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Mailchimp Is Exploring a Sale at $10B-Plus Valuation
- bruce343434 5y agoHopefully the new parent will do something about the insane, diabolical UX.
- uchman 5y agocurious what you mean. UX seems quite unique and cool to me. I'm not a power user though
- pc86 5y agoUnique isn't always good.
- bruce343434 5y agoJust fishing out the api keys is a feat in and of itself. Then there's like what, 3 to 5 different ways you can set up a mailing list, all using slightly incompatible methods/datastructures/layouts/whatever. By the way, I'm calling it a mailing list because that's what they are. But mailchimp has different unique terminology for each way. And that's just the tip.
- BrianOnHN 5y agoMailChimp was great until it wasn't. I decided to use aweber for my last project after previously using MailChimp to manage over 100k subscribers. That said, I highly respect the fact they've been bootstrapping. And I don't that bootstrapping has anything to do with the lousy choices made after they reached significant scale. You can't win them all.
- truthwhisperer 5y agowaste of money for 1B you have a competitor well suited
- dpflan 5y agoDo MC employees get any equity? I think there is a profit sharing compensation strategy, so, this huge potential sale, will MC share any of those “profits”?
- gigatexal 5y agoHopefully they do. It's crazy to me to think that a company that facilitates sending emails could be worth 10B.
- reilly3000 5y agoThey have really steady cashflow, some measure of lock-in, a strong brand, and access to a gigantic amount of small business customers that would be difficult to replicate. The right acquirer could cross-sell some related market products and make a healthy return in a few years.
- dpflan 5y agoSpot on.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoThe email space has a ton of cash. Frankly I’m surprised it’s as low as 10B. Probably due to the fact that social media is “new” while email is “old.” Hype matters.
- StevePerkins 5y agoMail platforms like Sendgrid and Mailchimp are pretty standard purchases for any company that does anything with email (i.e. pretty much every real-world company). It's crazy to me that Reddit has the same valuation. Frankly, I feel like I live on a different planet from much of the HN hype crowd sometimes.
- rchaud 5y agoThe HN crowd is vocal about tech paradigms they are familiar with, like social media, online shopping and streaming video. But when it comes to the actual commercial infrastructure underpinning large swathes of the digital economy, the knowledgeable ones are drowned out by the uninformed bloviators. This is clear when you look at the comments for stories related to Google/Facebook Ads (the ad product itself), Shopify, Mailchimp/Marketo or Salesforce/Dynamics CRM.
- forgingahead 5y agoPretty incredible if true - from the article, revenue was at 700 million with around 300 million EBITDA. That's a 14x multiple on ARR, which seems to be on the high side? Though a lot of these acquisition/sale strategies seem to be leaking info to the media in order to publicly plant a marker in the ground ("anchoring" in persuasion/negotiation).
- runako 5y ago> That's a 14x multiple on ARR, which seems to be on the high side? For small private companies, yes. Mailchimp is not in that set. Better comps likely to be public SaaS companies, since Mailchimp is certainly large enough to trade on the Nasdaq. I anchor valuation around Snowflake on the high end (117x sales), but a lot of it is really about growth rate. Here are price/sales for some other public SaaS companies: HubSpot: 29x DocuSign: 36x Asana: 47x Atlassian: 40x DataDog: 50x Shopify: 49x Twilio: 28x Okta: 40x Workday: 13x A case could be made that a buyer could spiff up the Mailchimp app/company and prep for an IPO in the ~$30B range in a couple of years.
- forgingahead 5y agoThanks for sharing that. Looking at Shopify[0], their revenue growth rate has been between 50% to 100% (!!) per year - didn't look at the rest but what you say makes sense with that information. [0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SHOP/financials?p=SHOP
- mywacaday 5y agoSurely if you had 10B in cash you could start a similar company and grow it to 300M in EBITDA for cheaper?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sombremesa 5y agoI'd agree, Mailchimp has spent a pretty penny on advertising and still doesn't seem to be all that strong as a brand or household name. $10B valuation doesn't seem justifiable.
- runako 5y ago> all that strong as a brand or household name. Which email services have stronger brands? Why would an email platform for business be a household name any more than would the top HR software?
- sombremesa 5y ago> Which email services have stronger brands? None. No "Email service" (let's say newsletters specifically, because obviously gmail exists) has a strong brand - that's my point, it was a blank canvas to start and they've spent a ton on paint with little to show for it. > Why would an email platform for business be a household name any more than would the top HR software? Businesses are made up of people. Look at Salesforce, Workday, Zoom...
- runako 5y ago> they've spent a ton on paint with little to show for it. This is a bizarre comment under an article for a company that bootstrapped to a $10 billion valuation.
- sombremesa 5y ago
- omarhaneef 5y agoLet's see: $300mm in earnings Average SP500 P/E ratio is 35: https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio (People get very different numbers for this, but let's go with it for now) 300 x 35 = $10.5B (assuming no debt or cash on the balance sheet, which I don't know about) So makes sense back of the envelope assuming it is growing as fast as the "average" SP500 company.
- mrkramer 5y agoWho can afford $10B buy from SaaS companies?! Only big ones. Salesforce? Adobe? Oracle?