19 ms·

MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

489 points by kellegous 10y ago

hitekker 10y ago
I'm curious if there's interesting data, information, or anecdotes about bootstrapped, well-intentioned, well-executed startups being utterly floored by VC-funded competitors. Particularly if the "average" or most common reason behind a bootstrapped failure diverges significantly from the 'common sense' reason, i.e., "bootstrapped startup couldn't move fast enough/expand quick enough/hire great talent because bootstrapped startup didn't have the money".
- taf2 10y ago
  So far in our space call tracking - we are competing quiet well vs all VC backed companies and I believe we are doing the opposite- holding our ground and in many cases out performing them. The only thing they have on us is more sales and marketing
- w1ntermute 10y ago
  I don't have the source, but I read that having VC cash to burn was partly responsible for YouTube's success. They did things like iPod giveaways and hired tons of designers to quickly iterate on the site. They had many competitors that were earlier to market, but ultimately lost out to YouTube. Edit: here's the source[0]: > Youtube acquired traction over it's competitors by their funding strategy, product strategy (growth rate) and a liberal interpretation of the DMCA. As illustrated and extensively researched by Mr Jaffari,, YouTube tried many tactics to gain differentiation over it's competitors. In the end, YouTube's growth hack was the only metric that mattered, conversion of viral buzz into users. > When YouTube debuted it was already late to the party with numerous competitors growing quickly. The company copied and experimented with the interfaces of it's rivals to establish a baseline. Then they applied liberal amounts of Venture Capital to organize a star development team that would iterate product faster than it's rivals. Finally they adhered very loosely to the DMCA laws leveraging primarily copyrighted content to build viewership against more generally viewable Flash player technology. … > The first and largest strategic advantage for YouTube was their investors, Sequoia Capital. Other Start-Ups were already in this space with more traffic, but with a major investment the sector had validity. This created coveted Bay Area buzz, while larger more established start-ups were largely ignored being outside of the echo chamber. For example VideoEgg.com (Who chose to move to the bay), Break.com (Then Big-Boys.com), Revver.com (Also LA Based), StupidVideos.com and Vidiac.com/StreetFire.net (Atlanta Based). > On top of the buzz Youtube leveraged VC investment to land a major blow to it's rivals. They went Ad-Free. It took YouTube over 12 months to pass Vidiac's traffic but with an interface clean of ads and a cost no object design team, YouTube's competitors could not iterate on designs quick enough. The development staff would see a feature on other sites, copy it, improve it, release it. An example of this behavior is the Flash embed video players that could be placed in MySpace that was already being employed by other services. Youtube let their competitors figure out the hard problems such as UX flow, user requirements, feasibility, copied it and spent more. With better funding of development, servers, bandwidth Youtube offered their users better site performance and quicker adoption of technology. For example an early metric of success was the acquisition of content contributors. Expensive encoding solutions could process an uploaded video into a streamable format but sometimes this process could take hours and the users had to wait for their video to be ready. YouTube could buy more encoders and cut this time down to 15 minutes offering bloggers quicker video to market times. Using Flash over QuickTime and Windows Media, embed code was more universally able to deliver a consistent if inferior video experience. Inferior until the delivery of Flash 8 when the On2 CODEC was introduced giving Flash full screen and high quality videos. 0. https://www.quora.com/How-did-YouTube-gain-its-initial-traction/answer/Adam-Bruce?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-did-YouTube-gain-its-initial-tract...
- anotherarray 10y ago
  Although not a numerous, there's some data in the following website: https://www.indiehackers.com https://www.indiehackers.com
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    Data that is mostly outliers in an industry with 90% failure is not data at all.
- robbfitzsimmons 10y ago
  I don't have any such anecdote, but I can't even think up a hypothetical, either. If said bootstrapped company was both "well-executed" and didn't fail because it "didn't have the money," what kind of reasons would you be thinking about? Losing to a competitor would mean you're not failing because you didn't find a market need. So you would screw up managing it, or by not spending to market/hire/add capacity fast enough. The only other reasons I can think up seem idiosyncratic (maybe well-funded competitor got regulatory approval or a big partnership from a VC intro?).
- crdb 10y ago
  In the particular case of MailChimp, their main competitor (AFAIK), Campaign Monitor, decided to raise VC funding after about a decade of slow grind a la MailChimp. They hired a CEO with experience in 5 other VC funded startups (and with burning cash) and moved into the most amazing penthouse, the last two floors of a giant tower in the heart of Sydney with a 360 degree view on the harbour and ocean and city, and a great kitchen with full time chefs, and of course a marble-covered lift lobby. In other words we have an A/B test.
  - replicatorblog 10y ago
    Constant Contact was another competitor, providing basically the same service, they recently sold for a billion dollars while MailChimp grew alongside them. If the market is big enough, it can support multiple companies.
    - davewritescode 10y ago
      They target totally different markets. Constant Contact is a superior product for the less technically literate crowd. The hacker news crowd probably isn't their target customer. I think live support is their key differentiator.
- peterevans 10y ago
  I don't think it matters as much as you suspect that one company is bootstrapped and the other is VC-funded. I'm sure you can find dozens of examples of VC-funded companies being floored by other VC-funded companies.
- geori 10y ago
  Yeah. I'm a big fan of MailChimp, but this is a clear case of survivorship bias. We have a ton of detailed reporting (CrunchBase, edgar.gov, startup accelerators, Mattermark, etc) on VC backed companies but very little on non VC. How do you get a detailed list of bootstrapped companies? Even if you did have a comprehensive list (Sec of State in each state), how are you going to differentiate amongst tech startup, lifestyle business, traditional new business, and service business? Angelist has some info, but it is a platform for fundraising.
  - JackFr 10y ago
    It is survivorship bias, and yet it isn't. I think you'd find a lot of these stories would read the same -- while engaging in some other business activity (consulting, sales, etc.) a potentially profitable business opportunity was observed, and gradually it became the primary focus. If there isn't an opportunity observed, or if it doesn't become the primary focus there is no startup and no story.
sametmax 10y ago
Then it's not called a start up, but a normal company. How is that a revelation?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- yitchelle 10y ago
  Isn't "statup" the phrase of the day used to described a nornmal tech company anyway.
  - randall 10y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
    - Avshalom 10y ago
      Yeah but before that it was "a company in search of a repeatable business model" and I believe before that it was mumble-mumble-innovator's-dilemma-mumble
- mwfunk 10y ago
  They were a startup when the company began but are now an established company. They didn't transition from startup to normal company by taking VC funds and optimizing for growth, rather they went the route that most businesses take. That's what different/interesting about them when compared to most SV tech startups nowadays.
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  As someone running and growing a traditional bootstrapped business the overall tone of the article did make me smile. "You mean to say that it's possible to build a business without millions in VC investment!?"
taf2 10y ago
It's called doing something kinda boring, consistently and doing it well. It's hard to say in software when you really need huge capital if you can start with the following: 1. Some financial understanding of how to invoice, pay taxes and write contracts - the business side 2. Manage people, setting expectations and holding people accountable, while empowering them to be successful in there job as clearly defined when hired 3. Take action to address the immediate. Reds of the customer while always keeping an eye on the longer term needs - always be available and responsive to needs of the customer - email, phone, chat 4. Have a solid foundation in the technical aspects of what you are building and operating If you have these 4 things and a product that is a good fit in an emerging market than raising capital is probably not necessarily needed because you have the resources and skills to make it happen. I think probably a 5th requirement is you have enough personal capital to pay for your living expenses until the business is making enough money. Also avoid hiring until you can pay for double the salary of the first hire... this way if you are wrong you have some padding and it's proved you can work through hard times. I remember thinking before our first hire that this was way too much stress and it would be so much easier when we have more people. Now at 16 employees, it's an order of magnitude harder but I'm much more prepared than I was back then. The children analogy is good I think. When you first have a child you think this is going to be hard but they grow with you and so it's not so bad it's even kind of fun
- ttul 10y ago
  It always helps to do all this AND have amazing market timing.
fideloper 10y ago
Interestingly in the marketing space (in particular, email-based marketing), all the tools I gravitate towards have been bootstrapped rather than funded: Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip (altho lead pages bought it, and is actively funding it's growth), curated.co (I'm not 100% sure on Curated - is that funded?), Edgar These types of apps can actively and easily translate into $$ for businesses, so it's no wonder they can bootstrap rather than take on funds - individuals and businesses are willing to pay to make money!
- stunod 10y ago
  how has Edgar been for you?
ilamont 10y ago
“MailChimp’s path was circuitous, and it came without the glory of enormous funding rounds.” It’s time to retire the idea that raising money equals “glory.” It’s not a measure of business success as much as it is a measure of founders being able to convince rich people to back them. As we know from the "XX is shutting down" stories that regularly grace HN, many if not most tales of massive fundraising success will eventually become business and investment failures. Yet the TechCrunch/Fortune/BI coverage angles—pushed relentlessly by the investment community and hired PR people—almost always emphasize the former over the latter.
- 55555 10y ago
  moz.com is a good example of raising bad money. They had an excellent core product and thus a business worth millions, then raised money to try to take over the world. It turns out they couldn't take over the world, so now all they have is the same core product and business they had prior to raising money, except now they also have dozens of millions of dollars of VC preference in the event of an acquisition. I've toyed with the numbers in my head and I can't make them work; I think they would have been much better off not raising any money. (I'm just an outside observer.)
  - shostack 10y ago
    Not to mention stress that crippled the founder Rand.
gallerytungsten 10y ago
You know what word doesn't appear in that story? Spam. Mailchimp is a company that provides lots of unsolicited commercial emails. In other words, spam. You can dress it up and call it "marketing software for small businesses" but that doesn't change the essential fact: Mailchamp is a spammer. Is it any surprise that spamming is profitable? I've received hundreds of Mailchimp emails. Not once did I sign up for any of those lists. Does Mailchimp make it easy to unsubscribe? Sure. But that doesn't change the fact that they are spammers, and that if you want to send spam with some semi-plausible deniability that you're a spammer, Mailchimp is probably a good choice. Of course, this story, like nearly all "business news" stories, is very likely the work of a highly paid public relations agency. That is one more reason that the word "spam" does not appear in this story.
- chris_7 10y ago
  I always click "the emails are spam and should be reported" (is that Mailchimp? not sure) when given a choice. Not sure if it really does anything.
  - simonbarker87 10y ago
    Even if you signed up for the mailing list in the first place? It's only spam if you never signed up for it in the first instance. If you sign up and then want to leave the list because the emails aren't relevant any more or too regular then that's just bad email marketing, not spam.
    - chris_7 10y ago
      I have never signed up for a mailing list[1], e.g. gone to a "sign up for my newsletter" page and clicked "I would like to subscribe to your newsletter". I've been signed up for them implicitly after making a purchase, etc., but I consider this spam and flag it as such. [1] OSS mailing lists don't count.
      - simonbarker87 10y ago
brightball 10y ago
I don't see why this is a surprise. From my observation, there are typically two types of startups out there. 1. Startup with a clear revenue model created by generating tangible value for businesses. 2. Startup without a clear revenue model that is doing something interesting and will probably be acquired if successful. The first is a successful business like MailChimp that can grow itself from it's own revenues and doesn't need funding. The second is the type of business that needs funding because they are essentially investing in building technology to sell to a larger company OR are building a large pool of users to sell to a larger company.
jasode 10y ago
>In fact, it’s possible to create a huge tech company without taking venture capital, and without spending far beyond your means. It’s possible, in other words, to start a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship careening out of control. The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a bootstrapped business as "good" and (via his prosaic examples of restaurants and dog walking) dismissing the VC-backed businesses as "bad." It should be obvious that the opposite can be true: a bootstrapped business can also be dysfunctional and a VC-backed firm can be disciplined with its money. Bootstrapping is great strategy especially if you're company that doesn't benefit from "network effects" such as Mailchimp/Sendgrid. You acquire customers one at a time and offer a good enough value proposition for them to subscribe or pay. A lot of SaaS/enterprise companies and lifestyle businesses can grow that way. Venture capital is really helpful when you need to deliberately grow exponentially faster than bootstrapping will allow because you're trying to build a giant footprint for the network effects. Snapchat is a good example of this. It wouldn't make sense to try to sell the Snapchat app on App store for $4.99 each so it can be cashflow positive and pay for programmer salaries. The first users of their apps were teens in high school and they can't just purchase an app like that without their parents' permission. If Snapchat charged money for the app, they wouldn't even know that teens were the leading edge of that trend. In that case, you need to wisely use vc funding to pay the bills while you grow the audience. Hopefully, Snapchat will end up profitable like Facebook instead of losing money like Twitter. If you're a "network effects" startup that insists on bootstrapping as the only funding, you will be beat by the competitors that are willing to live with $0 revenue for a few years while their equity financing allowed them to build their user base faster.
- SonicSoul 10y ago
  another way you could look at it is "here's what's good about doing it this way" w/out necessarily dismissing VC's as "bad". as a founder you do have a choice of the kind of business you start. I think he just points out that debt-driven is not the only way to grow a successful company.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > It should be obvious that a bootstrapped business can also be dysfunctional But it cannot continue to be so for half a decade.
jonstokes 10y ago
And then somehow they managed to totally disregard their customers' needs and screw everyone with the Mandrill changeover. Seriously, has everyone forgotten that fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713 I'll never trust them or use them again, after that. No way no how.
- sb8244 10y ago
  My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers. It is a very secretive company about most things related to way of business, so I can only speculate and from what I heard around town, but most of the customers there were not good sustainable fits. I've had extremely negative experiences in their customer support, but also extremely positive experiences through their community engagement as I'm local to them.
  - tomschlick 10y ago
    > My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers. But they fucked over more than the free tier. We (work) had 15 clients that all had accounts that we managed for them. We probably spent upwards of $1200/mo on emails through those accounts. We only got ~50 days of notice that we had to change over to another provider before we would get cut off.
  - dangrossman 10y ago
    Mandrill had over $1,000,000/mo in -paying- customers. We got no more time to transition off them than the free users did. Switching e-mail providers is not something you can do overnight if you send large volumes (large volume does not mean spam: I send purchase receipts, contact forms, notifications, password resets -- transactional mail not ads). Even if you have a team of coders that can drop everything to start integrating alternatives, you need time to warm up your new IP space at a new provider, or your mail ends up in spam folders. MailChimp screwed a lot of customers, and customers' customers when they gave only 60 days notice.
  - mmilano 10y ago
kareemsabri 10y ago
Works better in a market that is not "winner take all".
ohnoesmyscv 10y ago
Depends on what you mean by 'making it' as a startup - is it the revenue growth? burn rate? profit growth? Number of users? Number of employees? A SF office? How well funded you are? It's hard to grow a business without going the conventional SV route and getting VC funding. Unless you have a revolutionary product, the bigger competition will likely stomp over you unless you have resources to grow your team and product and marketing. Or if you are comfortable with a small market share but a profitable one. Not saying it is impossible, but just hard. I know a few SaaS out there like Roninapp and Reamaze that like Mailchimp are not VC funded and are growing well and are run by a small but effective team, but the question is would startups like these benefit from funding and be in a better position with regards to growth and user base than without vc funding? More often than not when startups receive funding they move away from satisfying the customers to making investors happy. As the company starts to hire, get a nice office, increase spend on things like office perks, ads, marketing etc while it might contribute to growth it doesnt necessarily work well for the end user. You go from lean to bloat more often than not. I guess that depends on how you manage resources but it isnt exactly easy with investors breathing down your neck I have a company that is bootstrapped and while there are well funded competitors out there, i'm perfectly fine with my startup running lean and being profitable, albeit slowly. At least I am my own boss and I answer to myself, and that in my world is 'making it'.
- anotherhacker 10y ago
  "Depends on what you mean by 'making it' as a startup " Making it = profitable and no debt. As odd as that may seem, a great many companies don't do that. E.g. Uber (for now).
  - hw 10y ago
    It is unfortunate, and it remains to be seen if they will remain profitable, or just go on an endless run of losses and increasing debt. Some say 'making it' is IPOing, even if not profitable and laden with a mountain of debt. As some would argue, why spend your own money if you can spend someone else's? I do like the question on whether Mailchimp would be a lot more successful had it taken on more funding and debt.
echelon 10y ago
The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenominal. You can comfortably live in the city with a roommate and pay only $500-600 rent. Just outside the city, you can get a 1200 sqft apartment for $700. Our music scene is amazing, and the local food is fantastic. I try to convince my friends in SF to come out here and give Atlanta a look, but nobody bites. I think this city is an incredible opportunity, especially for an early stage startup that wants to focus on growth prior to investment. The talent is here, the city is amazing, and the rent isn't absurd.
- irishloop 10y ago
  I used to work for a company based in Conyers, GA, and would hang out in Atlanta when I traveled there. It is a great city. However, there is a huge cultural shift outside of Atlanta for people used to Silicon Valley or NYC, because the rest of Georgia is definitely... different.
  - treehau5_ 10y ago
    You say this as if it isn't true for NYC or SV either. I think the bubble is bigger in those places and makes it easier to plug your ears and turn the eye in NYC or SV. Ever been to Yonkers? Inside San Jose?
  - cyanbane 10y ago
    I think it is different in the way that most big cities are when compared to other parts of their states. San Fran and East California might be one of the better examples. Marietta is very similar Merced; Athens is similar to Berkeley. I don't think Atlanta is very different in that regard. (From Athens, longtime Atlanta resident - spent a lot of time in Cali, lots of family out in Sacramento/Berkeley)
    - 10y ago
ex3ndr 10y ago
Isn't VCs needed for building such company not in 16 years but in 2-3?
Animats 10y ago
Spam is profitable. (And yes, Mailchimp is a spammer, based on the Spamhaus definition of spam.[1] It may be legal, but it's still spam.) [1] https://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/ https://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/
- bildung 10y ago
  According to that definition, you're wrong: Mailchimp doesn't fulfill the first condition. In my experience, Mailchimps interface puts heavy emphasis on having opt-in proof for the addresses you use, having to include unsubscribe links and sender's postal addresses etc. Yes, they don't technically enforce it, but how could they do that without also preventing legitimate use cases like importing addresses from a competitor's service?
  - Animats 10y ago
    No. After a transaction is complete, any further communication from the seller is spam. MailChimp treats a previous transaction as a license to spam. MailChimp says they're in the "email marketing" business and writes about "campaigns". That's spam.
  - criddell 10y ago
    There are some easy things they could to though. Cory Doctorow had this exchange with them: https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641660268720689152 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641660268720689152 I think Doctorow's request was entirely reasonable.
    - Animats 10y ago
      If they gave you enough info to opt out effectively, people would do it. Also, then people could check up on them, checking the list of claimed "opt ins" for spam trap addresses. Giving the user that access would allow users to definitively catch spammers and mailing services in lies, and could lead to prosecutions under the CAN-SPAM act.
nathancahill 10y ago
Too bad. After the Mandrill/MailChimp price hike, every company I've worked with is moving off of them as fast as possible, towards Mailgun/Sendgrid.
Taylor_OD 10y ago
and my buying ad space on every podcast ever.
wslh 10y ago
We really need this contrarian view of startup creation. In a way, having a few millions in profits can't be called a lifestyle business, your business can't scale more and you are happy with what you created and control. Also, only the process to get initially funded is very time consuming (e.g. look at the kickstarter videos).
combatentropy 10y ago
A similar message is in Getting Real, a free PDF by the makers of Basecamp: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ https://gettingreal.37signals.com/
rsp1984 10y ago
What a lot of people miss (including the author) is the time factor. Yes you can bootstrap a business and grow things organically once you have found decent product/market fit. The problem is that it will just take a much longer time until you reach certain milestones than with a VC-based approach. "There is perhaps no better example of this other way than MailChimp, a 16-year-old Atlanta-based company that makes marketing software for small businesses." This just kind of proves the point. If you have a company with great product/market fit and lots of VC in the bank you would either reach their numbers much quicker or have higher numbers after 16 years of operation.
qwrusz 10y ago
The article seems to acknowledge Silicon Valley is good and prolific at startups to the point of metonymy. SV is the standard way, and so you get descriptions like "Un-Silicon Valley Way" instead of say the "Atlanta Way" (another startup from Atlanta called Coca-Cola appears to be doing OK too ;)) But why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the jab on VCs? Clearly both VC or bootstrapping approaches can work for a company (though both approaches fail in the majority of cases and journalism is in love with survivorship bias). I'm not in SV, but it's obviously the place important innovation has/is/will be coming from (and some crap too). Innovation and growth is needed and should be encouraged in this economy. Just frustrating to see big journalism knock SV for no reason. Better story: "Chimps and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make it as a Primate".
- w1ntermute 10y ago
  > why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the jab on VCs? VCs are easy to hate: they're rich, successful, powerful, and mostly straight, white men who had privileged upbringings.
balls187 10y ago
Mail...Kimp?
gopi 10y ago
I think such a story is difficult now unless its a niche small market. Lets say someone start a company and stumble-upon a massive market but decides to grow slow financed by revenue. The problem is others are going to copy the idea and grow fast with VC money and crush the original company. May be possible in the next downturn when VC money dries up Read Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman - https://hbr.org/2016/04/blitzscaling https://hbr.org/2016/04/blitzscaling
veryhungryhobo 10y ago
I'm looking to write a powershell script for creating lists and updating subscribers for mailchimp api v3. However, Im kind of lost. I only found old code samples. http://poshcode.org/3479 http://poshcode.org/3479 http://poshcode.org/3351 http://poshcode.org/3351 Does anyone know any new code samples for mailchimp v3 api for powershell.
yoamro 10y ago
If you can continue growth and profitability without taking outside investors, great for you and I recommend it. The reality is, a lot of times founders are faced with the problem of funding/paying bills and are left with no other option than to take VC money. If you go down that route, just make sure that everyone on-board has the interests of your users in mind.
pitchups 10y ago
Another example of a company that has grown quite large without using venture funding is Zoho.com - based out of Chennai, India. They are even larger than Mailchimp in terms of revenues - clocking over $1 Billion and with over 3000 employees. [1] https://pando.com/2014/10/14/anti-burn-how-bootstrapped-zoho-survived-two-tech-bubbles-and-became-a-massive-success/ https://pando.com/2014/10/14/anti-burn-how-bootstrapped-zoho...
- sridharvembu 10y ago
  (Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :) We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.
pjlegato 10y ago
> a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship Most tech startups are funded with equity, not debt.
traviswingo 10y ago
"Believe it or not, start-ups don’t even have to be headquartered in San Francisco or Silicon Valley." Lol. This was a great read. But yeah, don't take money unless you literally cannot finance your growth. A real business builds itself.
ungzd 10y ago
Glory to the company but shame to modern internet — you have to use one of few "email providers" instead of just installing Postfix otherwise all your emails go to spam folder.
- sumedh 10y ago
  To be fair, they also provide link tracking, email opens, bounce rate etc, so these companies do provide value to users.
Ayraa 10y ago
As a regular user of all the main email marketing services: I feel Mailchimp is missing the boat by focusing entirely on email and not offering a way to contact customers via: 1. In-app messages 2. SMS 3. Push notifications It's also difficult / impossible to set up advanced automation sequences with it. For example, if Customer X does Y on your site, direct them to another branch with a different sequence. Of course, their main target customers are small businesses so they may not need these advanced features but these customers would benefit tremendously from being able to for example text certain messages to customers instead of only being able to email them.
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489 points by kellegous 10y ago

I'm curious if there's interesting data, information, or anecdotes about bootstrapped, well-intentioned, well-executed startups being utterly floored by VC-funded competitors. Particularly if the "average" or most common reason behind a bootstrapped failure diverges significantly from the 'common sense' reason, i.e., "bootstrapped startup couldn't move fast enough/expand quick enough/hire great talent because bootstrapped startup didn't have the money".

taf2 10y ago
So far in our space call tracking - we are competing quiet well vs all VC backed companies and I believe we are doing the opposite- holding our ground and in many cases out performing them. The only thing they have on us is more sales and marketing
w1ntermute 10y ago
I don't have the source, but I read that having VC cash to burn was partly responsible for YouTube's success. They did things like iPod giveaways and hired tons of designers to quickly iterate on the site. They had many competitors that were earlier to market, but ultimately lost out to YouTube. Edit: here's the source[0]: > Youtube acquired traction over it's competitors by their funding strategy, product strategy (growth rate) and a liberal interpretation of the DMCA. As illustrated and extensively researched by Mr Jaffari,, YouTube tried many tactics to gain differentiation over it's competitors. In the end, YouTube's growth hack was the only metric that mattered, conversion of viral buzz into users. > When YouTube debuted it was already late to the party with numerous competitors growing quickly. The company copied and experimented with the interfaces of it's rivals to establish a baseline. Then they applied liberal amounts of Venture Capital to organize a star development team that would iterate product faster than it's rivals. Finally they adhered very loosely to the DMCA laws leveraging primarily copyrighted content to build viewership against more generally viewable Flash player technology. … > The first and largest strategic advantage for YouTube was their investors, Sequoia Capital. Other Start-Ups were already in this space with more traffic, but with a major investment the sector had validity. This created coveted Bay Area buzz, while larger more established start-ups were largely ignored being outside of the echo chamber. For example VideoEgg.com (Who chose to move to the bay), Break.com (Then Big-Boys.com), Revver.com (Also LA Based), StupidVideos.com and Vidiac.com/StreetFire.net (Atlanta Based). > On top of the buzz Youtube leveraged VC investment to land a major blow to it's rivals. They went Ad-Free. It took YouTube over 12 months to pass Vidiac's traffic but with an interface clean of ads and a cost no object design team, YouTube's competitors could not iterate on designs quick enough. The development staff would see a feature on other sites, copy it, improve it, release it. An example of this behavior is the Flash embed video players that could be placed in MySpace that was already being employed by other services. Youtube let their competitors figure out the hard problems such as UX flow, user requirements, feasibility, copied it and spent more. With better funding of development, servers, bandwidth Youtube offered their users better site performance and quicker adoption of technology. For example an early metric of success was the acquisition of content contributors. Expensive encoding solutions could process an uploaded video into a streamable format but sometimes this process could take hours and the users had to wait for their video to be ready. YouTube could buy more encoders and cut this time down to 15 minutes offering bloggers quicker video to market times. Using Flash over QuickTime and Windows Media, embed code was more universally able to deliver a consistent if inferior video experience. Inferior until the delivery of Flash 8 when the On2 CODEC was introduced giving Flash full screen and high quality videos. 0. https://www.quora.com/How-did-YouTube-gain-its-initial-traction/answer/Adam-Bruce?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-did-YouTube-gain-its-initial-tract...
anotherarray 10y ago
Although not a numerous, there's some data in the following website: https://www.indiehackers.com https://www.indiehackers.com
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Data that is mostly outliers in an industry with 90% failure is not data at all.
robbfitzsimmons 10y ago
I don't have any such anecdote, but I can't even think up a hypothetical, either. If said bootstrapped company was both "well-executed" and didn't fail because it "didn't have the money," what kind of reasons would you be thinking about? Losing to a competitor would mean you're not failing because you didn't find a market need. So you would screw up managing it, or by not spending to market/hire/add capacity fast enough. The only other reasons I can think up seem idiosyncratic (maybe well-funded competitor got regulatory approval or a big partnership from a VC intro?).
crdb 10y ago
In the particular case of MailChimp, their main competitor (AFAIK), Campaign Monitor, decided to raise VC funding after about a decade of slow grind a la MailChimp. They hired a CEO with experience in 5 other VC funded startups (and with burning cash) and moved into the most amazing penthouse, the last two floors of a giant tower in the heart of Sydney with a 360 degree view on the harbour and ocean and city, and a great kitchen with full time chefs, and of course a marble-covered lift lobby. In other words we have an A/B test.
- replicatorblog 10y ago
  Constant Contact was another competitor, providing basically the same service, they recently sold for a billion dollars while MailChimp grew alongside them. If the market is big enough, it can support multiple companies.
  - davewritescode 10y ago
    They target totally different markets. Constant Contact is a superior product for the less technically literate crowd. The hacker news crowd probably isn't their target customer. I think live support is their key differentiator.
peterevans 10y ago
I don't think it matters as much as you suspect that one company is bootstrapped and the other is VC-funded. I'm sure you can find dozens of examples of VC-funded companies being floored by other VC-funded companies.
geori 10y ago
Yeah. I'm a big fan of MailChimp, but this is a clear case of survivorship bias. We have a ton of detailed reporting (CrunchBase, edgar.gov, startup accelerators, Mattermark, etc) on VC backed companies but very little on non VC. How do you get a detailed list of bootstrapped companies? Even if you did have a comprehensive list (Sec of State in each state), how are you going to differentiate amongst tech startup, lifestyle business, traditional new business, and service business? Angelist has some info, but it is a platform for fundraising.
- JackFr 10y ago
  It is survivorship bias, and yet it isn't. I think you'd find a lot of these stories would read the same -- while engaging in some other business activity (consulting, sales, etc.) a potentially profitable business opportunity was observed, and gradually it became the primary focus. If there isn't an opportunity observed, or if it doesn't become the primary focus there is no startup and no story.

sametmax 10y ago

Then it's not called a start up, but a normal company. How is that a revelation?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
yitchelle 10y ago
Isn't "statup" the phrase of the day used to described a nornmal tech company anyway.
- randall 10y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    Yeah but before that it was "a company in search of a repeatable business model" and I believe before that it was mumble-mumble-innovator's-dilemma-mumble
mwfunk 10y ago
They were a startup when the company began but are now an established company. They didn't transition from startup to normal company by taking VC funds and optimizing for growth, rather they went the route that most businesses take. That's what different/interesting about them when compared to most SV tech startups nowadays.
SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
As someone running and growing a traditional bootstrapped business the overall tone of the article did make me smile. "You mean to say that it's possible to build a business without millions in VC investment!?"

taf2 10y ago

It's called doing something kinda boring, consistently and doing it well. It's hard to say in software when you really need huge capital if you can start with the following: 1. Some financial understanding of how to invoice, pay taxes and write contracts - the business side 2. Manage people, setting expectations and holding people accountable, while empowering them to be successful in there job as clearly defined when hired 3. Take action to address the immediate. Reds of the customer while always keeping an eye on the longer term needs - always be available and responsive to needs of the customer - email, phone, chat 4. Have a solid foundation in the technical aspects of what you are building and operating If you have these 4 things and a product that is a good fit in an emerging market than raising capital is probably not necessarily needed because you have the resources and skills to make it happen. I think probably a 5th requirement is you have enough personal capital to pay for your living expenses until the business is making enough money. Also avoid hiring until you can pay for double the salary of the first hire... this way if you are wrong you have some padding and it's proved you can work through hard times. I remember thinking before our first hire that this was way too much stress and it would be so much easier when we have more people. Now at 16 employees, it's an order of magnitude harder but I'm much more prepared than I was back then. The children analogy is good I think. When you first have a child you think this is going to be hard but they grow with you and so it's not so bad it's even kind of fun

ttul 10y ago
It always helps to do all this AND have amazing market timing.

fideloper 10y ago

Interestingly in the marketing space (in particular, email-based marketing), all the tools I gravitate towards have been bootstrapped rather than funded: Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip (altho lead pages bought it, and is actively funding it's growth), curated.co (I'm not 100% sure on Curated - is that funded?), Edgar These types of apps can actively and easily translate into $$ for businesses, so it's no wonder they can bootstrap rather than take on funds - individuals and businesses are willing to pay to make money!

stunod 10y ago
how has Edgar been for you?

ilamont 10y ago

“MailChimp’s path was circuitous, and it came without the glory of enormous funding rounds.” It’s time to retire the idea that raising money equals “glory.” It’s not a measure of business success as much as it is a measure of founders being able to convince rich people to back them. As we know from the "XX is shutting down" stories that regularly grace HN, many if not most tales of massive fundraising success will eventually become business and investment failures. Yet the TechCrunch/Fortune/BI coverage angles—pushed relentlessly by the investment community and hired PR people—almost always emphasize the former over the latter.

55555 10y ago
moz.com is a good example of raising bad money. They had an excellent core product and thus a business worth millions, then raised money to try to take over the world. It turns out they couldn't take over the world, so now all they have is the same core product and business they had prior to raising money, except now they also have dozens of millions of dollars of VC preference in the event of an acquisition. I've toyed with the numbers in my head and I can't make them work; I think they would have been much better off not raising any money. (I'm just an outside observer.)
- shostack 10y ago
  Not to mention stress that crippled the founder Rand.

gallerytungsten 10y ago

You know what word doesn't appear in that story? Spam. Mailchimp is a company that provides lots of unsolicited commercial emails. In other words, spam. You can dress it up and call it "marketing software for small businesses" but that doesn't change the essential fact: Mailchamp is a spammer. Is it any surprise that spamming is profitable? I've received hundreds of Mailchimp emails. Not once did I sign up for any of those lists. Does Mailchimp make it easy to unsubscribe? Sure. But that doesn't change the fact that they are spammers, and that if you want to send spam with some semi-plausible deniability that you're a spammer, Mailchimp is probably a good choice. Of course, this story, like nearly all "business news" stories, is very likely the work of a highly paid public relations agency. That is one more reason that the word "spam" does not appear in this story.

chris_7 10y ago
I always click "the emails are spam and should be reported" (is that Mailchimp? not sure) when given a choice. Not sure if it really does anything.
- simonbarker87 10y ago
  Even if you signed up for the mailing list in the first place? It's only spam if you never signed up for it in the first instance. If you sign up and then want to leave the list because the emails aren't relevant any more or too regular then that's just bad email marketing, not spam.
  - chris_7 10y ago
    I have never signed up for a mailing list[1], e.g. gone to a "sign up for my newsletter" page and clicked "I would like to subscribe to your newsletter". I've been signed up for them implicitly after making a purchase, etc., but I consider this spam and flag it as such. [1] OSS mailing lists don't count.
    - simonbarker87 10y ago

brightball 10y ago

I don't see why this is a surprise. From my observation, there are typically two types of startups out there. 1. Startup with a clear revenue model created by generating tangible value for businesses. 2. Startup without a clear revenue model that is doing something interesting and will probably be acquired if successful. The first is a successful business like MailChimp that can grow itself from it's own revenues and doesn't need funding. The second is the type of business that needs funding because they are essentially investing in building technology to sell to a larger company OR are building a large pool of users to sell to a larger company.

jasode 10y ago

>In fact, it’s possible to create a huge tech company without taking venture capital, and without spending far beyond your means. It’s possible, in other words, to start a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship careening out of control. The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a bootstrapped business as "good" and (via his prosaic examples of restaurants and dog walking) dismissing the VC-backed businesses as "bad." It should be obvious that the opposite can be true: a bootstrapped business can also be dysfunctional and a VC-backed firm can be disciplined with its money. Bootstrapping is great strategy especially if you're company that doesn't benefit from "network effects" such as Mailchimp/Sendgrid. You acquire customers one at a time and offer a good enough value proposition for them to subscribe or pay. A lot of SaaS/enterprise companies and lifestyle businesses can grow that way. Venture capital is really helpful when you need to deliberately grow exponentially faster than bootstrapping will allow because you're trying to build a giant footprint for the network effects. Snapchat is a good example of this. It wouldn't make sense to try to sell the Snapchat app on App store for $4.99 each so it can be cashflow positive and pay for programmer salaries. The first users of their apps were teens in high school and they can't just purchase an app like that without their parents' permission. If Snapchat charged money for the app, they wouldn't even know that teens were the leading edge of that trend. In that case, you need to wisely use vc funding to pay the bills while you grow the audience. Hopefully, Snapchat will end up profitable like Facebook instead of losing money like Twitter. If you're a "network effects" startup that insists on bootstrapping as the only funding, you will be beat by the competitors that are willing to live with $0 revenue for a few years while their equity financing allowed them to build their user base faster.

SonicSoul 10y ago
another way you could look at it is "here's what's good about doing it this way" w/out necessarily dismissing VC's as "bad". as a founder you do have a choice of the kind of business you start. I think he just points out that debt-driven is not the only way to grow a successful company.
_pmf_ 10y ago
> It should be obvious that a bootstrapped business can also be dysfunctional But it cannot continue to be so for half a decade.

jonstokes 10y ago

And then somehow they managed to totally disregard their customers' needs and screw everyone with the Mandrill changeover. Seriously, has everyone forgotten that fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713 I'll never trust them or use them again, after that. No way no how.

sb8244 10y ago
My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers. It is a very secretive company about most things related to way of business, so I can only speculate and from what I heard around town, but most of the customers there were not good sustainable fits. I've had extremely negative experiences in their customer support, but also extremely positive experiences through their community engagement as I'm local to them.
- tomschlick 10y ago
  > My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers. But they fucked over more than the free tier. We (work) had 15 clients that all had accounts that we managed for them. We probably spent upwards of $1200/mo on emails through those accounts. We only got ~50 days of notice that we had to change over to another provider before we would get cut off.
- dangrossman 10y ago
  Mandrill had over $1,000,000/mo in -paying- customers. We got no more time to transition off them than the free users did. Switching e-mail providers is not something you can do overnight if you send large volumes (large volume does not mean spam: I send purchase receipts, contact forms, notifications, password resets -- transactional mail not ads). Even if you have a team of coders that can drop everything to start integrating alternatives, you need time to warm up your new IP space at a new provider, or your mail ends up in spam folders. MailChimp screwed a lot of customers, and customers' customers when they gave only 60 days notice.
- mmilano 10y ago

kareemsabri 10y ago

Works better in a market that is not "winner take all".

ohnoesmyscv 10y ago

Depends on what you mean by 'making it' as a startup - is it the revenue growth? burn rate? profit growth? Number of users? Number of employees? A SF office? How well funded you are? It's hard to grow a business without going the conventional SV route and getting VC funding. Unless you have a revolutionary product, the bigger competition will likely stomp over you unless you have resources to grow your team and product and marketing. Or if you are comfortable with a small market share but a profitable one. Not saying it is impossible, but just hard. I know a few SaaS out there like Roninapp and Reamaze that like Mailchimp are not VC funded and are growing well and are run by a small but effective team, but the question is would startups like these benefit from funding and be in a better position with regards to growth and user base than without vc funding? More often than not when startups receive funding they move away from satisfying the customers to making investors happy. As the company starts to hire, get a nice office, increase spend on things like office perks, ads, marketing etc while it might contribute to growth it doesnt necessarily work well for the end user. You go from lean to bloat more often than not. I guess that depends on how you manage resources but it isnt exactly easy with investors breathing down your neck I have a company that is bootstrapped and while there are well funded competitors out there, i'm perfectly fine with my startup running lean and being profitable, albeit slowly. At least I am my own boss and I answer to myself, and that in my world is 'making it'.

anotherhacker 10y ago
"Depends on what you mean by 'making it' as a startup " Making it = profitable and no debt. As odd as that may seem, a great many companies don't do that. E.g. Uber (for now).
- hw 10y ago
  It is unfortunate, and it remains to be seen if they will remain profitable, or just go on an endless run of losses and increasing debt. Some say 'making it' is IPOing, even if not profitable and laden with a mountain of debt. As some would argue, why spend your own money if you can spend someone else's? I do like the question on whether Mailchimp would be a lot more successful had it taken on more funding and debt.

echelon 10y ago

The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenominal. You can comfortably live in the city with a roommate and pay only $500-600 rent. Just outside the city, you can get a 1200 sqft apartment for $700. Our music scene is amazing, and the local food is fantastic. I try to convince my friends in SF to come out here and give Atlanta a look, but nobody bites. I think this city is an incredible opportunity, especially for an early stage startup that wants to focus on growth prior to investment. The talent is here, the city is amazing, and the rent isn't absurd.

irishloop 10y ago
I used to work for a company based in Conyers, GA, and would hang out in Atlanta when I traveled there. It is a great city. However, there is a huge cultural shift outside of Atlanta for people used to Silicon Valley or NYC, because the rest of Georgia is definitely... different.
- treehau5_ 10y ago
  You say this as if it isn't true for NYC or SV either. I think the bubble is bigger in those places and makes it easier to plug your ears and turn the eye in NYC or SV. Ever been to Yonkers? Inside San Jose?
- cyanbane 10y ago
  I think it is different in the way that most big cities are when compared to other parts of their states. San Fran and East California might be one of the better examples. Marietta is very similar Merced; Athens is similar to Berkeley. I don't think Atlanta is very different in that regard. (From Athens, longtime Atlanta resident - spent a lot of time in Cali, lots of family out in Sacramento/Berkeley)
  - 10y ago

ex3ndr 10y ago

Isn't VCs needed for building such company not in 16 years but in 2-3?

Animats 10y ago

Spam is profitable. (And yes, Mailchimp is a spammer, based on the Spamhaus definition of spam.[1] It may be legal, but it's still spam.) [1] https://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/ https://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/

bildung 10y ago
According to that definition, you're wrong: Mailchimp doesn't fulfill the first condition. In my experience, Mailchimps interface puts heavy emphasis on having opt-in proof for the addresses you use, having to include unsubscribe links and sender's postal addresses etc. Yes, they don't technically enforce it, but how could they do that without also preventing legitimate use cases like importing addresses from a competitor's service?
- Animats 10y ago
  No. After a transaction is complete, any further communication from the seller is spam. MailChimp treats a previous transaction as a license to spam. MailChimp says they're in the "email marketing" business and writes about "campaigns". That's spam.
- criddell 10y ago
  There are some easy things they could to though. Cory Doctorow had this exchange with them: https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641660268720689152 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/641660268720689152 I think Doctorow's request was entirely reasonable.
  - Animats 10y ago
    If they gave you enough info to opt out effectively, people would do it. Also, then people could check up on them, checking the list of claimed "opt ins" for spam trap addresses. Giving the user that access would allow users to definitively catch spammers and mailing services in lies, and could lead to prosecutions under the CAN-SPAM act.

nathancahill 10y ago

Too bad. After the Mandrill/MailChimp price hike, every company I've worked with is moving off of them as fast as possible, towards Mailgun/Sendgrid.

Taylor_OD 10y ago

and my buying ad space on every podcast ever.

wslh 10y ago

We really need this contrarian view of startup creation. In a way, having a few millions in profits can't be called a lifestyle business, your business can't scale more and you are happy with what you created and control. Also, only the process to get initially funded is very time consuming (e.g. look at the kickstarter videos).

combatentropy 10y ago

A similar message is in Getting Real, a free PDF by the makers of Basecamp: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

rsp1984 10y ago

What a lot of people miss (including the author) is the time factor. Yes you can bootstrap a business and grow things organically once you have found decent product/market fit. The problem is that it will just take a much longer time until you reach certain milestones than with a VC-based approach. "There is perhaps no better example of this other way than MailChimp, a 16-year-old Atlanta-based company that makes marketing software for small businesses." This just kind of proves the point. If you have a company with great product/market fit and lots of VC in the bank you would either reach their numbers much quicker or have higher numbers after 16 years of operation.

qwrusz 10y ago

The article seems to acknowledge Silicon Valley is good and prolific at startups to the point of metonymy. SV is the standard way, and so you get descriptions like "Un-Silicon Valley Way" instead of say the "Atlanta Way" (another startup from Atlanta called Coca-Cola appears to be doing OK too ;)) But why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the jab on VCs? Clearly both VC or bootstrapping approaches can work for a company (though both approaches fail in the majority of cases and journalism is in love with survivorship bias). I'm not in SV, but it's obviously the place important innovation has/is/will be coming from (and some crap too). Innovation and growth is needed and should be encouraged in this economy. Just frustrating to see big journalism knock SV for no reason. Better story: "Chimps and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make it as a Primate".

w1ntermute 10y ago
> why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the jab on VCs? VCs are easy to hate: they're rich, successful, powerful, and mostly straight, white men who had privileged upbringings.

balls187 10y ago

Mail...Kimp?

gopi 10y ago

I think such a story is difficult now unless its a niche small market. Lets say someone start a company and stumble-upon a massive market but decides to grow slow financed by revenue. The problem is others are going to copy the idea and grow fast with VC money and crush the original company. May be possible in the next downturn when VC money dries up Read Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman - https://hbr.org/2016/04/blitzscaling https://hbr.org/2016/04/blitzscaling

veryhungryhobo 10y ago

I'm looking to write a powershell script for creating lists and updating subscribers for mailchimp api v3. However, Im kind of lost. I only found old code samples. http://poshcode.org/3479 http://poshcode.org/3479 http://poshcode.org/3351 http://poshcode.org/3351 Does anyone know any new code samples for mailchimp v3 api for powershell.

yoamro 10y ago

If you can continue growth and profitability without taking outside investors, great for you and I recommend it. The reality is, a lot of times founders are faced with the problem of funding/paying bills and are left with no other option than to take VC money. If you go down that route, just make sure that everyone on-board has the interests of your users in mind.

pitchups 10y ago

Another example of a company that has grown quite large without using venture funding is Zoho.com - based out of Chennai, India. They are even larger than Mailchimp in terms of revenues - clocking over $1 Billion and with over 3000 employees. [1] https://pando.com/2014/10/14/anti-burn-how-bootstrapped-zoho-survived-two-tech-bubbles-and-became-a-massive-success/ https://pando.com/2014/10/14/anti-burn-how-bootstrapped-zoho...

sridharvembu 10y ago
(Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :) We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.

pjlegato 10y ago

> a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship Most tech startups are funded with equity, not debt.

traviswingo 10y ago

"Believe it or not, start-ups don’t even have to be headquartered in San Francisco or Silicon Valley." Lol. This was a great read. But yeah, don't take money unless you literally cannot finance your growth. A real business builds itself.

ungzd 10y ago

Glory to the company but shame to modern internet — you have to use one of few "email providers" instead of just installing Postfix otherwise all your emails go to spam folder.

sumedh 10y ago
To be fair, they also provide link tracking, email opens, bounce rate etc, so these companies do provide value to users.

Ayraa 10y ago

As a regular user of all the main email marketing services: I feel Mailchimp is missing the boat by focusing entirely on email and not offering a way to contact customers via: 1. In-app messages 2. SMS 3. Push notifications It's also difficult / impossible to set up advanced automation sequences with it. For example, if Customer X does Y on your site, direct them to another branch with a different sequence. Of course, their main target customers are small businesses so they may not need these advanced features but these customers would benefit tremendously from being able to for example text certain messages to customers instead of only being able to email them.

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