How a Web Designer Who Hated His Freelance Projects Built Mailchimp in His Spare Time and Sold It for $12 Billion Without Taking a Dollar of Funding
Two web designers in Atlanta lost their jobs on the same day in 2000. They started a web design agency. They hated the most repetitive part of the work. So they built a tool to automate it. They called it Mailchimp. They never raised a dollar of outside capital. They never answered to a board. They kept the monkey even when the instinct was to kill it. In September 2021, Intuit paid $12 billion for 100 percent of something two people built from a freelancer's annoyance. This playbook breaks down every decision in that twenty-year sequence and what you can take from it starting this week.
In 2000, two web designers in Atlanta lost their jobs on the same day.
Ben Chestnut had been working at Cox Interactive Media in Atlanta, building digital products for corporate clients. His colleague Dan Kurzius had bluffed his way into the job by overstating his coding abilities and had been learning on the fly ever since. They were both good at their work. Neither of them loved it.
When the dot-com bust arrived and Cox shut down the department, they both found themselves out on the street on the same afternoon.
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Two web designers in Atlanta lost their jobs on the same day in 2000. They started a web design agency. They hated the most repetitive part of the work. So they built a tool to automate it. They called it Mailchimp. They never raised a dollar of outside capital. They never answered to a board. They kept the monkey even when the instinct was to kill it. In September 2021, Intuit paid $12 billion for 100 percent of something two people built from a freelancer's annoyance. This playbook breaks down every decision in that twenty-year sequence and what you can take from it starting this week.
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