YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Chestnut

lines on the record: 114
first: 2021-07-12
most recent: 2021-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“with some really great business leaders. And I remember being in one recently where a head of one of Microsoft's cloud units, he was speaking about How he hosts executive leadership team meetings. And he says, we're still winging it. We have no idea. You know, he didn't say it that way, but he's like, we're still experimenting. And this is Microsoft. And they've been around a very, very long time and they know what they're doing. So, you know, it was that moment I realized, oh my God, nobody has the answer. We're all just winging it. Every one of us is just winging it. I don't know if that's hopeful or horrifying, but that's what I've learned.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I totally believe in luck. I mean, but I think it comes from constantly striving and looking for that silver bullet. When I look back over my twenty years, it felt like I was always looking for the answer, always looking for what is the playbook that I'm missing? You know, it's constantly searching. And then all along the way, stumbling upon something that actually does better than my wildest dreams, I don't know. I always had in my mind that I was just a bumbling idiot from Hepsebah, Georgia who stumbled into business and somewhere out there, someone knew the right answer of how to run my business, right? These days, these days, you know, MailChimp is much bigger, and I get invited to Ritzy events.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, exactly. It's creepy. So it makes me think, you know, like, oh, maybe there is going to be a time where I need to step back and maybe have a succession plan and have someone take over running it day to day. I do see that as a possibility. But right now, I'm just so happy running this thing.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possible as possible. You know, the other thing is early on we talked about VCs knocking on my door just saying take my money. We can help you flip to enterprise yada yada. But nowadays, you know, the tone has changed. I get private equity companies coming in and they don't ask me to take their money and grow it. The first thing they ask me is how's your health? It feels like they're just waiting for me to kill over. They're like, well, here just hold my business card just in case, you know, in case you keel over and your wife needs to contact us. Here you go. BMI.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've had offers. The thing is, I love what I do. And I find that I am happiest when I have a really tough problem to solve, when my eyebrows are like, my forehead is all furrowed and wrinkled because I'm just like struggling to figure out, oh, this is a new challenge. How do I conquer this? And that never ends when you run a business. I mean, it's just never ending problems to solve. And so I just feel like every day I always have some new challenge and I love that. I really do. And I just can't see myself retiring. I don't know. It's one of those things you learn over time after 20 years of running a business. You learn never say never, right? I think I have an open mind about it, but I can say really, honestly and truly, like having meaningful work is just the most important thing, I think.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started our meeting, and someone said the headline should be Mailchimp leaned in. We didn't shy away. We leaned in and we changed the culture for the better.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we made our response public. We have our six big commitments. We have a whole strategy on, it's called our culture reset plan. So we actually published that. But it came from the very first thing we did was I just held constant office hours where I just listened to anybody who wanted to talk to me. And I just took notes and people from every department, every rank, they came and just told me what they were experiencing. And it was heartbreaking to hear that some people weren't feeling that MailChimp was what I thought it was. And I listened to it all and I came back to my leadership team. And they were holding office hours too. And we compared notes and we put together a plan to change the culture. And the thing that we said was like one year from now, what do we want the headline to be? We have this awful headline that's out now, right? That we're dealing with. But one year from now, what do we want the headline to be?”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just focus on growing the business. And so that's what I did. I just focused on growth and not enough on nurturing the culture. I mean, you can be fooled into thinking growth and strategy is your only job as a CEO. But no, it's culture as well because that's what drives everything else.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, when you're a founder and something like that comes out, it's a real gut punch. We learned a lot from that. And I am grateful for what we learned from it. And in retrospect, I think We were always intentional about our culture at Mailchimp, right? I mean, we got people to help us codify it. I mean, we hired a chief culture officer. I would say that we were really good with our culture. And what can happen to a founder? You know, this is my warning to other entrepreneurs out there is when you're good at culture in the early years, sometimes you can kind of lull into like an autopilot, right?”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tried everything under the sun, you know, for the first few weeks. We tried to post videos, you know, every day. And then, you know, that was just too much and overbearing. It was weird. In some ways, we were more productive. We got a lot more done than we did when we were in office. So it was encouraging in some ways. And you wanted to be optimistic and you could almost get confident about that, right? But then just the morale just dragged everything down as well. Like you couldn't really celebrate anything either. It was a tough, tough year”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Connection with each other where they can kind of brainstorm together and collaborate and just socialize. And so the office space that they come to should probably be built for that.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I say I don't know It's all over the board, right? And when I talk to our employees, it's very clear that they do not want things to go all the way back to normal. They want that hybrid approach. So we're calling it flex. So it's going to be a scenario where people can choose, do you want to be primarily office and sometimes home or primarily home, sometimes office or all home or all office? You have to choose and then it stays that way for, I think, like six months, I think is how we're going to pilot this thing. That way we can actually make space planning decisions. You know right before the pandemic hit, we had signed a contract to open up a new headquarters. So I think we're still going to need physical space, maybe not as much as we thought originally. But the nature of the space, I think, is going to change where I think people will work at home more often kind of doing their deep thought work. And then they're still going to want.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entrepreneurialism. Sometimes it's not even about entrepreneurialism, it's about a parent having some kind of an argument with a son who really wants to be a musician. I mean, it's like interwoven in there are stories of entrepreneurialism.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by then, everyone knew that I was the founder of MailChimp. And so they just came to me and they said, I'll tell you right now what your brand is. And to a T, every single student in that class told me, you need to get out of email marketing and expand into other channels. So I got the idea from Dayton, Ohio, let it be known. Wow. You know, that was like, I don't know, 2017-ish is when I came back and told the company, we have permission. Our brand has earned the right and the permission from customers to expand beyond just email. So yeah, we have been since 2017 adding social media channels. We also started Mailchant Presents where we produce video content for people too because YouTube is like, it's now like the world's number two search engine after Google. We're out there producing documentaries and movies as well.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And by the way, when I was out there in Dayton, Ohio at this leadership school, they had a little exercise to make founders think about what is the real essence of their brand. It's not the product. It's like, what is the brand all about?”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, it took a few more years after that, actually. I mean, here's the thing about early years of a startup. The idea of strategy just gets more sophisticated the older you get. So in the early years, yes, I think we did have a strategy in retrospect. It was nothing but a product roadmap. It was just, we will build these three things this year. So yeah, we did eventually have these strategies. We made a conscious effort to always keep it simple, no more than three themes. You know, it had to fit on a sticky note was always my philosophy. So many years later, I think 2018 is when things had to get way more sophisticated. And we started to see that we needed to hire eventually what we have now, a chief strategy officer. Because, man, it's a thing now. It's real. I can safely say we do have a strategy now.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what we cared about most was actually our employees who had been with us for so many years. We wanted them to become good managers and progress through leadership at MailGym. So we started to think about like, what would it be like if we had like a Mailchimp school or a Mailchimp Academy? We started to inquire about that, talking to some local professors at Emory University. And they said, yeah, we can absolutely help you with that. But first, we need to know something about your culture. We were like, well, what's that? I don't know what that means. And they said, oh, well, it starts off with your core values. And we said, we don't, what is that? So yeah, that's how the whole journey began. And we, you know, I hired a chief culture officer to kind of help us maintain that culture. That's how the whole process came to be.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there was a lot of that kind of stuff, right? So talking about strategy, talking about culture and stuff like that. But the most helpful stuff was like they make you get out of this mode where it's all about me and it's really all about the team. It sounds cheesy, but you have to understand like I am not good enough. That's like the self conscious thing that's this tape that's playing through everyone's mind and you have to remember that as a leader and you've got to like shake that out of them, make them feel confident, make them work as a team. You know, it was more psychological stuff like that that kind of helped me get out of my rut and think about leadership in a different way.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two or three days. So it was built this school. I haven't talked to anyone about this. The school is built for the locals. This was his hometown, Claymatil's hometown. And it was really built for small family businesses. And, you know, I remember it said like the minimum revenue had to be 2 million revenue. And, you know, we were like maybe at 200 million or something by this time. Wow. And so I didn't tell them that I submitted the form and I said, you know, Yes, I make two million in revenue. And I went out to Dayton, Ohio. And I learned a lot out there. I needed it. You know, it was a lot of humble pie that I ate out there.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I went searching online. Actually, I remember I was listening to NPR. Driving around in the country somewhere And true at Kathy, the founder of Chickfil A had passed away. Someone at NPR, I believe, was doing interviews with people who knew him as a friend. And they were telling stories about Truitt Kathy. And a guy came on and his name was Clay Matteel. And they talked about how he ran his company, sold it, and he started a school for founders. It was in Dayton, Ohio. And this guy, he sold his business for multiple billions of dollars, and he just wanted small business leaders to learn the lessons that he learned the hard way and learn how to scale their businesses and become better leaders. So I just thought You know, let me jot this guy's name down and go look him up. And that's what I did. I went to his school. You”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, I thought that they just wanted me probably to coddle them. You know what I mean? That was my attitude at the time. Like, what do you want from me? Like, why do you need me to tell you what to do?”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was so bad I didn't know it. You know, I guess I was coming home and not really talking much about it. It just weighed very heavily on my mind. I remember my wife sitting down next to me and just saying, you know what? I think I'm going to take the kids and move out for a while, leave you alone. And I remember looking at her like shocked. I was just thinking, why in the world would you do that? You know, and I guess it had affected me so much that she thought it had something to do with her. And I had no idea that it was like emanating from me, right? Those vibes. And I remember I just told her, you know what? It's not about you at all. Let me tell you what's going on at work. And that was for the first time I started to talk to her about everything. Now she's probably sick of hearing me talk about work. But every day I talk to her about work and what I'm thinking and what problems I'm having.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was completely self-conscious and worried that anytime I opened my mouth, I would just make things worse. It was really one of the worst times of my life.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like an identity crisis, sort of. Like, you don't know who you are anymore. I thought I was a pretty decent leader. And I remember subsequent meetings, we would have an event of some sort. And I remember just not being able to talk to anybody anymore. I just remember being, I stopped talking. I would just sit in the corner. And I would only talk to people if they came up to me. But otherwise, you were.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I might have said the strategy. I might have said the strategy is no strategy. I might have actually foolishly said that. But you know, when I went back to my office, a young woman knocked on the door, came in, sat down in front of me, and very politely said, you know, I think you could use some leadership training Was really bold of her to come into my office and say that. Her name was Kate Lee. She's now our chief comms officer at Mailchimp.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There actually is no strategy. You know what I remember looking out at this audience and I remember half of it being kind of old guard, you know, sort of like the typical startup pirates. And the other half of people like being really concerned, why are you hiding things from us? And so the whole meeting just completely flopped. It was an awful meeting. And I was just shell-shocked from the whole thing. And I remember going back to my office just sitting there alone thinking about what in the world just happened to me.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things are great. We're awesome. Who knows? I barely remember. And, you know, are there any questions? And we had people. Questions that were coming were, you know, totally unexpected. So, you know, we were talking about how successful things were growing. We were on a tear, things were looking like up and to the right. It's amazing. And people were raising their hand saying, so what's the strategy? And my answer, you know, it's a startup founders. We don't need no stinking strategy. We've got this, you know. And half the audience would cheer and say, yeah, we don't need no strategy. And the other half would say, yeah, we do. And they were just I remember the person asking me that, you know, raising his hand and saying, why do you feel the need to keep it a secret? And I remember thinking, oh my God.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing, you know, just to make things interesting was that day of the All Hands was Halloween, and we had a costume contest going on. So everybody was in costumes when we all met. And we have some creative people at MailChimp, and their costumes are. They were horrifying, right? I mean, like, I remember just like constantly looking down at them, just like mortified at them. And they were probably just as terrified of me, whatever I was about to announce”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it can. We didn't think about that. And then so like a couple of days go by, we're like, you know, we need to be considerate because the customer service team, they've complained in the past that when we hold all hands, they can never quite disconnect from serving customers and really be present. So let's tell them that they can shut down chats. So we sent an update saying, furthermore, during this all hands, chats will be closed. We think we're doing them a favor. Unbeknownst to us, rumors are swirling that we're shutting down, something is really awful, or maybe somebody's buying MailChip or something. We had no idea. Dan and I have no idea walking into this all hands that people are basically... Completely terrified of what we're about to announce.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, for me as a founder, I was really good at that point running like a small squad. But when it got to hundreds of people, it got really hard for me. I remember a meeting that we called. We were doing these little all hands. We called them coffee hour meetings. They were maybe 20, 40 people. We'd meet on one floor and talk about everything we had planned. And we had stopped doing them for a while. And then one day my co-founder, Dan and I, we were like, let's have another coffee hour. We haven't done it in a while. Let's just get the band back together. We send out an email to everybody saying, hey, we haven't done this in a while, but we're going to have an all hands this Friday.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just like a bummer because the cereal, the quarter where we sponsored cereal did so amazingly well. It's hard to beat it every year. It's like, darn it, that's cereal. It just makes it too hard. Yeah, it was an amazing quarter for us.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the price went up. I'm sure it did. For season two. For season two, the price went up significantly. They wised up to it. But what a lucky break that was for us. And I mean, to this day, we look at our quarter four results and, you know,”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it really took our brand out of the entrepreneurial world and like the tech world. Like for the first time, we had people telling us that their mothers or grandmothers were asking them about MailChimp, like just mainstream America was asking us about MailChimp. And it was so crazy. Like you mentioned Saturday Night Live, they did a skit about serial. And at the end, they had a MailChimp ad as well. Yeah. And that night, you know, my Facebook messenger just lit up with all of my friends saying, oh my God, you're on Saturday Night Live.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And he's like, you remember that thing we agreed to sponsor? They sent the first draft. And here's what it sounds like when we listen to it. And he was like, the thing is, I think it's kind of funny and we should go with it. And I hesitated for just a second just thinking, should I demand that they actually pronounce my name correctly? I think I have a right. I think I have a right and nobody in their right minds would agree to this. And I said, you know what? Screw it. Go ahead and do it. And it just was a hit. It just went viral.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That delightful young woman mispronounced us and called us mail camp. And I remember Mark Di Christina, he walked into my office with this recording and he was kind of sheepish about it. He's saying like,”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was shockingly cheap. Yes. And furthermore, they said, you know, what do you want us to say for the, what do you call it, the intro? And we said, you do it. You know better. You know your audience better. We believe in your creative process. So we trusted them and they did this intro where they interviewed people on the sidewalks of New York.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Website, we didn't even sell that. It was just a gag. And apparently their phone lines were flooded. People kept calling in asking where they could get those hats for their cats and dogs. And this made an impression on the producer, I guess. So when they came up with cereal, they just said, who should we approach to run ads for this? I said, they said, well, let's just call it Mailchim because they had that quirky ad. And that's how they gave us first dibs.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. It wasn't like a big commercial success for us to sponsor it. But I do remember the producer said that we ran an ad during their podcast. And the ad was really quirky and weird. And it basically said something like, if you need EMO marketing or hats for cats and dogs, go to MailChimp. And that was because we had these funny little knit hats that they were meant for humans, but people started putting them on their dogs. And then people asked for cat hats, so we made smaller versions for the cats.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're catching on to the recurring theme. That is the story of Ben Chesnut, which is I basically force Gump my way into luck. So yeah, it was not a genius business move. We sponsored another podcast by the same people. I wish I could remember the name movement.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. But I mean, eventually we started to do that. We were sponsoring podcasts, public radio shows. And that is ultimately what led to us sponsoring serial.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think we should sponsor a podcast. And I thought it was just a weird idea. I never heard a podcast, but I said, screw it, here's some money and go sponsor podcasts. It was the Joe Rogan podcast. And so we were always like. Eventually we did get the budget to do things like TV. And, you know, they were okay. But they're not all they're cracked up to be.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had the typical kind of cafe press, you know, stick the logo in the upper left pocket area. And I had a designer said, you know, we can make this really, really cool. We can use these really designer t-shirts that feel really soft and comfortable. We'll make it something that people would want to wear. And so he created these. And then we decided, you know, what if we just had like a t-shirt giveaway? And it went viral. We did a t-shirt giveaway and it just went berserk on Twitter. And we always had really lucky breakthroughs on new media, new channels, new networks, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It seems like since we were constantly tinkering, we were always there when those channels got big. I still remember the day when someone told me one of our employees said, I listened to this thing called podcasts on my drive to work.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a pretty popular building in San Francisco. It's where Apple used to hold their WWDC events. And so crowds of people would gather outside of the Moscone Center up and down the street there waiting to get in. And they would use this new app called Instagram to take selfies. And what would they do? They would take a selfie with a winking chimpanzee in the background. So we kind of went viral that way. And then billboards just took off after that. We just started to use billboards in all kinds of cities after that.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that when their customers visit, I want them to see MailChimp's logo. I'm not proud to share this story. But, you know, fortunately, my staff just said, okay, we're not going to do that. They secretly went off and they said, but a billboard is an interesting idea. They're cheap. Nobody uses them anymore. And so they went off and they found one of those media companies in San Francisco who said, you know, we don't have any billboards across the street from this particular office, but we do have one on the top of this building right across from this building called Moscone. And we had no idea what that was. But we said, you know what? Screw it, let's just take it. And it turns out, you know, that's...”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had to be, I mean, we had to be super creative, right? So I remember one of our biggest competitors announcing that they were opening up an office in San Francisco to be, you know, with all of the other tech companies and show that they had a presence there. And I just remember being just like really jealous, you know, just being honest. And I remember telling my team, my marketing team want you to get a billboard across the street from their office. And all I want you to do is just put a big giant winking chimpanzee on it.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You lose a big anchor client. You can't pay your bills, and you have to lay people off. It's horrible. You have to depend on just a handful of customers. With the long tail, you know, we're serving thousands or millions of tiny customers who pay small amounts of money. You don't rely on anyone too much such that, you know, they're sort of too big to fail. We cannot survive without them. We're actually a very, very, much more resilient company serving the long tail.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saw the opportunity, we saw the inspiration too. It just felt more fulfilling. I mean, remember, we had a taste of serving big business. We knew what that was like. We knew that it would fill the wallet, but serving small businesses, serving the underdog was always our thing. And it just felt better. And yeah, the volume was there, you know, the idea of that long tail. We worked as an agency. We know what it's like when you lose a big client because of 9-11 or a pandemic or something. Yeah.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was funding that. We were totally self funded. Investors still came and they would say, you know, take our money and we'd say we don't know why we would need it. We're making plenty.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were trying new things, like fun branding stuff, trying this new thing called Twitter in 2008. Yeah, I'd say 2008-ish, 2000, 2010, I'd say, is when we think, yeah, this is real. This is going to be something.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, we were making good money. I wish I could remember the timeline. It's been 20 years, you know. It's all a blur now, but we were making probably 10 million, 15 million at the time. We were doing really, really well.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT