Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 267 posts

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#91

Post by specialp »

sb8244 wrote: post #38
jonstokes wrote: post #30

And then somehow they managed to totally disregard their customers' needs and screw everyone with the Mandrill changeover. Seriously, has everyone forgotten that fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713 I'll never trust them or use them again, after that. No way no how.

My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers. It is a very secretive company about most things related to way of business, so I can only speculate and from what I heard around town, but most of the customers there were not good sustainable fits. I've had extremely negative experiences in their customer support, but also extremely positive experiences through their co…

We weren't free tier spammers either and we paid them a good amount of money for Mandrill. They changed their TOS to make it not possible to send out bulk mailings without using their managed and much more expensive MailChimp service. We are not spammers, we are a non-profit that sends digest emails of our content to those who specifically subscribe and confirm. We also have our own mailing system so we do not need the features MailChimp provides, we just need well instrumented SMTP.

We then switched to Amazon SES but still have a bitter feeling about MailChimp and will move our services that are using the full MailChimp product. Some of the change was indeed to control spammers, but when you are forcing over enterprises sending 100's of thousands of emails without complaint, that starts crossing the line where you want to better monetize your product. Giving your customers 60 days to engineer a different solution after they invested in your product is not good business.

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#92

Post by guoqiang2 »

oftenwrong wrote: post #81
echelon wrote: post #37

The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenomina…

Is it practical to live in Atlanta without a car?

If you live and work in those areas: Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, Perimeter Mall, you don't need a car.

The public commute system in Atlanta called MARTA, http://itsmarta.com/rail-map.aspx have a good train station coverage in those area. Grocery stores (CVS, Publix, Walgreen) are mostly nearby. Walk or bike should be enough.

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#93

Post by chatmasta »

metafunctor wrote: post #65
lgleason wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Atlanta. It's a great place to work for a non-tech corporation, but the startup scene is so so. Most of the "tech" startups fall in to one of two categories. First, ones that will not get traction and are doing something that someone else is already doing or two high tech boiler room operations where they hire a few tech people and an army of sales types to try to sell it. Sadly tech people in Atlanta are seco…

Doing something that someone else is already doing is not necessarily a bad thing.

Indeed. It replaces one challenge with another. When you're the first to market, your primary challenge is to prove your business model and product market fit. When you're later to market, your challenge is to build a better product and execute a strategy better than your competitors.

Different teams excel at different challenges.

Personally I'd prefer a market with competitors. That means the market exists.

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#94

Post by vram22 »

samsolomon wrote: post #83
vram22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you send emails to a list that has a 20 percent or more bounce or unsubscribe rate, they'll freeze your account. Without giving you a chance to do anything to correct that? What if it is a genuine case of non- spam? e.g. 100% signed up, soon after, 20% decide this list is not for them. Sometimes that might happen.

When you unsubscribe from a Mailchimp email, they ask the recipient why they are unsubscribing. If the recipient marks "I never subscribed" or "this email is spam," the threshold is probably much lower than 20 percent. The software tries to decide if your emails were malicious. If your account is locked, then you have to call MailChimp and explain that your intentions weren't malicious and that you won't send anythin…

At least there's the possibility to get it unlocked. Clear now, thanks.

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#95

Post by wil421 »

bendmorris wrote: post #62
echelon wrote: post #37

The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenomina…

Earning $200k most places is pretty nice, but most sources show that in Atlanta almost no one is making that much. The average is less than half that. For most of us, moving to Atlanta would probably coincide with a sharp pay cut. If that wasn't the case, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

According to this CNN Money calculator you would only need to make $114k here to match a 200k salary on SF. Even less if you didn't want to live downtown. The housing costs are listed at 75% less than SF!

http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#96

Post by jasode »

maneesh wrote: post #58
jasode wrote: post #22

>In fact, it’s possible to create a huge tech company without taking venture capital, and without spending far beyond your means. It’s possible, in other words, to start a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship careening out of control. The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a bootstrapped business as "good" and (via his prosaic examples of restaurants and dog walking)…

How is the position of WhatsApp significantly different than that of Snapchat? WhatsApp didn't need outside funding to grow huge...

WhatsApp raised "outside funding" of $250k from ex-Yahoo employees before publicly launching the app in November 2009. They then got another $8 million in April 2011 from VC firm Sequoia Capital. However, Jan Koum was already talking to Jim Goetz of Sequoia a year prior to that (Spring 2010) and it took several months of negotiation to close the deal. I don't think people would call Whatsapp a "bootstrapped company".

Whatsapp did charge for the iOS App and also a 99 cent subscription but it's not clear if they were break-even or profitable from November 2009 to April 2011. Since they were a private company, I'm not sure if they have ever disclosed their financial details before the 2014 Facebook acquisition.

[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp/funding-rou...

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#97

Post by chatmasta »

hehheh wrote: post #61
echelon wrote: post #37

The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenomina…

How's the political climate? It doesn't look so great from my initial Googling: Georgia is one of the states suing over the transgender bathroom issue. Per Wikipedia Georgia doesn't include sexual orientation in their laws against employer discrimination. Anything else folks from SF might be concerned about?

You mean is it a giant bubble where everyone shares the same liberal views, reinforces each other, and ostracizes any dissenting opinions?

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#98

Post by clueless123 »

echelon wrote: post #37

The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenomina…

Tech people are lucky enough to have a choice where to work. Cheap rent and low cost of living are not enough to attract talent.. There always has to be a "something cool" on a city to be attractive.

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#99

Post by chatmasta »

mazeway wrote: post #40
jasode wrote: post #22

>In fact, it’s possible to create a huge tech company without taking venture capital, and without spending far beyond your means. It’s possible, in other words, to start a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship careening out of control. The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a bootstrapped business as "good" and (via his prosaic examples of restaurants and dog walking)…

But it then bears the question that if the so called "network effect" companies has any real value (that is to generate profit in the future) or are manifestations of a bubble?

It's pretty clear that they have value, or the entire VC industry would not exist.

At least, enough of them have value to pay for the ones that don't.

This is basic economics.

Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs

#100

Post by w1ntermute »

qwrusz wrote: post #78

The article seems to acknowledge Silicon Valley is good and prolific at startups to the point of metonymy. SV is the standard way, and so you get descriptions like "Un-Silicon Valley Way" instead of say the "Atlanta Way" (another startup from Atlanta called Coca-Cola appears to be doing OK too ;)) But why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the j…

> why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the jab on VCs?

VCs are easy to hate: they're rich, successful, powerful, and mostly straight, white men who had privileged upbringings.

Post reply on HN