After three years of using mailchimp experience

Mailchimp is an email marketing service that I really enjoy using; I've been on and off with it for three years, and I suddenly felt compelled to write about it. Three years ago, I created a weekly newsletter called "Japanese Grocery."

Creating an email marketing service isn't easy. It involves event tracking, data statistics, ensuring deliverability, retries, and optimizing for different clients, among other things. That's why Mailchimp, which entered the market early on, is relatively stable and is used by many businesses today.

This article documents their entrepreneurial journey. Mailchimp originally started as a freelance agency, helping various businesses solve their problems and grow. They later discovered that many small businesses had a need for newsletters, which led them to gradually shift their focus to providing email marketing services.

Now, Mailchimp has been around for over 10 years, and you can still see traces of Ember on their website, but it remains an incredibly useful service.

What touches me the most is their pricing plan: for subscribers under 2,000 and a monthly limit of 10,000 emails, it’s completely free—yes, completely free, with no trial period.


This allowance is sufficient for a startup to build its first user base and even start generating revenue. Mailchimp only starts charging once you exceed this allowance.

It’s almost as if they’re saying, “Hey, I know you’re busy burning cash to acquire users and building an excellent product; just pay me once your company is thriving.”

Although the pricing after entering the paid phase can be a bit daunting (though it might not be too bad for companies), you can really feel that Mailchimp is serious about preparing solutions for the problems you might encounter and the tools you might need.

For the features I require:

• Preview
• Newsletter editor
• View statistics
• Send test newsletters
• Manage subscribers in the backend
• Schedule sending



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

Comprehensive API and Documentation

If you’re an engineer, you can even leverage the Mailchimp API to accomplish the aforementioned tasks. You can use the API to automatically generate newsletter templates, create campaigns, and send them, allowing you to integrate it with your own product and save a lot of manual UI operation time.

Mailchimp's REST API documentation is very clear and easy to understand, and the error messages are straightforward. I highly recommend giving it a try; you might find it surprisingly seamless to integrate. I really admire the attitude and spirit behind their product development, and I hope to embody that role someday myself.

In conclusion, I’d like to end with the last paragraph of the 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