Thoughts After Three Years of Using Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email newsletter service I’m quite fond of. I’ve been using it on and off for three years now, and I suddenly felt like writing down my thoughts. Three years ago, I started a weekly newsletter called “Japanese Yaoya.”

Building an email newsletter service is no easy task—it involves event tracking, analytics, deliverability, retries, and optimizing for different email clients. That’s why Mailchimp, an early entrant in the market, is relatively stable and trusted by so many businesses today.

This article documents their startup story. Mailchimp originally started as a web design agency, helping various businesses solve their problems and grow. Later, they realized that small businesses universally needed email marketing services, so they gradually shifted their focus toward building an email newsletter product.

Mailchimp has been around for over a decade now. You can even still spot traces of Ember on their website, yet it remains an exceptionally great service to use.

What touched me the most is their pricing model. For up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month, it is completely free. Mind you, totally free—no trial period whatsoever.


This allowance is more than enough for a startup to acquire its initial user base and even start generating revenue. Mailchimp only starts charging once you exceed that threshold.

It’s almost as if they’re telling you: “Hey, I know you’re busy burning cash to acquire users and build a great product. Pay me once your company grows.”

While the pricing becomes a bit daunting once you cross into the paid tier (though perhaps manageable for a company), you can truly feel that Mailchimp has thoughtfully prepared all the tools you might need and anticipated every issue you might run into.

Taking the features I need as an example:

• Preview
• Newsletter editor
• Analytics and reporting
• Send test emails
• Subscriber management dashboard
• Scheduled sending



All of these can be easily viewed and configured on Mailchimp.

Comprehensive API and Documentation

If you’re an engineer, you can even use Mailchimp’s API to accomplish everything mentioned above: call APIs to auto-generate newsletter templates, create campaigns, and send them. This allows you to integrate it seamlessly with your own product and saves a massive amount of manual UI work.

Mailchimp’s REST API documentation is crystal clear, and the error messages are very easy to understand. I highly recommend trying it out; before you know it, everything is wired up. I really admire this product-building attitude and spirit, and I hope to become someone who can build things like this one day.

Finally, I’d like to end with the closing quote from that article:

“Everybody we talked to said, ‘You’re sitting on a gold mine, and if you pivot to enterprise, you could be huge,’” Mr. Chestnut said. “But something in our gut always said that didn’t feel right.”

Epilogue

To be honest, lately I’ve been feeling torn between learning product skills and deepening my technical skills. On one hand, I want to keep refining my technical expertise (regardless of the specific area); on the other hand, I want more experience in building products. Yet, these two don’t seem entirely mutually exclusive—building a product requires technical backing, and delving into technology is often about better solving problems encountered in a service.

Sigh, feeling so lost.