapped company and my question to you is as you thought about building your company bootstrapped how did you think about profitability and thinking about investing in the right areas did you always try to maintain X percentage of profitability how did you think about that um I mostly yeah I talked about looking at the bank statements for one uh but that was maybe I guess the trailing indicator or something what I really cared about most was uh here's some acronyms to LTV LTV and Cat I cared about that you did care about LTV that was the only thing I cared about and it was it was really because my first CEO he made me listen to some of the investor calls of our competitors and they talked about their customer acquisition costs and their lifetime value and I knew our lifetime value from a typical small business customers I knew how much that was and the trick was don't spend more than that yeah I like it oh yeah and and and like the lifetime value I knew how long it took me to get that you know and you try to shorten that get that as it is short of time as you can uh recoup that cost ASAP that was really all I cared about I what I would watch for that like once a quarter thank you yep good luck on the bootstrapping hey man um so my founder also bootstrapped from Argentina we're about 100 people 10 million in AR we're doing well but uh yeah but we are we're having a problem now with our Tech and something about what you said yesterday so the tech is built in a way that's not like we didn't go and hire the best developers at the very first start so it's a lot of old code that we're needing to redo and so we're plateauing a bit because we can't scale the attack right now how did you manage that as CEO not being from a technical background because you're not a CEO that comes from the tech side and that's my my challenge as well how did you manage that and did you ever have that I actually think if you don't come from the tech side it's an advantage because you stay the hell out of the engineer's way uh I mean if you know if you look over their shoulder and say you coded that wrong I mean it's just not going to help anything so I had I tried to hire the craziest and the best and I just gave them cool toys really powerful computers and as big monitors as I could find at the time and just left them alone um and I bought them snacks and I mean in the early days I mean I'm I'm yes I'm trying to be funny but in the early days when you have Pirates I mean that's all that matters is they want to build great stuff so we talked about the purpose the mission and they were just passionate about it and they and and I just tried to stay out of their way and and I think V3 is pivotal for almost like every product like there's something about V3 after V3 you're real that's product Market fit maybe and V3 maybe you're at V3 yeah rv3 was like that it took a year to get it to get it done where before actually and that's yeah but yes it's around that area around that time but yeah I mean it's it's gonna hurt and I don't know what to say if it's this is a massive one and then hopefully if you do this one right then then it's going to be like nothing but iterations until maybe like V8 that was the next one we've all been through it right yeah but if you get the best talent that's the only way to solve it whether it's a VPN you're better people we've all everyone in this room has been through some version of it yeah um you got to do it only once right or it destroys you right that's right it doesn't always mean best pedigree at the best university sometimes it's just some Scrappy really weird like we hired one that would look like an Ax Murderer and I was afraid to be at the office late with him but he was amazing he built our entire API I mean he was just awesome so it's like like cast a broad net he brought in the net yeah all right thanks congrats to getting your 10 million yes man thanks I'm bootstrapping again also awesome and I hadn't thought about this until I heard you talk about future MailChimp but is there a way we could use future MailChimp to draw visibility to the whole environment social governance and impact on the climate of the apps that we all use gosh that's a deep question I've been in it for 40 years I've had time to think about it I I don't know you know I I have no idea I don't I don't I'm a designer and my product has a chimpanzee as its mascot I don't but like I'm probably the worst person yeah it's good so I'd love to brainstorm with you about it yeah that'd be great thank you all right we'll take one more question then give Ben a break but thank you hey uh so it was mentioned earlier that Atlanta is becoming more and more of a tech City and my question is during the early days uh being in Atlanta how are you able to attract top talent and retain that top talent without massive funding as Europe was driving over the years um not having the massive funding was in retrospect an asset because it attracted people who truly cared about the cause not to get that money and the equity for it um so it it's not that much of a weakness to be honest with you but when you're in the moment it's hell I know but in retrospect I'm so thankful we didn't have that massive funding um we tried everything we tried to post jobs everywhere what ultimately helped was we just said forget it just stop trying to hire people and just iterate and launch cool stuff and so we started to launch some stuff that was kind of innovative at the time and that started to attract Engineers they would notice that stuff and that's how we got our call from the Chad and he came over uh he was amazed by it and then you know he was I think kind of jaded at his current startup they weren't really listening to him uh and he felt like he wanted to go to a place where people would listen to him and so that's why he joined us and uh I think that the one that looked like a Ax Murderer uh he had a heart of gold he was so kind but he he said that he joined us because all of my screenshots my username the username was Roger Waters I was a Pink Floyd fan uh and he was a Pink Floyd fan and he said that's why he joined us so I mean in the early days when it's Pirates man you just you have no idea you have no idea I mean just keep trying and I would say really launch cool stuff just try to do cool stuff and publish it as much as you can and that'll attract the talent so you got me I sometimes call Missionaries they're folks that get yes yeah they could make more money you got to pay him enough to to survive but there are if you're if you're most folks here are charismatic founder they wouldn't be here you can find a couple missionaries including Engineers that will not not all of them like I mean Google pays better into it pays better but there are the stories are missionaries so if you're struggling see that find your own Charisma and there's always a missionary story right I paid them more than I paid myself in those early years too by the way you have to pay them you don't have that massive funding they want the cash sometimes I just didn't pay myself and then it sounds like a little wrap from that but it's an interesting story and then you got the missionaries but then you created a center of excellence so you got the missionaries got you a few good Engineers yeah and then people wanted to work on cool problems right so you were able to get the the expert or gravity and that's how you get this flywheel going in engineering hiring like find the missionaries that are great and then people will be attracted to working with them and then it's never easy but um any great founder someone's some great engineer is going to want some some romantic engineer is going to want to work for you someone that believes in your mission right foreign [Music]