[HN Gopher] Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B
___________________________________________________________________
Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B
Author : marc__1
Score : 239 points
Date : 2021-09-13 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.investors.intuit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.investors.intuit.com)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| @&$#
|
| 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-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 wrote:
| Spoiler: only the two founders are making out like bandits.
| Mailchimp employees aren't given equity.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Wow, the salaries look very meh, especially considering
| there's no equity. They must have really good work-life
| balance or something.
| ckirksey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Oof. Hope there are some nice bonuses to go around, then.
|
| From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to work.
| But I guess most of that will change when the corporate
| overlords decend and start optimizing things.
| echelon wrote:
| > From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to
| work.
|
| Not in the scheme of things, especially with regard to
| comp. Plus, they had a shitty PHP stack that was a
| spaghetti web.
|
| I desperately tried to convince my Atlanta Mailchimp
| friends to quit and join me at a pre-IPO company. No
| takers. After our IPO, I made a life changing amount.
| Enough to retire before 30. They got paltry "bonuses" every
| year.
|
| Mailchimp had some weird cool aid that made people like
| working there despite there being plenty of better
| alternatives. I just wish I could have convinced my friends
| to leave.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Working at a company that actually makes and pays cash is
| better in all ways than a pre-IPO startup that _might_
| potentially go that route and earn you some money then.
|
| A company can just be a great place to work. No cool aid
| necessary.
| saos wrote:
| Yikes
| inshadows wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jtmcmc wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| uptown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I was impressed with how fun, simple and easy-to-use mailchimp
| seemed to be.
|
| Good to see that rewarded!
| zuhayeer wrote:
| 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-...
| songzme wrote:
| 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.
| kureikain wrote:
| I run an email forwarding services https://hanami.run so I can
| share quite a bit about this.
|
| Oppose with what many said, delivery to gmail.com is easisest.
| Now, where it's land is another question. Their spam filtering
| also very quick to learn.
|
| icloud and hotmail are the worst because no way to get
| unblocked. You just fill in the form and wait in the dark. If
| you got luckly enough, they work on your ticket and unblock the
| ip. And here is the thing, they outright reject connection so
| your email cannot event reach the spam inbox.
|
| So when launch a new IP, you should check on
| https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com and
| https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.a...
|
| Any host providers that are cheap are most liklely has their IP
| blocked by proofpoint or microsoft already.
|
| My strategy was to use server on Hetzner, then try to buy float
| IP then I can attach to any server. I have to try like 40
| before I was able to get a pair of IP that aren't blocked by
| proofpoint/outlook.
|
| Then I tried to warm up and build reputation by having a bunch
| of inbox email each others like 100 email per day then up to
| 1000 email per day.
|
| Even with that I got blocked by proofpoint for no reason time
| by time...
|
| So it's hard but with right strategy you can still do it. Just
| take more time and plan to build up and keep good reputation of
| your IPs.
| superasn wrote:
| Yes sending emails yourself is just as impossible as hosting a
| payment processor yourself.
|
| Even though all the docs and technology is there, you really
| can't do it without the help of a big company like Amazon due
| to the following reasons:
|
| - almost all residential ips are blocked.
|
| - most data center ips are mostly blocked because there are
| like 100s of blacklists and every blacklist has it's own unique
| way of getting delisted.
|
| - every big email provider has its own version of FBL and it's
| often a big black box. For example till date gmail won't even
| give Amazon access to its fbl(1)
|
| - spam filtering is not an exact science and while there are
| things like spf, dkim, dmarc etc to ensure the authenticity of
| message at the end of the day it all comes down to your
| reputation as a sender and managing it is nothing short of a
| full time job.
|
| (1) https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487
| warent wrote:
| yup. I use protonmail and even that apparently gets blocked
| by gmail recipients occasionally. Rolling your own, you're
| lucky to have anyone ever see your mail
| arosier wrote:
| Thanks for using protonmail, email deliverability is always
| a battle. Let us know if you see more of this
| https://protonmail.com/support-form
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Protonmail gets banned from email lists because their users
| tend to behave poorly.
| biztos wrote:
| I don't know how much it really counts as "like MailChimp" but
| Substack is relatively new, and seems to have found its way
| past the spam filters at least enough to get top-tier VC
| backing, so if I were trying to solve this problem I'd probably
| look at how they did it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack
| jdavis703 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| estreeper wrote:
| I hate to recommend what is just another service provider, but
| there are many cloud hosting providers that offer email sending
| (i.e. AWS, GCP, etc.) and dedicated email companies (Sendgrid,
| Mailgun, etc.). The cost to send email via any of these
| services is a tiny fraction of the amount you would pay to
| Mailchimp.
|
| The value in what Mailchimp does is not so much just sending
| email, but in all the things around it, like managing
| subscribers, tracking opens, easily creating nice-looking
| emails that look good in a variety of mail clients, etc.
|
| Contrary to some of the replies you've received here, it
| definitely is possible to run your own mail server with good
| deliverability, and we routinely did this for companies, even
| fairly small ones, physically on-prem and in datacenters, and
| cloud. It is not trivial, but far from impossible, and will
| likely involve communicating with a human when getting a static
| IP to find a good one. With that being said, I do not recommend
| you run your own mail server starting out, that is probably not
| the problem you are trying to solve.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| It's not easy but it's not that hard. I've bootstrapped many
| mail servers on AWS and others and, although the initial
| outgoing emails might be flagged as spam AND you may have to
| remove yourself from Spamhaus and others, it's been mostly
| painless.
| codazoda wrote:
| Even the state of Utah seems to be failing at this _. They
| recently started to snail mail vehicle registration reminders
| again. I signed up for email reminders on all my vehicles
| multiple times and I 've never received an email from the
| state. Apparently others haven't either because the state now
| has a massive problem with expired plates.
|
| _ My own assumption about why the system doesn't work.
| granshaw wrote:
| I imagine its a fairly difficult undertaking nowadays. Your
| best bet is to probably use Mailgun or similar for the actual
| sending and let them deal with the reputation management
| headaches
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]
| maxclark wrote:
| Wow congrats to Mailchimp
|
| Smart move by Intuit
|
| Odds this ends up like Mint?
| marklyon wrote:
| [sad trombone]
| voz_ wrote:
| Reminder that Intuit is an insidious company:
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
| bserge wrote:
| Does anyone not know that by now?
| kennywinker wrote:
| 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.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Anyone else still waiting on their 2020 refund?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| .. 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 wrote:
| _> .. 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 wrote:
| OK, fair point.
| yunesj wrote:
| 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.
| opinion-is-bad wrote:
| I find it very unlikely the IRS is not already writing tax
| software. They would need fairly sophisticated in-house
| software to evaluate returns, so it would just be the
| creation a new UI to be tax-payer facing. I would imagine all
| the required logic is already coded.
| occz wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mike_d wrote:
| It is more along the lines of "all your friends can
| excuse themselves to use the bathroom, why do you keep
| pissing yourself?"
| phepranto wrote:
| If all my friends jumped off a bridge they must've had a
| really good reason to, so yes I might as well.
|
| Same logic applies here. Just maybe, if everyone does it,
| we should consider it too.
| matthewmcg wrote:
| Except that in American political culture it's extremely
| common to argue that such and such thing is either
| impossible or will introduce a parade or horrible
| consequences. Those that make this argument depend on
| voters being ignorant of the existence of other countries
| that have successfully done that thing or not experienced
| those consequences or, when those examples are cited,
| rush to American exceptionalism or other baseless appeals
| to distinguish them.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Jumping off a cliff is obviously bad because of what
| happens when you hit the ground at the bottom. One click
| taxes seem a bit different.
| [deleted]
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _Filing taxes in the rest of the developed world is
| essentially a one-click process_
|
| I'm a little fed up of this canard. No. This is not the
| case. I've lived in the UK and had to do self assessment
| filing. It was not "essentially a one-click process". I
| have lived in Japan and filed taxes there. It was also not
| "essentially a one-click process".
|
| > _have all the information necessary to create such
| software (and so does the IRS)_
|
| No, it does not. A significant chunk of social programs are
| run in the US via the tax system (primarily through the
| forms of various credits) and are dependent on facts that
| the IRS does not know.
| rurp wrote:
| The proposals aren't that you _have_ to use a 1 click
| process, just that it 's the default starting point.
| People will of course need the ability to add deductions
| and other information if they so choose. But for someone
| who just needs to fill out a normal return with
| information that the IRS already has, and is already
| using to verify that return, why on earth shouldn't we
| just make that automatic?
|
| It's a massive waste of time to require millions of
| people needlessly fill out forms that the IRS already
| fills out on their end! It's a manufactured problem to
| benefit a scummy company.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Probably depends on the filer's situation.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| "Very reasonable" if you're prioritizing Intuit's profits
| above the interests of every U.S. taxpayer; Unreasonable if
| those priorities are reversed.
| gnulinux wrote:
| 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.
| divbzero wrote:
| What are the best Mailchimp alternatives for those who do not
| want to support Intuit in the future?
| mattwad wrote:
| Mailgun
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Gelob wrote:
| Sparkpost
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Lots of recommendations in this thread but not many
| descriptions about what the commenters like about their
| choice. Is it price? Usability? Deliverability?
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| Postmark
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Klaviyo is ok, way cheaper than braze
| fosron wrote:
| Mailerlite is good and way cheaper (p.s i do work for the
| parent company)
| donohoe wrote:
| Not sure about the best, but this seems to be the field
| depending on what your needs are... Active
| Campaign Boomtrain Campaign Monitor
| Cordial Amazon SES Eloqua Emma
| Experian Cheetahmail Exact Target Hubspot
| Maropost OneSignal PostUp Responsys
| Sailthru SeconStreet Sendgrid SparkPost
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| SendGrid is owned by Twilio btw
| gav wrote:
| Exact Target has been Salesforce Marketing Cloud since
| 2014.
| jrs235 wrote:
| PostMarkApp?
| michilehr wrote:
| Sendy
| jhammer wrote:
| Another option, for Mac users: Direct Mail
| (https://directmailmac.com). Disclosure: I work there.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Mailchimp isn't just email. They have ecomm, SMS, and some
| media companies. And they are a lot of SMB only CRM.
| LookAtThatBacon wrote:
| 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/
| candyman wrote:
| Probably very good news for younger, more independent platforms
| like ConvertKit.
| Zealotux wrote:
| 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?
| pirsquare wrote:
| Postmark is the gold standard for transactional emails. They
| have the best deliverability since they don't mix marketing
| emails.
| alberth wrote:
| No true anymore.
|
| Postmark has been doing bulk emailing since 2019.
|
| https://postmarkapp.com/blog/api-bulk-the-final-frontier
| orky56 wrote:
| Constant Contact is still independent. Its WYSIWYG is just fine
| and comes out a little cheaper for me.
| pirsquare wrote:
| 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-FA...
| jkestner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| [1] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing
|
| [2] https://emailoctopus.com/api-documentation
|
| [3] https://docs.bigmailer.io/reference#updatecontact
| throwawayboise wrote:
| HTML is for web pages. Email should be plain text.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| My partner's one-person service business sends out monthly
| availability emails to her small list of eager customers.
| Plain text would not suit her image and brand at all. You are
| saying she should send a plain text email with a link to a
| webpage? It sounds like you have no understanding of a
| business like hers.
| PostHeat wrote:
| I'm working to build a good WYSIWYG email editor at
| https://postheat.com/create
| matthewmcg wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Time to sort through my email for "Mailchimp" and unsubscribe
| before it happens I guess.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| MailChimp just sent me an email saying my account has been
| inactive and is about to be deleted.
|
| I say: let it die
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 ~$300MM.
|
| They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside
| funding.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| about 1000$ per user? is that the value of our privacy?
| probably because each user uploaded their address book?
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| Not quite - many of their customers are paying $$ a month for
| medium to large marketing sends. Their biggest customers
| probably count for 30% of the overall revenue.
|
| It's unusual seeing a company that sells goods and services
| for money be valued highly in silicon valley ;)
| gigatexal wrote:
| wow -- the founders are going to make out like bandits. No
| outside funding means no dilution.
| adventured wrote:
| They're certainly not hurting:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/profile/ben-chestnut/
|
| https://www.forbes.com/profile/dan-kurzius/
| williamsmj wrote:
| Not so for the employees
| https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1437516618553192449
| graeme wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| FredPret wrote:
| It's like funding in the sense that you can get an
| engineer who demands (for example) $200k in comp for
| $100k cash and $100k in stock options, saving the startup
| lots of cash in the beginning.
| elif wrote:
| This is accurate. TC was ~25% higher than I would get
| working in SF. Plus I got to invest it how I liked.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| What? You give stock as a way to manage retention of
| talent not funding. Mailchimp benefits from a market (GA)
| not saturated by competitive hiring.
| graeme wrote:
| Suppose you could pay an employee $200,000 or $150,000 +
| stock options.
|
| If the two options were rationally considered equal that
| would mean the missing $50,000 NPV of the employee's
| salary would be paid by future investors once they bought
| the shares. Either in an IPO or in this case by the
| acquiring company.
|
| Options are also a method to retain and incentivize
| talent, but they're certainly a form of funding.
| elif wrote:
| Above market salary is also a way to retain talent.
| dvt wrote:
| Ellen Pao still chasing clout, I see -- no better way than
| riling up the Twitter masses. _So what_ if employees have
| no equity? The business was profitable enough to pay them a
| fair market salary, it 's not like they were indentured
| servants. What stops them from building their own $12B
| exit?
|
| I hate this selective criticism; for goodness' sake, she
| was the CEO of _reddit_ -- a company with ethical
| controversies every other week, but she attacks MailChimp?
| Give me a break.
| arglebarglegar wrote:
| eh, her reddit tenure is questionable for many reasons
| (not just of her making)
| benatkin wrote:
| This isn't reddit. A reddit villain isn't automatically a
| HN villain. Also, she wasn't universally disliked there,
| and it's been a few years since she left.
| xwdv wrote:
| Doesn't matter. HN is simply a more well behaved Reddit
| with a higher average intelligence per user.
|
| From reading the room I'd say Ellen Pao is typically seen
| as a minor villain around here. _Definitely_ not a hero.
| notdang wrote:
| Doesn't is say "$300m of "employee transaction bonuses" (or
| 2.5% of the deal)" ?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be upset about this. If
| they chose to work for a "startup" which didn't offer
| incentive equity, they don't have equity. Presumably they
| had good salaries to compensate.
| majani wrote:
| The founders weren't really building the company with an
| exit as plan A, so stock option programs would have been a
| waste of time and full of lies.
| rexreed wrote:
| There are other ways of structuring bonus and non-salary
| compensation besides "equity" which honestly can get
| employees just as stuffed in an acquisition as firms
| without any equity. The silicon valley model is not the
| only way to frame success.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| alberth wrote:
| 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.
| bserge wrote:
| They're really into it heheheh
| xnx wrote:
| I think SMB is exactly what it's about. I wouldn't be surprised
| if they go for Squarespace or Wix next.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| My guess is SaaS to SMB.
|
| _Intuit Inc. is an American business that specializes in
| financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain
| View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. As of 2019,
| more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its
| activities within the United States.[3] Intuit 's products
| include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal
| finance app Mint and the small business accounting program
| QuickBooks._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit
| ricksunny wrote:
| I feel the same - Cue the pundits in the business press writing
| articles titled "Why the Intuit acquisition of Mailchimp makes
| sense" as if they would have predicted it years prior.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| Intuit has a stack to send invoices and receive payments from
| customers via email. Mailchimp has a stack that allows non-
| technical users to create complex emails, lists, track opens
| and responses. Together, this would allow a small business to
| build and monetize an email list of customers. They are
| creating an ecommerce channel via email to augment/compete with
| web stores.
| williamsmj wrote:
| Intuit want Mailchimp's data.
| adventured wrote:
| Maybe they'll lobby Congress to make it illegal to block
| spam.
| matthewowen wrote:
| i think that _is_ synergy.
|
| we often think of synergy being where you can apply your skill
| in solving problem Y to problem X even though the markets for
| those solutions are wildly different.
|
| but you can also think about the "thing" as being "selling to a
| particular category of customer". you can cross sell, bundle,
| gain some forms of economy of scale.
|
| this is basically the internet equivalent of WB Mason selling
| you toner, coffee, paper, chairs, and water coolers.
| [deleted]
| pirsquare wrote:
| they are moving into ecommerce. They've acquired tradegecko
| last yr and rebranded it as quickbooks commerce.
|
| Also, if you look at mailchimp recent product changes with
| addition of MC stores, they are positioning themselves to
| compete against ecommerce platforms. This could be planned
| beforehand to be part of the package for the acquisition.
| majani wrote:
| It's counter intuitive, but the best acquisitions are the ones
| with little synergy where the acquirer pretty much invests
| money in the acquiree and leaves them alone to continue as they
| were, but with a bigger budget.
| cdubzzz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why not Gmail?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| ?? 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 wrote:
| Use a standalone client if you want more HTML editing
| options.
| donohoe wrote:
| Oh god. Now I have a migration project on my hands.
| unixhero wrote:
| 12bees! Oh lord
| imwillofficial wrote:
| An interesting move by Intuit.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Big loss for small business. Mailchimp never received any venture
| capital. They focused on small customers.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-13 23:00 UTC)