25 ms·

Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B

582 points by marc__1 5y ago

marklyon 5y ago
[sad trombone]
voz_ 5y ago
Reminder that Intuit is an insidious company: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
- bserge 5y ago
  Does anyone not know that by now?
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    You still hear people saying "if you're not paying for the service, you're the product" as if they're enlightening people, so <shrug>.
  - whoisjuan 5y ago
    Most people think of Intuit as the company that helps them to deal with government bullshit and they are happy to pay for that. The average consumer doesn't know that Intuit has a gross business model that is entirely based on the idea of deliberately keeping bureaucracy alive. They think the exact opposite. They believe Intuit is giving them a solution to deal with the government's outdated and overly-complex tax filing system. And unsurpisingly the government has no issues with being the escape goat on this one, because the way you pay your taxes will never be as politically contentious as determining who gets to pay taxes and how much they pay.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Anyone else still waiting on their 2020 refund?
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    And yet I don't see any real backlash against Grover Norquist's "no new taxes" pledge being applied to "making filing easier / automatic" - which is in my mind a prerequisite to any real improvement on the filing process since essentially half of the government at any given time has only been allowed to be elected because they promised not to improve things.
- divbzero 5y ago
  What are the best Mailchimp alternatives for those who do not want to support Intuit in the future?
  - mattwad 5y ago
    Mailgun
    - donmcronald 5y ago
      And since they already screwed all their free users and early adopters you don't have to worry about it happening again (for a while).
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      I tried them a few years ago, everything was great except the email servers in the free tier had terrible reputation and most of what I sent was rejected by the receiving side. I guess that's to be expected, free tiers of any email services are going to be horribly abused. Hopefully the paid service is better.
  - giovannibonetti 5y ago
    Postmark
  - andrewljohnson 5y ago
    Something like Braze (or many competitors) will do all sorts of messaging. It really depends on your business... variables like do you just want to do email, or do you want to message in app or on website too? Selling physical goods? There are a million ways to do app or marketing automation comms.
  - savrajsingh 5y ago
    Klaviyo is ok, way cheaper than braze
  - fosron 5y ago
    Mailerlite is good and way cheaper (p.s i do work for the parent company)
- yunesj 5y ago
  IIRC from the last time I read it, the article only provides evidence for Intuit not wanting taxpayers (including themselves) to fund a competitor to their product, which is very reasonable. I also don't want the government to get in the business of writing tax software.
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    If the government is in the business of collecting tax from 300+ million people and has power to punish these people if they don't, government already is in the business of writing tax software.
  - occz 5y ago
    > I also don't want the government to get in the business of writing tax software. Filing taxes in the rest of the developed world is essentially a one-click process, because every tax authority in the rest of the developed world already have all the information necessary to create such software (and so does the IRS). This is a problem entirely caused by lobbying efforts. It literally does not exist for the rest of the developed world. Why insist on having it worse than everyone else, for the sole gain of the likes of Intuit? It's baffling to say the least.
    - syshum 5y ago
      I am always baffled by the augment of "well the rest of the developed world does X" Seems to strike me as a lesson I learned when I was young.. "Well if your friends all jumped off the bridge would you?" Simply because other nations do X, is not IMO a valid justification for X...
      - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
        While appeal to consensus is a common logical fallacy, we can make stronger arguments to support government tax software. Tax preparation is 100% deadweight in an economic sense. Nothing useful is created in that time, and yet billions of hours are spent on it each year in the United States. Streamlining the collection of tax revenue seems to be in the best interest of the state and the people, even if a very small minority will be harmed in the process. The additional product of those billions of hours of work time per year would pay enough dividend to cover the development cost virtually overnight.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  .. because they lobby to keep taxes complicated? I'm not saying they don't, but don't you think the tax code is complicated because politicians have to be doing something, and they get donations by adding special provisions for their donors? A prerequisite to a simple tax system would be a rate so low that (1) no deductions are necessary, and (2) it's not worth making any special effort to avoid the tax or to cheat. On (1), that's right: no child deduction, no mortgage deduction, no charitable deduction, no state & local tax deduction, no nothing. Just pay 15% of your income, period, full stop. And TurboTax got no further reason to live.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    > .. because they lobby to keep taxes complicated? No, because they lobby to keep filing taxes complicated. Yes, taxes most likely will always be complicated, but if there's no artificial barriers to filing (like in most of the rest of the developed world), there can be real competition in the tax-solutions-software space and most likely there'll also be acceptable open-source solutions that can be used for free.
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      OK, fair point.
- jet_32951 5y ago
  So is Mailchimp. PITA to figure out blocking rules for their spam.
Zealotux 5y ago
Mailchimp/Mandrill is pretty expensive, but designing emails without a solid WYSIWYG editor is just too painful for my taste. Are there good, cheaper alternatives out there for transactional email and newsletters with good delivery?
- PostHeat 5y ago
  I'm working to build a good WYSIWYG email editor at https://postheat.com/create https://postheat.com/create
- orky56 5y ago
  Constant Contact is still independent. Its WYSIWYG is just fine and comes out a little cheaper for me.
  - pirsquare 5y ago
    FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Constant Contact to anyone. Simple reason is that you need to call their support line to cancel subscription. Source: https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FAQ/td-p/363817 https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FA...
    - jkestner 5y ago
      I did that, wasn’t painful. On the other hand, Mailchimp expired unused credits I had to send emails. I know it’s the way of the world, but digital credits shouldn’t expire.
- mtlynch 5y ago
  I like EmailOctopus Connect.[0] It includes a WYSIWYG editor, but it sends outgoing mail through your own Amazon SES account, so it stays affordable even with large lists. They also have a non-SES offering which costs a little more.[1] They're also bootstrapped and independent. They have a really easy to use API[2] (other providers have horrifically inscrutable APIs[3]). The customer service used to be excellent since you were talking directly to the founders. Now they've outsourced customer support so that's not as good, but I still like them far more than any other email service provider. [0] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect [1] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing https://emailoctopus.com/pricing [2] https://emailoctopus.com/api-documentation https://emailoctopus.com/api-documentation [3] https://docs.bigmailer.io/reference#updatecontact https://docs.bigmailer.io/reference#updatecontact
throwaway889900 5y ago
Time to sort through my email for "Mailchimp" and unsubscribe before it happens I guess.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  MailChimp just sent me an email saying my account has been inactive and is about to be deleted. I say: let it die
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  As someone who gets a relative ton of unsolicited Kickstarter spam, I appreciated that Mailchimp was the only marketing email provider that seemed to actually use "this message was unsolicited/I never signed up for this" signals and it was an Unsubscribe button I felt able to trust. (As opposed to some other worse providers where Unsubscribe sometimes just means "Oh look, an actual human clicked the button, time to send more spam.") I'm not sure Intuit will intentionally break this trust, but it will be something I'm probably going to be wary of happening unintentionally.
switz 5y ago
Here are some numbers I dug up: Mailchimp has ~13MM users and 800k paying customers. In 2019 they had revenues of $700MM. In 2020 they had EBITDA of ~$300MM. They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside funding.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  wow -- the founders are going to make out like bandits. No outside funding means no dilution.
  - adventured 5y ago
    They're certainly not hurting: https://www.forbes.com/profile/ben-chestnut/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/ben-chestnut/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/dan-kurzius/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/dan-kurzius/
  - williamsmj 5y ago
    Not so for the employees https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1437516618553192449 https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1437516618553192449
    - graeme 5y ago
      Giving employees equity is a form of funding. If a company is bootstrapped and profitable, they can just pay employees money instead. In theory this should mean Mailchimp employees were paid more money than employees doing similar work where they were given stock options.
      - robocat 5y ago
        Giving early employees equity is often a form of incentive. If giving an employee 1% of equity improves acquisition valuation by 2%, then it was probably a good move, as the remaining shareholders got 1% more than they would have otherwise. It gets less intuitive with multiple people: what to do if one founder owning a valuable small business adds a salesperson and a UI guru, each of whom adds 10x the valuation to the company? The main problem with equity is that it is extremely difficult to value how much a person will increase a future valuation by (ignoring complications with voting rights etcetera).
alberth 5y ago
Can anyone help explain why Intuit would want to acquire Mailchimp. I’m just not seeing the “synergy” between these two companies other than they both focus on SMB.
- williamsmj 5y ago
  Intuit want Mailchimp's data.
  - adventured 5y ago
    Maybe they'll lobby Congress to make it illegal to block spam.
- bserge 5y ago
  They're really into it heheheh
- xnx 5y ago
  I think SMB is exactly what it's about. I wouldn't be surprised if they go for Squarespace or Wix next.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Exactly. Intuit gets a list of and intro to all of mailchimp's customers. Which alone is probably worth a substantial amount of the purchase price in advertising / sales time equivalency. Intuit is also pivoting themselves to being a data aggregator, who sells products powered by that (see: Mint purchase). And they seem to realize that whoever owns the collection point wins (see: Google). Consequently, mailchimp gets them a durable product and data coverage of a difficult to target and lucrative market (SMB).
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    Here I am stressing out because I am going to have to figure out a MailChimp replacement for my partner's service business and now you have me worrying about the multiple non-profits that I have migrated from WordPress hell to Wix. Fingers crossed that it is Squarespace as I determined that it was a ridiculously bad option due to no backup functionality.
ethbr0 5y ago
@&$# But can't fault them. Congrats to the entire mailchimp team! You all deserve all the rewards, especially for bootstrapping. Hope everyone there made out like bandits, and may this give them the financial freedom to pursue new passions in their lives. For those curious about the founding story, How I Built This did a podcast with Ben Chestnut (released July 12, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-chestnut https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-ches... Small tidbit: mailchimp was a major pivot into SaaS (before that was a phrase) from another already successful services business (building websites). The team realized scaling a software product was a better idea than selling their time.
- ckirksey 5y ago
  Spoiler: only the two founders are making out like bandits. Mailchimp employees aren't given equity.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Wow, the salaries look very meh, especially considering there's no equity. They must have really good work-life balance or something.
    - ckirksey 5y ago
      Atlanta is only recently getting high paying engineering jobs in volume. They've been able to compete with quality of life and profit sharing up until now.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Context: at least some of those salaries are in Atlanta, where you can make 1/3 of a west coast salary and still live a pretty nice life.
    - elif 5y ago
      When we were a flat engineering team, profit-sharing and growing it was an amazing place to work because everyone was very good at their job and cared about making a lean and self-sufficient profit machine. From 2015 on the corporatization took over, the flat hierarchy was completely discarded in favor of multi-tier CwhateverO monster departments, team fragmentation and purposeful reassignments, and basically a 100% annual employee count growth mandate. That's also around when the big raises and bonuses stopped, and everyone was assigned to a role and level which has a set salary value range etc. For me 2018 was the end of my patience for it, but I think some are trapped believing in an older version of themselves.
azinman2 5y ago
At first I read this as Intel and thought wow that makes no sense, much like many of Intel’s other acquisitions. Then I reread it was Intuit, and it still doesn’t make sense (to me)!
- iscrewyou 5y ago
  Same here! I really thought it was intel. Maybe because there’s another story relatively near this on the front page about intel End of Life-ing something.
songzme 5y ago
Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp? It seems to me like the only way to send emails is via a service provider. When I try to get a hosting server to send emails myself, it seems like all of the server ips have been blacklisted and flagged as spam.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  You need to bring your own IPs and warm them up with legit emails. People abuse shared cloud IP addresses for spam, so you're going to run in to problems if you want to use them.
  - songzme 5y ago
    Ah I need to buy my own block of ip addresses? Is that what I need to do? And then connect those ip addresses to my computer that I run at home / office? Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
    - kccqzy 5y ago
      Most likely you don't buy IP addresses outright. You sign a business Internet contract with your ISP that has a fixed IP address. You essentially lease that IP address from your ISP. You will stipulate in the contract that the IP address will be used to send/receive emails, because otherwise ISPs may block SMTP traffic completely. Once you get big enough, you can consider buying an IP address prefix, getting your Autonomous System number, setting up peering, etc. For example Mailchimp seems to have AS14782.
- tootie 5y ago
  Yeah, this is the big moat that big viral email companies have. You can only get around spam filters by building reputation which takes time and volume so it's really hard to bootstrap. The shortest path would be to start with low-level managed service like AWS SES and build value adds on top of it.
LookAtThatBacon 5y ago
In case you haven't already, you should submit a request to delete all your data as a Mailchimp "Contact" (a "Contact" is a person whose contact info was given to Mailchimp by a Mailchimp "Member"): https://mailchimp.com/privacy-rights/ https://mailchimp.com/privacy-rights/
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Seems like wufoo (the form service they use for that form) is having a bad day, the form won't load for me. It also feels a bit ironic that to ask mailchimp to not store my data I need to send that request via another company, do I need to ask them to delete my data too?
cdubzzz 5y ago
Anyone have recommendations for building and sending simple "family update" types of emails? E.g. lots of pictures of kids and such and life/activity/plan updates every couple of months? Primarily just want a decent WYSIWYG/photo editor and assured deliver-ability. I have used MailChimp for this for many years now but have been meaning to move away from it for a while anyway since it's not really the right tool for the use case anyway.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Why not Gmail?
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    ?? Because Gmail has incredibly limited Formatting Options that come nowhere near a HTML editor. You can't even set a font size, much less use background colors, tables, etc...
    - niij 5y ago
      Use a standalone client if you want more HTML editing options.
    - smallerfish 5y ago
      You can copy and paste from any HTML into gmail. E.g. copy and paste the frontpage of HN into it, and it'll render perfectly. Results not guaranteed on different screen sizes of course.
  - cdubzzz 5y ago
    This does make me think a bit more about the requirements beyond WYSIWYG -- photo editing/hosting (maybe Gmail does have this built in to their WYSIWYG?), templates, pre-built components, fine grained "styling" controls (think button styles, image groups, TOC, etc.). All of that is pretty much out of the box with MailChimp. I initially customized a predefined template with the WYISWYG, saved my own template from that, and now can easily send a new email using it including making small one-off tweaks as desired.
imwillofficial 5y ago
An interesting move by Intuit.
saos 5y ago
Yikes
inshadows 5y ago
> Mailchimp began by offering email marketing solutions, and evolved into a global leader in customer engagement and marketing automation fueled by a powerful, cutting-edge AI-driven technology stack. Why does mail sender (SPAM as a service?) need "AI"?
- nathanaldensr 5y ago
  Your question makes the following poor assumptions: 1. "AI" exists 2. They are using "AI" to begin with This is just marketing. Nearly any time you see the phrase "AI" used, it's pure marketing.
  - inshadows 5y ago
    AI can refer to classifiers, perhaps neural networks, or some probabilistic algorithms. I find it hard to believe that marketing department would just label something as AI without any underlying algorithm existing[1]. So, for what kind of work does mail sending service needs classifiers/neural networks? [1] Ignoring outright fraudulent press releases of course. This doesn't seem like a fraudulent company.
    - djur 5y ago
      Abuse detection, in order to maintain high sender reputation, perhaps?
- jtmcmc 5y ago
  at the lower level - detecting senders trying to send spam is a big one as well as detecting sending / deliverability problems I'm not familiar with what mailchimp is actually doing with their marketing automation / analytics stuff but you could use "AI" ( or basically statistics in this case ) to analyze the resultant data.
- smelendez 5y ago
  They've increasingly added features to tell you who on your mailing list to advertise to, how (they also handle Facebook and Google ads, some postal mail, etc.), and when. They can estimate how likely addresses are to lead to spam complaints (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-omnivore/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-omnivore/), how likely customers are to spend more (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-customer-lifetime-value-and-purchase-likelihood/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-customer-lifetime-value-and...), things like that.
uptown 5y ago
Ironic that a company named "Intuit" is buying a company with one of the least intuitive UIs I've ever used for email distribution.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
I was impressed with how fun, simple and easy-to-use mailchimp seemed to be. Good to see that rewarded!
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
This kinda feels like one of those acquisitions where all the special sauce that makes the acquired company a great company is the exact opposite in the acquiring company. That is, from all I've heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the "scrappyness" that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too. Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for "regulatory capture" company. Also, since employees don't have equity (though I'm assuming they'll get fat bonuses for this), it's bound to cause some level of strife in the company.
- mithusingh32 5y ago
  You bring up a good point. It's be really nice to see how much of an overlap there is between MailChimp and Intuit users.
- elif 5y ago
  I hope for intuit's sake they don't forget the fat bonus. It's an amazing place to work and I'm happy to have helped make Ben and Dan rich, but no skin in the game works both ways. I had no hesitation leaving, same with a few others I know that moved on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- curun1r 5y ago
  Having worked at a company that was acquired by Intuit, they gave fairly substantial retention bonuses that vested over the 3 years following the acquisition that ended up being about 4x the value of my original pre-acquisition stock options, though the retention bonuses varied greatly and not everyone got that much. So I’d expect that Intuit is taking care of the employees that are considered key to Mailchimp’s business.
  - buitreVirtual 5y ago
    Softening the shock to Mailchimp employees with money would work to some degree. But if they kill the culture then it won't help in the long run.
maxclark 5y ago
Wow congrats to Mailchimp Smart move by Intuit Odds this ends up like Mint?
NotAnOtter 5y ago
I just left Intuit, they are all over the acquisition game lately. The public Credit Karma acquisition, followed by mail chimp just over a year later. Not sure what the big wigs are thinking but I'm expecting a big dilution in the RSU's I'm still holding...
- tootie 5y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/intuit-confirms-12b-deal-to-buy-mailchimp/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/intuit-confirms-12b-deal-t... This acquisition didn't really make much sense to me either, but apparently it's a bid to become hub for small businesses. $12B is a pretty big wad to blow on just email though. Maybe they go after a site builder, ecomm or CRM SaaS next? What's HubSpot worth these days?
  - lancesells 5y ago
    Mailchimp isn't just email. They have ecomm, SMS, and some media companies. And they are a lot of SMB only CRM.
- silvershell 5y ago
  I was surprised that their plan with TradeGecko for an ecommerce platform didn't go anywhere, it seems. https://www.tradegecko.com https://www.tradegecko.com
candyman 5y ago
Probably very good news for younger, more independent platforms like ConvertKit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tinyhouse 5y ago
Intuit is one of those companies that go under everyone's radar. But their stock performance the last 5 years is one of the best in tech.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Their margin trend is amazing, 15% to 20% and I presume 25% now that they have made quickbooks a SaaS. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTU/intuit/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTU/intuit/profit...
donohoe 5y ago
Oh god. Now I have a migration project on my hands.
unixhero 5y ago
12bees! Oh lord
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Big loss for small business. Mailchimp never received any venture capital. They focused on small customers.
zuhayeer 5y ago
Always love looking deeper into businesses that bootstrapped their way to large revenues, you can tell they were relentlessly focused – and yet still underrated in the mainstream narrative "You can simply start a business, run it to serve your customers" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-the-un-silicon-valley-way-to-make-it-as-a-start-up.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-...
matthewmcg 5y ago
I wonder if they were still solely owned by the two founders, with a profit sharing plan. If so, it will be interesting to see how that is continued (or more likely, abandoned or harmonized), and the resulting effect on retention. If they’d awarded equity to employees there’d be quite a few newly wealthy folks in Atlanta instead of just two new billionaires.
Flatcircle 5y ago
They should have acquired Twilio
vmception 5y ago
> to disrupt the small business mid-market Reminds me of the conference where one of the panelists said they did a lot for wealth inequality And the other panelist said “in what direction” and yell “wider!” and all the panelists start cackling like cartoon super villains, but unironically
ironfootnz 5y ago
Far out, what's wrong with the market?
P373 5y ago
>Data and technology in the form of 70 billion contacts How are they defining contacts? Certainly not unique contacts (which would be 10 contacts per person in the world?)
shaunparker 5y ago
My experience with Intuit's Quickbooks Online suggests that all Mailchimp users will be paying 2-3X within 3 years for a worse product. I'd plan on transitioning soon. They're awful.
- system2 5y ago
  No kidding. Worst company with their "advanced" tax software like proseries and lacerte. Try klavio.
janmo 5y ago
A bit unrelated: What is the cheapest provider for transactional E-Mail through an API? Mailchimp is quite expense. A few solutions are a bit cheaper but not that much. I used to have my own mailserver using Roundcube and my E-Mails never ended in the spams. So it quickly gets more economic to run my own mail server. Only problem is that it is quite a headache to manage. Can't some one create a 10x cheaper alternative to Mailchimp since sending E-Mails comes at almost no cost?
- caoilte 5y ago
  Mailgun?
  - system2 5y ago
    +1. Cheap, easy to use, nice API.
  - Angius 5y ago
    Another +1 for Mailgun, I'm using it myself and haven't had any issues
- fragmede 5y ago
  There are a bunch of competitors on price like AWS SES or Sendgrid, and if you're not taking advantage of MailChimp's add on features you're a) getting overcharged, and b) not taking advantage of useful features available to you.
sanguy 5y ago
Intuit is a sleazy company. This doesn't bode well for MailChimp.
slackstation 5y ago
I worked at a small startup that got acquired by Intuit. It killed the company culture, the products and just sucked the life out of us post acquisition. Intuit is the slowest, most comfortable dev dept I've ever seen. Everything takes forever to get done. Even small projects take 3-6 months. They would ask us for a feature and budget 6 months and we would have it done in 1-2 weeks. At first they looked at us like rockstars. Then their culture started getting into our organization and we slowed down to their level. Everyone left when they wanted to move us out of our cool downtown offices to a space in one of their big suburban office parks, way outside the city. Almost everyone left when that was announced. TLDR; Intuit is an awesome place to work if you want to hide, do nothing and get paid a truckload of money.
0des 5y ago
This reminds me of when GoDaddy bought MediaTemple
mkr-hn 5y ago
The rare local tech company. I guess it won't be so local anymore.
Elidrake24 5y ago
Should have guessed when Mailchimp, after so many years of supporting the arts, suddenly and unceremoniously dropped Longform.
oblib 5y ago
I don't remember the name of the email service but after setting it up for use by an app I was working on they got bought up by Mailchimp, who, as I recall told me "you have to switch over to our service" which required re-coding all the email routines again. That was about the 3-4th time I had to do that over the years and after looking into their way of doing things that's when I decided to set up my own email server. I don't do mass mailing so that has been a good solution for me. Not great, but better than being stuck using a 3rd party service that can sell your dependence on them like an asset.
lgleason 5y ago
Basically Mailchimp did nothing to enrich the Atlanta startup community with a bunch of people making nice exits via stocks etc.. Instead it is another example of the Atlanta startup sharecropping model. A few years ago a reporter for the Atlanta Business Chronicle referred to Atlanta as the Bangalore of the South. Up until a few years ago, salaries didn't really compete with other locations and most companies that were opening up engineering offices in ATL did it as a cost cutting measure (IE: Bose, Pandora/Sirius etc..) COVID has opened up opportunities for developers living in Atlanta to have other options that are more lucrative. Mailchimp had run it's course. It was a marketing play, and e-mail marketing has become a commodity business. Atlanta is, at it's heart, a marketing town. But even there, that can only take a marketing company so far.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  They did nothing to enrich bunch of people with making money via exits because they never raised funds and were doing profit sharing https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-profit-sharing/ https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-pr... Mailchimp is also paying out $300M in bonuses https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499 https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499
- blocked_again 5y ago
  Bangalore has changed. There are so many high paying dev jobs in Bangalore now where you take home salary after taxes + rent would be more than that of many US and European cities. People are no longer incentivized to take a massive loan and immigrate to US. That ship has sailed.
  - evnix 5y ago
    could you name me a few companies whose take home is more than many in the US? I'd love to return :)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
d3vmax 5y ago
All I want is to send emails out, now its going to get more bloated.
d3vmax 5y ago
This is going to bloat mailchimp even further. Going to shift to an alternate. Can anyone suggest a solution for 10K email ids?
- sprkwd 5y ago
  Mautic.org
amelius 5y ago
It's a standard HN type of question, but I have to ask it. What does Mailchimp do that I can't replicate in a weekend of coding?
circa 5y ago
I feel like every company Intuit absorbs is destined to fail or at least decline. Mint.com comes to mind from years ago. I loved that app until Intuit took over. I know there are others.
PrivateButts 5y ago
My first IT job revolved around supporting Intuit products in a small office environment. It sucked, and I have a pretty poor opinion of Intuit. I hope that doesn't infect Mailchimp.
thesocialdiner 5y ago
Am I the only one who despises Intuit, root deep in my soul? I'm thrilled for the founders of MailChimp don't get me wrong. Just today I was offered a monthly rate, and reimbursement for an account that was created over 7 years ago, and was charging me every month until I discovered it. Now they are retracting the agreement, raised their prices by over 50% and now offering me a insulting rate monthly as if they are giving me some huge break. I don't see Xero, FreshBooks, or any of the others encroaching on their territory anytime soon. Web3 can't get hear fast enough.

582 points by marc__1 5y ago

[sad trombone]

voz_ 5y ago

Reminder that Intuit is an insidious company: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

bserge 5y ago
Does anyone not know that by now?
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  You still hear people saying "if you're not paying for the service, you're the product" as if they're enlightening people, so <shrug>.
- whoisjuan 5y ago
  Most people think of Intuit as the company that helps them to deal with government bullshit and they are happy to pay for that. The average consumer doesn't know that Intuit has a gross business model that is entirely based on the idea of deliberately keeping bureaucracy alive. They think the exact opposite. They believe Intuit is giving them a solution to deal with the government's outdated and overly-complex tax filing system. And unsurpisingly the government has no issues with being the escape goat on this one, because the way you pay your taxes will never be as politically contentious as determining who gets to pay taxes and how much they pay.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Anyone else still waiting on their 2020 refund?
- kennywinker 5y ago
  And yet I don't see any real backlash against Grover Norquist's "no new taxes" pledge being applied to "making filing easier / automatic" - which is in my mind a prerequisite to any real improvement on the filing process since essentially half of the government at any given time has only been allowed to be elected because they promised not to improve things.
divbzero 5y ago
What are the best Mailchimp alternatives for those who do not want to support Intuit in the future?
- mattwad 5y ago
  Mailgun
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    And since they already screwed all their free users and early adopters you don't have to worry about it happening again (for a while).
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I tried them a few years ago, everything was great except the email servers in the free tier had terrible reputation and most of what I sent was rejected by the receiving side. I guess that's to be expected, free tiers of any email services are going to be horribly abused. Hopefully the paid service is better.
- giovannibonetti 5y ago
  Postmark
- andrewljohnson 5y ago
  Something like Braze (or many competitors) will do all sorts of messaging. It really depends on your business... variables like do you just want to do email, or do you want to message in app or on website too? Selling physical goods? There are a million ways to do app or marketing automation comms.
- savrajsingh 5y ago
  Klaviyo is ok, way cheaper than braze
- fosron 5y ago
  Mailerlite is good and way cheaper (p.s i do work for the parent company)
yunesj 5y ago
IIRC from the last time I read it, the article only provides evidence for Intuit not wanting taxpayers (including themselves) to fund a competitor to their product, which is very reasonable. I also don't want the government to get in the business of writing tax software.
- gnulinux 5y ago
  If the government is in the business of collecting tax from 300+ million people and has power to punish these people if they don't, government already is in the business of writing tax software.
- occz 5y ago
  > I also don't want the government to get in the business of writing tax software. Filing taxes in the rest of the developed world is essentially a one-click process, because every tax authority in the rest of the developed world already have all the information necessary to create such software (and so does the IRS). This is a problem entirely caused by lobbying efforts. It literally does not exist for the rest of the developed world. Why insist on having it worse than everyone else, for the sole gain of the likes of Intuit? It's baffling to say the least.
  - syshum 5y ago
    I am always baffled by the augment of "well the rest of the developed world does X" Seems to strike me as a lesson I learned when I was young.. "Well if your friends all jumped off the bridge would you?" Simply because other nations do X, is not IMO a valid justification for X...
    - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
      While appeal to consensus is a common logical fallacy, we can make stronger arguments to support government tax software. Tax preparation is 100% deadweight in an economic sense. Nothing useful is created in that time, and yet billions of hours are spent on it each year in the United States. Streamlining the collection of tax revenue seems to be in the best interest of the state and the people, even if a very small minority will be harmed in the process. The additional product of those billions of hours of work time per year would pay enough dividend to cover the development cost virtually overnight.
AlbertCory 5y ago
.. because they lobby to keep taxes complicated? I'm not saying they don't, but don't you think the tax code is complicated because politicians have to be doing something, and they get donations by adding special provisions for their donors? A prerequisite to a simple tax system would be a rate so low that (1) no deductions are necessary, and (2) it's not worth making any special effort to avoid the tax or to cheat. On (1), that's right: no child deduction, no mortgage deduction, no charitable deduction, no state & local tax deduction, no nothing. Just pay 15% of your income, period, full stop. And TurboTax got no further reason to live.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  > .. because they lobby to keep taxes complicated? No, because they lobby to keep filing taxes complicated. Yes, taxes most likely will always be complicated, but if there's no artificial barriers to filing (like in most of the rest of the developed world), there can be real competition in the tax-solutions-software space and most likely there'll also be acceptable open-source solutions that can be used for free.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    OK, fair point.
jet_32951 5y ago
So is Mailchimp. PITA to figure out blocking rules for their spam.

Zealotux 5y ago

Mailchimp/Mandrill is pretty expensive, but designing emails without a solid WYSIWYG editor is just too painful for my taste. Are there good, cheaper alternatives out there for transactional email and newsletters with good delivery?

PostHeat 5y ago
I'm working to build a good WYSIWYG email editor at https://postheat.com/create https://postheat.com/create
orky56 5y ago
Constant Contact is still independent. Its WYSIWYG is just fine and comes out a little cheaper for me.
- pirsquare 5y ago
  FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Constant Contact to anyone. Simple reason is that you need to call their support line to cancel subscription. Source: https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FAQ/td-p/363817 https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FA...
  - jkestner 5y ago
    I did that, wasn’t painful. On the other hand, Mailchimp expired unused credits I had to send emails. I know it’s the way of the world, but digital credits shouldn’t expire.
mtlynch 5y ago
I like EmailOctopus Connect.[0] It includes a WYSIWYG editor, but it sends outgoing mail through your own Amazon SES account, so it stays affordable even with large lists. They also have a non-SES offering which costs a little more.[1] They're also bootstrapped and independent. They have a really easy to use API[2] (other providers have horrifically inscrutable APIs[3]). The customer service used to be excellent since you were talking directly to the founders. Now they've outsourced customer support so that's not as good, but I still like them far more than any other email service provider. [0] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect [1] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing https://emailoctopus.com/pricing [2] https://emailoctopus.com/api-documentation https://emailoctopus.com/api-documentation [3] https://docs.bigmailer.io/reference#updatecontact https://docs.bigmailer.io/reference#updatecontact

throwaway889900 5y ago

Time to sort through my email for "Mailchimp" and unsubscribe before it happens I guess.

Bilal_io 5y ago
MailChimp just sent me an email saying my account has been inactive and is about to be deleted. I say: let it die
WorldMaker 5y ago
As someone who gets a relative ton of unsolicited Kickstarter spam, I appreciated that Mailchimp was the only marketing email provider that seemed to actually use "this message was unsolicited/I never signed up for this" signals and it was an Unsubscribe button I felt able to trust. (As opposed to some other worse providers where Unsubscribe sometimes just means "Oh look, an actual human clicked the button, time to send more spam.") I'm not sure Intuit will intentionally break this trust, but it will be something I'm probably going to be wary of happening unintentionally.

switz 5y ago

Here are some numbers I dug up: Mailchimp has ~13MM users and 800k paying customers. In 2019 they had revenues of $700MM. In 2020 they had EBITDA of ~$300MM. They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside funding.

gigatexal 5y ago
wow -- the founders are going to make out like bandits. No outside funding means no dilution.
- adventured 5y ago
  They're certainly not hurting: https://www.forbes.com/profile/ben-chestnut/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/ben-chestnut/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/dan-kurzius/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/dan-kurzius/
- williamsmj 5y ago
  Not so for the employees https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1437516618553192449 https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1437516618553192449
  - graeme 5y ago
    Giving employees equity is a form of funding. If a company is bootstrapped and profitable, they can just pay employees money instead. In theory this should mean Mailchimp employees were paid more money than employees doing similar work where they were given stock options.
    - robocat 5y ago
      Giving early employees equity is often a form of incentive. If giving an employee 1% of equity improves acquisition valuation by 2%, then it was probably a good move, as the remaining shareholders got 1% more than they would have otherwise. It gets less intuitive with multiple people: what to do if one founder owning a valuable small business adds a salesperson and a UI guru, each of whom adds 10x the valuation to the company? The main problem with equity is that it is extremely difficult to value how much a person will increase a future valuation by (ignoring complications with voting rights etcetera).

alberth 5y ago

Can anyone help explain why Intuit would want to acquire Mailchimp. I’m just not seeing the “synergy” between these two companies other than they both focus on SMB.

williamsmj 5y ago
Intuit want Mailchimp's data.
- adventured 5y ago
  Maybe they'll lobby Congress to make it illegal to block spam.
bserge 5y ago
They're really into it heheheh
xnx 5y ago
I think SMB is exactly what it's about. I wouldn't be surprised if they go for Squarespace or Wix next.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Exactly. Intuit gets a list of and intro to all of mailchimp's customers. Which alone is probably worth a substantial amount of the purchase price in advertising / sales time equivalency. Intuit is also pivoting themselves to being a data aggregator, who sells products powered by that (see: Mint purchase). And they seem to realize that whoever owns the collection point wins (see: Google). Consequently, mailchimp gets them a durable product and data coverage of a difficult to target and lucrative market (SMB).
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Here I am stressing out because I am going to have to figure out a MailChimp replacement for my partner's service business and now you have me worrying about the multiple non-profits that I have migrated from WordPress hell to Wix. Fingers crossed that it is Squarespace as I determined that it was a ridiculously bad option due to no backup functionality.

ethbr0 5y ago

@&$# But can't fault them. Congrats to the entire mailchimp team! You all deserve all the rewards, especially for bootstrapping. Hope everyone there made out like bandits, and may this give them the financial freedom to pursue new passions in their lives. For those curious about the founding story, How I Built This did a podcast with Ben Chestnut (released July 12, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-chestnut https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-ches... Small tidbit: mailchimp was a major pivot into SaaS (before that was a phrase) from another already successful services business (building websites). The team realized scaling a software product was a better idea than selling their time.

ckirksey 5y ago
Spoiler: only the two founders are making out like bandits. Mailchimp employees aren't given equity.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Wow, the salaries look very meh, especially considering there's no equity. They must have really good work-life balance or something.
  - ckirksey 5y ago
    Atlanta is only recently getting high paying engineering jobs in volume. They've been able to compete with quality of life and profit sharing up until now.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Context: at least some of those salaries are in Atlanta, where you can make 1/3 of a west coast salary and still live a pretty nice life.
  - elif 5y ago
    When we were a flat engineering team, profit-sharing and growing it was an amazing place to work because everyone was very good at their job and cared about making a lean and self-sufficient profit machine. From 2015 on the corporatization took over, the flat hierarchy was completely discarded in favor of multi-tier CwhateverO monster departments, team fragmentation and purposeful reassignments, and basically a 100% annual employee count growth mandate. That's also around when the big raises and bonuses stopped, and everyone was assigned to a role and level which has a set salary value range etc. For me 2018 was the end of my patience for it, but I think some are trapped believing in an older version of themselves.

azinman2 5y ago

At first I read this as Intel and thought wow that makes no sense, much like many of Intel’s other acquisitions. Then I reread it was Intuit, and it still doesn’t make sense (to me)!

iscrewyou 5y ago
Same here! I really thought it was intel. Maybe because there’s another story relatively near this on the front page about intel End of Life-ing something.

songzme 5y ago

Could anyone give me some insight about how to start an email service like MailChimp? It seems to me like the only way to send emails is via a service provider. When I try to get a hosting server to send emails myself, it seems like all of the server ips have been blacklisted and flagged as spam.

jdavis703 5y ago
You need to bring your own IPs and warm them up with legit emails. People abuse shared cloud IP addresses for spam, so you're going to run in to problems if you want to use them.
- songzme 5y ago
  Ah I need to buy my own block of ip addresses? Is that what I need to do? And then connect those ip addresses to my computer that I run at home / office? Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
  - kccqzy 5y ago
    Most likely you don't buy IP addresses outright. You sign a business Internet contract with your ISP that has a fixed IP address. You essentially lease that IP address from your ISP. You will stipulate in the contract that the IP address will be used to send/receive emails, because otherwise ISPs may block SMTP traffic completely. Once you get big enough, you can consider buying an IP address prefix, getting your Autonomous System number, setting up peering, etc. For example Mailchimp seems to have AS14782.
tootie 5y ago
Yeah, this is the big moat that big viral email companies have. You can only get around spam filters by building reputation which takes time and volume so it's really hard to bootstrap. The shortest path would be to start with low-level managed service like AWS SES and build value adds on top of it.

LookAtThatBacon 5y ago

In case you haven't already, you should submit a request to delete all your data as a Mailchimp "Contact" (a "Contact" is a person whose contact info was given to Mailchimp by a Mailchimp "Member"): https://mailchimp.com/privacy-rights/ https://mailchimp.com/privacy-rights/

SahAssar 5y ago
Seems like wufoo (the form service they use for that form) is having a bad day, the form won't load for me. It also feels a bit ironic that to ask mailchimp to not store my data I need to send that request via another company, do I need to ask them to delete my data too?

cdubzzz 5y ago

Anyone have recommendations for building and sending simple "family update" types of emails? E.g. lots of pictures of kids and such and life/activity/plan updates every couple of months? Primarily just want a decent WYSIWYG/photo editor and assured deliver-ability. I have used MailChimp for this for many years now but have been meaning to move away from it for a while anyway since it's not really the right tool for the use case anyway.

tomcam 5y ago
Why not Gmail?
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  ?? Because Gmail has incredibly limited Formatting Options that come nowhere near a HTML editor. You can't even set a font size, much less use background colors, tables, etc...
  - niij 5y ago
    Use a standalone client if you want more HTML editing options.
  - smallerfish 5y ago
    You can copy and paste from any HTML into gmail. E.g. copy and paste the frontpage of HN into it, and it'll render perfectly. Results not guaranteed on different screen sizes of course.
- cdubzzz 5y ago
  This does make me think a bit more about the requirements beyond WYSIWYG -- photo editing/hosting (maybe Gmail does have this built in to their WYSIWYG?), templates, pre-built components, fine grained "styling" controls (think button styles, image groups, TOC, etc.). All of that is pretty much out of the box with MailChimp. I initially customized a predefined template with the WYISWYG, saved my own template from that, and now can easily send a new email using it including making small one-off tweaks as desired.

imwillofficial 5y ago

An interesting move by Intuit.

saos 5y ago

Yikes

inshadows 5y ago

> Mailchimp began by offering email marketing solutions, and evolved into a global leader in customer engagement and marketing automation fueled by a powerful, cutting-edge AI-driven technology stack. Why does mail sender (SPAM as a service?) need "AI"?

nathanaldensr 5y ago
Your question makes the following poor assumptions: 1. "AI" exists 2. They are using "AI" to begin with This is just marketing. Nearly any time you see the phrase "AI" used, it's pure marketing.
- inshadows 5y ago
  AI can refer to classifiers, perhaps neural networks, or some probabilistic algorithms. I find it hard to believe that marketing department would just label something as AI without any underlying algorithm existing[1]. So, for what kind of work does mail sending service needs classifiers/neural networks? [1] Ignoring outright fraudulent press releases of course. This doesn't seem like a fraudulent company.
  - djur 5y ago
    Abuse detection, in order to maintain high sender reputation, perhaps?
jtmcmc 5y ago
at the lower level - detecting senders trying to send spam is a big one as well as detecting sending / deliverability problems I'm not familiar with what mailchimp is actually doing with their marketing automation / analytics stuff but you could use "AI" ( or basically statistics in this case ) to analyze the resultant data.
smelendez 5y ago
They've increasingly added features to tell you who on your mailing list to advertise to, how (they also handle Facebook and Google ads, some postal mail, etc.), and when. They can estimate how likely addresses are to lead to spam complaints (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-omnivore/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-omnivore/), how likely customers are to spend more (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-customer-lifetime-value-and-purchase-likelihood/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-customer-lifetime-value-and...), things like that.

uptown 5y ago

Ironic that a company named "Intuit" is buying a company with one of the least intuitive UIs I've ever used for email distribution.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

I was impressed with how fun, simple and easy-to-use mailchimp seemed to be. Good to see that rewarded!

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

This kinda feels like one of those acquisitions where all the special sauce that makes the acquired company a great company is the exact opposite in the acquiring company. That is, from all I've heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the "scrappyness" that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too. Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for "regulatory capture" company. Also, since employees don't have equity (though I'm assuming they'll get fat bonuses for this), it's bound to cause some level of strife in the company.

mithusingh32 5y ago
You bring up a good point. It's be really nice to see how much of an overlap there is between MailChimp and Intuit users.
elif 5y ago
I hope for intuit's sake they don't forget the fat bonus. It's an amazing place to work and I'm happy to have helped make Ben and Dan rich, but no skin in the game works both ways. I had no hesitation leaving, same with a few others I know that moved on.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
curun1r 5y ago
Having worked at a company that was acquired by Intuit, they gave fairly substantial retention bonuses that vested over the 3 years following the acquisition that ended up being about 4x the value of my original pre-acquisition stock options, though the retention bonuses varied greatly and not everyone got that much. So I’d expect that Intuit is taking care of the employees that are considered key to Mailchimp’s business.
- buitreVirtual 5y ago
  Softening the shock to Mailchimp employees with money would work to some degree. But if they kill the culture then it won't help in the long run.

maxclark 5y ago

Wow congrats to Mailchimp Smart move by Intuit Odds this ends up like Mint?

NotAnOtter 5y ago

I just left Intuit, they are all over the acquisition game lately. The public Credit Karma acquisition, followed by mail chimp just over a year later. Not sure what the big wigs are thinking but I'm expecting a big dilution in the RSU's I'm still holding...

tootie 5y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/intuit-confirms-12b-deal-to-buy-mailchimp/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/intuit-confirms-12b-deal-t... This acquisition didn't really make much sense to me either, but apparently it's a bid to become hub for small businesses. $12B is a pretty big wad to blow on just email though. Maybe they go after a site builder, ecomm or CRM SaaS next? What's HubSpot worth these days?
- lancesells 5y ago
  Mailchimp isn't just email. They have ecomm, SMS, and some media companies. And they are a lot of SMB only CRM.
silvershell 5y ago
I was surprised that their plan with TradeGecko for an ecommerce platform didn't go anywhere, it seems. https://www.tradegecko.com https://www.tradegecko.com

candyman 5y ago

Probably very good news for younger, more independent platforms like ConvertKit.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tinyhouse 5y ago

Intuit is one of those companies that go under everyone's radar. But their stock performance the last 5 years is one of the best in tech.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Their margin trend is amazing, 15% to 20% and I presume 25% now that they have made quickbooks a SaaS. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTU/intuit/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTU/intuit/profit...

donohoe 5y ago

Oh god. Now I have a migration project on my hands.

unixhero 5y ago

12bees! Oh lord

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Big loss for small business. Mailchimp never received any venture capital. They focused on small customers.

zuhayeer 5y ago

Always love looking deeper into businesses that bootstrapped their way to large revenues, you can tell they were relentlessly focused – and yet still underrated in the mainstream narrative "You can simply start a business, run it to serve your customers" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-the-un-silicon-valley-way-to-make-it-as-a-start-up.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-...

matthewmcg 5y ago

I wonder if they were still solely owned by the two founders, with a profit sharing plan. If so, it will be interesting to see how that is continued (or more likely, abandoned or harmonized), and the resulting effect on retention. If they’d awarded equity to employees there’d be quite a few newly wealthy folks in Atlanta instead of just two new billionaires.

Flatcircle 5y ago

They should have acquired Twilio

vmception 5y ago

> to disrupt the small business mid-market Reminds me of the conference where one of the panelists said they did a lot for wealth inequality And the other panelist said “in what direction” and yell “wider!” and all the panelists start cackling like cartoon super villains, but unironically

ironfootnz 5y ago

Far out, what's wrong with the market?

P373 5y ago

>Data and technology in the form of 70 billion contacts How are they defining contacts? Certainly not unique contacts (which would be 10 contacts per person in the world?)

shaunparker 5y ago

My experience with Intuit's Quickbooks Online suggests that all Mailchimp users will be paying 2-3X within 3 years for a worse product. I'd plan on transitioning soon. They're awful.

system2 5y ago
No kidding. Worst company with their "advanced" tax software like proseries and lacerte. Try klavio.

janmo 5y ago

A bit unrelated: What is the cheapest provider for transactional E-Mail through an API? Mailchimp is quite expense. A few solutions are a bit cheaper but not that much. I used to have my own mailserver using Roundcube and my E-Mails never ended in the spams. So it quickly gets more economic to run my own mail server. Only problem is that it is quite a headache to manage. Can't some one create a 10x cheaper alternative to Mailchimp since sending E-Mails comes at almost no cost?

caoilte 5y ago
Mailgun?
- system2 5y ago
  +1. Cheap, easy to use, nice API.
- Angius 5y ago
  Another +1 for Mailgun, I'm using it myself and haven't had any issues
fragmede 5y ago
There are a bunch of competitors on price like AWS SES or Sendgrid, and if you're not taking advantage of MailChimp's add on features you're a) getting overcharged, and b) not taking advantage of useful features available to you.

sanguy 5y ago

Intuit is a sleazy company. This doesn't bode well for MailChimp.

slackstation 5y ago

I worked at a small startup that got acquired by Intuit. It killed the company culture, the products and just sucked the life out of us post acquisition. Intuit is the slowest, most comfortable dev dept I've ever seen. Everything takes forever to get done. Even small projects take 3-6 months. They would ask us for a feature and budget 6 months and we would have it done in 1-2 weeks. At first they looked at us like rockstars. Then their culture started getting into our organization and we slowed down to their level. Everyone left when they wanted to move us out of our cool downtown offices to a space in one of their big suburban office parks, way outside the city. Almost everyone left when that was announced. TLDR; Intuit is an awesome place to work if you want to hide, do nothing and get paid a truckload of money.

0des 5y ago

This reminds me of when GoDaddy bought MediaTemple

mkr-hn 5y ago

The rare local tech company. I guess it won't be so local anymore.

Elidrake24 5y ago

Should have guessed when Mailchimp, after so many years of supporting the arts, suddenly and unceremoniously dropped Longform.

oblib 5y ago

I don't remember the name of the email service but after setting it up for use by an app I was working on they got bought up by Mailchimp, who, as I recall told me "you have to switch over to our service" which required re-coding all the email routines again. That was about the 3-4th time I had to do that over the years and after looking into their way of doing things that's when I decided to set up my own email server. I don't do mass mailing so that has been a good solution for me. Not great, but better than being stuck using a 3rd party service that can sell your dependence on them like an asset.

lgleason 5y ago

Basically Mailchimp did nothing to enrich the Atlanta startup community with a bunch of people making nice exits via stocks etc.. Instead it is another example of the Atlanta startup sharecropping model. A few years ago a reporter for the Atlanta Business Chronicle referred to Atlanta as the Bangalore of the South. Up until a few years ago, salaries didn't really compete with other locations and most companies that were opening up engineering offices in ATL did it as a cost cutting measure (IE: Bose, Pandora/Sirius etc..) COVID has opened up opportunities for developers living in Atlanta to have other options that are more lucrative. Mailchimp had run it's course. It was a marketing play, and e-mail marketing has become a commodity business. Atlanta is, at it's heart, a marketing town. But even there, that can only take a marketing company so far.

HatchedLake721 5y ago
They did nothing to enrich bunch of people with making money via exits because they never raised funds and were doing profit sharing https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-profit-sharing/ https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-pr... Mailchimp is also paying out $300M in bonuses https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499 https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499
blocked_again 5y ago
Bangalore has changed. There are so many high paying dev jobs in Bangalore now where you take home salary after taxes + rent would be more than that of many US and European cities. People are no longer incentivized to take a massive loan and immigrate to US. That ship has sailed.
- evnix 5y ago
  could you name me a few companies whose take home is more than many in the US? I'd love to return :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

d3vmax 5y ago

All I want is to send emails out, now its going to get more bloated.

d3vmax 5y ago

This is going to bloat mailchimp even further. Going to shift to an alternate. Can anyone suggest a solution for 10K email ids?

sprkwd 5y ago
Mautic.org

amelius 5y ago

It's a standard HN type of question, but I have to ask it. What does Mailchimp do that I can't replicate in a weekend of coding?

circa 5y ago

I feel like every company Intuit absorbs is destined to fail or at least decline. Mint.com comes to mind from years ago. I loved that app until Intuit took over. I know there are others.

PrivateButts 5y ago

My first IT job revolved around supporting Intuit products in a small office environment. It sucked, and I have a pretty poor opinion of Intuit. I hope that doesn't infect Mailchimp.

thesocialdiner 5y ago

Am I the only one who despises Intuit, root deep in my soul? I'm thrilled for the founders of MailChimp don't get me wrong. Just today I was offered a monthly rate, and reimbursement for an account that was created over 7 years ago, and was charging me every month until I discovered it. Now they are retracting the agreement, raised their prices by over 50% and now offering me a insulting rate monthly as if they are giving me some huge break. I don't see Xero, FreshBooks, or any of the others encroaching on their territory anytime soon. Web3 can't get hear fast enough.