Boy, it's been busy. Time to catch up on what's been going on at MailChimp.
A.P.I.E. Awards!
We've always wanted to do some kind of "awards thing" for our customers. You know, give some kind of trophy for "best email design" or "best performing campaign." Except we never had an awesome enough prize.
Until now. We've asked the folks at Wildcat Championship Belts to make us some MailChimp Wrestling Belts. Yes, wrestling belts. They've been working on them for several months now, and they just arrived. Woo-hoo! Here's Bill, Redd, and Liza posing with the belts:
Each belt is leather and has 3 thick, heavy metal plates, coated in Gold, Silver, and Bronze. I swear they feel like they're about 10 pounds each. Look at the amazing detail:
As you can see, we're calling this the "Awesome Performance in Email Awards" (or "the Apie" for short). We're still putting together the details of the awards, but we'll keep you posted.
Just imagine yourself winning one of these babies and strutting around the office with it around your waist. RESPECT THE BELT.
Google Analytics API
 A little while back, we got a call from Google. Now, whenever Google contacts you, it can be a very good thing, or a very very bad thing, so we were a little nervous at first. Sorta like when Amazon called us after we ran this Mechanical Turk experiment.
Luckily, it turned out to be a good thing. They invited us to take part in their private beta program for the Google Analytics API. It was great getting inside access to the code, so we could improve on our Analytics360 plugin. We were even featured over in their Google Labs.
MailChimp v4.1.1 Live
We just launched MailChimp v4.1.1. This was supposed to be a bunch of really small, minor enhancements but we kept thinking of more stuff to throw in. You can read the full list of new features on our blog, but the main attractions are:
The Monkey Love is Spreading (Thanks!)
A little while ago, we introduced our MonkeyRewards referral program. If you refer a new customer to MailChimp, you both get rewarded with $30 in credits, plus 3 inbox inspections. We had no idea if it would catch on, so we launched it and then forgot about it.
We just recently checked the stats, and were amazed. Thank you everyone for referring so many new MailChimp customers our way!
We've inserted MonkeyRewards links in some of our own campaigns (just for kicks) and I gotta admit it's a pleasant surprise whenever I go to purchase email credits or inbox inspections, and it's free.
Inbox Inspector Price Reduction
Years ago, it was really hard to test your email designs. You had to be a rich fat cat with thousands of dollars worth of computers and software, and you had to setup different accounts with ISPs all over the globe to send your campaigns to. We didn't think it was fair to the little guy, so we came up with the whacky idea for the inbox inspector (BTW, our disdain for rich fat cats is what spawns most of the innovation here at MailChimp, like our patent-pending A/B split tool).
Where were we? Oh, inbox inspector. You just click one button, and we'll test your email design across dozens of the major email readers and spam filters (see a video demo). Boy has the idea caught on.
In fact, so many people are using the inbox inspector that we're now able to reduce prices dramatically. The price reduction is so big, they won't let us talk about them in public. Yes, I know that sounds cheezy, but it's actually something that the fat cats out there have demanded. So you'll need to log in to see the new pricing for inbox inspections. It's really cheap now, so there's no excuse not to check your campaigns before sending.
What's Ahead?
We've been growing exponentially ever since 2007. We think it's the innovation, power and flexible pricing that makes MailChimp stand out from the rest. And the monkey logo. Oh, and an economy that's forcing more and more companies to "shift budgets to cost-effective, ROI-driven marketing" helps too.
We're now at 80,000 users, managing over 230,000 customer lists. Our biggest city is London. That's bloody cool for a little company based in Atlanta, Georgia (they say "bloody" a lot in London, right?). But things are changing, and we're having to adapt.
We've always subscribed to the philosophy of, "build a profitable business first, then worry about scalability later."
Well, we think "later" is here now. So over the next few months, we'll be hatching a couple more innovative email marketing features, but mostly we'll be focused on scaling our operations. Every month this year we've added and/or replaced servers, just to keep up with the growth. We setup shop in a 2nd data center, moved assets to a CDN, and switched some processes from "instant" to "background processing." And that's just barely keeping up.
We've got plans (already underway) to seriously expand our server infrastructure for the growth that we anticipate in 2009. We've replaced all of our app servers with big, badonky-donk machines that have many times more power than we need right now. We've purchased a few hundred more delivery IP addresses, and are warming them up as we speak. Later this year, we plan to add some servers in Europe, and increase support for more time zones.
There's a little bit of a paradigm shift happening here. As a 100% organic bootstrapped startup, we've always focused on "just enough." Now, "just enough" is no longer enough and we're thinking much bigger.
Thank you,
The MailChimp Team
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MailChimp In The News
Co-Founder Dan Kurzius recently spoke at the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs meetup. Below, he demonstrates his deadly underhand kara-TEY chop:  photo from Mike Schinkel's flickr You may recall in a previous Meetup, co-founder Ben Chestnut demonstrated his deadly telekinetic soda can crushing powers:  photo from Mike Schinkel's flickr BTW, that's Sandi Solow from isendyouremail in the background. She's in a hypnotic trance from the "chi" emanating from Ben's fingers.  In June, Ben will be speaking (and demonstrating more deadly MailChimp powers) in Boston for the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2009. * We also do birthdays, weddings and bar mitzvahs.  MailChimp is co-sponsoring the Mashable Mixer Atlanta event with Regator. Amanda, our CTO (chief twitter officer) will be there, with MailChimp stuff to give away. More information about the event  MailChimp is now a part of the Small Business Web, along with Batchblue, Freshbooks, Shoeboxed, and Outright. Read about the sbweb over at: Social Computing Journal
New Faces @mailchimp: The MailChimp team keeps growing. We're up to 19 people now (and we're still hiring). Meet some of our newest members:  James - Design  Bill - Customer Svc  Liza - Compliance  Dougal - Programming Speaking of faces, you may have noticed more faces on the MailChimp Blog lately. Yep, we finally got so sick of Ben's writing, other MailChimpsters are contributing.  Juliana, our resident musician (well, one of them) wrote about using internet tools to communicate with your 1,000 true fans.  Josh, aka "The Red Baron" and resident video guy, posted some tips for customizing your email designs.
 Over 6,000 tweeple follow MailChimp on Twitter, and we follow them right back. It's a great way to listen to what customers are thinking (we were on twitter before people said they were on twitter before Oprah)  Join over 1,000 MailChimp fans on Facebook Welcome to the MailChimp Jungle, <<First Name>>.  Watch MailChimp tutorial videos on iTunes.
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