Happy Summer!
Hi folks, this summer got off to a blazing hot start at MailChimp. No, literally. The building A/C konked out for a week, which is not a good thing in Atlanta's mid-90 degree weather. Still, the MailChimp team persevered and perspired through it all (well, we had lots of ice cream and popsicles), and we got v5.2 live. Which is also hot. Speaking of...
v5.2 is Live. Let's Get Social!
For the past 1.5 months, we've been secretly working on some exciting new social integrations. We really wanted to surprise our users on Monday the 12th, but while we were prepping for launch, we had to post some videos on the previous Friday. This caused some confusion with customers thinking everything was already live, which forced me to blog about it a little (you know, to "control the story"). Well. It kinda got outta control. First, AllFacebook covered it, then Mashable picked it up (which got 1,390 tweets so far, and was shared 693 times on Facebook).
One interesting thing (imho) about all that is how we didn't see a flood of traffic to the MailChimp.com website from Mashable or AllFacebook. It's not like there was a spike showing up in our analytics, or crashing our servers (thank goodness). Instead, all the discussion and sharing (especially for our video) was happening over on Facebook and Twitter. We had to actively monitor what was happening on the Mashable fan page, and the AllFacebook fan page, to judge overall sentiment and prepare for our launch (which, btw, hadn't even happened yet). There was almost no discussion about it on our blog until we launched the next week.
Which is kind of the point of all our new social features. The Social Web is changing everything, and we want our customers to be ready for it. In case you missed it, here are some Highlights from v5.2:
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MailChimp Facebook App - puts your MailChimp signup form on your fan page so you can collect subscribers directly from Facebook
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Facebook Like Button - Embed the new "Like" button inside your email campaigns (and we track total likes and re-likes)
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SocialPro Add-on - Connects your email list to the social graph. See who's following you on twitter, and segment by influence, age, gender and more.
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AutoConnect Templates - Link to your Etsy, iTunes, Yelp, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and twitter profiles to build beautiful emails automagically
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MailChimp Raplet for Gmail - Tells you if someone you're talking to in Gmail is also a member of your list, and how engaged they are.
We rolled out all these new features last week, and have been blogging about them ever since. Stroll over to the MailChimp Blog to catch up on all the announcements, or attend one of the upcoming v5.2 webinars, where we'll demo everything for you.
Emotional Design at MailChimp
There’s no denying that Jason Fried of 37 signals is pretty intense. He loves what he does, and is passionate about it. Recently, Jeffrey Zeldman mentioned MailChimp’s party pooper mode (specifically, this) to Jason during the Big Web Show, and we actually got a chuckle out of him.
See, he is human:
We're pretty serious about humor at MailChimp (see what I did there?). We just think more people will use MailChimp if we make it fun. Kinda sucks building something nobody uses, you know?
 Our lead UX dude, Aarron Walter, thinks a lot about this stuff. He wrote up a nice article about Emotional Interface Design over at ThinkVitamin. He'll also be speaking about Emotional UIs at An Event Apart in DC this September, and at Carsonified's Future of Web Apps in October. If you're attending either of those shows, be sure to check him out. But don't take him too seriously!
Chimpadeedee for Your Laptop
Remember our iPad app, Chimpadeedoo? It's a beautifully simple app that lets you collect emails from your storefront register, art fairs, trade shows, or at events. Or, as pictured above, in your super awesome pizza shop (thanks to NakedPizza for sending us those great photographs of the app working IRL).
 Anyway, we're getting lots of feedback for this app, and we want our customers to know that we're thrilled that people love it so much, and we're working on it actively (more on that later).
One of the most requested enhancements was to make a version of Chimpadeedoo that works on laptops, too. And since the nerds were kinda looking for an excuse to practice with Adobe AIR (for yet another product we'll be announcing soon), we bring you Chimpadeedee, a really simple, elegant way to let customers subscribe from a laptop or kiosk.
Events & Announcements
 We took that photo above to celebrate the swiss-miss blog turning 5. The entire company dressed in red, and went up to the roof to jump up and down. Not sure how many times they had to take this pic to get it right. And do not ask me why Blaine rolled up his shirt and exposed his bellybutton like that (Blaine, please report to the principal's office. Again). Anyway, if you follow the Swiss-Miss design blog, you'd know that we're big fans and we sponsor some of her events. So for the SwissMiss = 5 party, we sponsored her photo booth. Check it out on SmugMug -- our mascot Freddie actually made an appearance in some of the photos. And coincidentally, a couple MailChimpsters (Amy & Lance) were in the neighborhood, so they dropped by and took that pic over to the right.
Why were Amy and Lance in NYC? We were sponsoring the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. We weren't exhibiting or speaking or anything. It was really just an elaborate scheme to meet up with a bunch of our high volume clients, like Gawker Media, TED, Vera Wang, and a few others. Fun fact: New York is our 2nd largest city of customers behind London (and we'll be heading to London for FOWA). Before they left for NY, Amy actually gave away two tickets to Disrupt. What, you don't subscribe to the MarketingLab email newsletter, or follow the MarketingLab blog? That's why you missed out, and this guy went in your place.
New MailChimp Experts Directory
 Ever needed help designing or coding an HTML email? Ever wish you could find a programmer who knew his way around MailChimp's API (and who also lives in Venezuela)? Or maybe you have a few lists that are still hosted on some other email service provider and you need some help transitioning everything over to MailChimp.
Good news. We just re-launched our MailChimp Experts Directory. Now you can easily find an expert by budget, location, and expertise. If you're an expert, we made it easy to post and update your profile information. If you're an expert, and want to get listed, here's where you sign up. And be on the lookout for E.E.P (our new "Experts Exchange Program"), where MailChimp will discount your customer’s monthly fee by 50%, for up to six months or until half the cost of the project is reimbursed. Eep eep!
The MailChimp Family is Growing
In my February newsletter, I was all gushy about how our little family had grown to 40 people. As of today, I am told that we're at 52. Not too shabby for a company supporting hundreds of thousands of users. But I've been warned that once your company crosses the 50-employee mark, smaller "tribes" start to form, where people know their managers and department teammates more than they know me. In fact, it won't be long before employees forget who I am altogether. I can't have that. So I setup my own Myspace page, which will now be the default homescreen for everybody's computer here.
Any-whooo, here are some of the new peeps:
Valerie's our new privacy officer. As we expand globally (and develop new products), we'll need to be on top of all those complicated privacy laws everywhere. Can you spot Valerie in this photo? (hint: she's the best dressed cyclist)
Aaron recently joined our DesignLab. A few days into his job, his work is already winning awards.
We asked Eric (sitting on the left, above) to join MailChimp after we saw his Blackberry app, MiniChimp. At first, he thought we were sending him a cease-and-desist. I think he was kinda surprised to be getting a job offer. Above, he's talking to Chad, our Lead Engineer (MailChimp does not sit still, because Chad does not sit).
After growing to around 30 or 40 people, I decided that we really need a dedicated IT & Security person. Mainly because it's too hard to change everyone's home screen to my Myspace page all by myself. Welcome, Zack.
Did I mention MailChimp started up a new Mobile Lab? Drew (left) and Amro (right) are going to be rolling out a bunch more useful mobile apps soon. Simple apps like Chimpadeedoo, but that are not always directly tied to MailChimp, or even related to email marketing. Yet always useful for our customers. It's kinda hard for me to explain, so read this. They've got a new update to Chimpadeedoo coming already. I'll be writing more about the Mobile Lab soon.
The Mobile "wave" is so important to us, that we're giving every employee of MailChimp a smartphone of their choice, and covering their monthly fees. This announcement made everyone so happy, someone sent an internal email to the entire company that said, "I just shatted a tear." Um, we're sure he meant "shed a tear," but we were all laughing so hard (and sending around photo-chopped pictures of William Shatner), it really didn't matter.
Whew. Where was I? Oh yeah...
Allison is part of a covert team at MailChimp that I can neither confirm nor deny even exists.
Lance might also work on that team with Allison that may or may not exist.
Tracy & Noah have joined our compliance team, Sonya has joined to help us with business development and contracts, and Kaitlin, Floyd, and Matthew just joined our support team. They've been busy with so much MailChimp training, it's been hard getting single shots of them. So I got this shot of them all in training. Above: Bill, from our support team, giving new peeps a MailChimp walkthrough.
Finally, check out this video from Croatian band Super Brands that we posted over on The MailChimp Posterous (yeah, those are MailChimp t-shirts they're wearing!):
Our first reaction? Double rainbow! (etymology).
Eep eep,
Ben & the entire MailChimp family |
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