A few years ago MailChimp decided to take video seriously. Well, in the beginning, the videos themselves were never very serious, in fact, quite the opposite. But they have always served a very serious purpose, which is to help our customers learn how to use MailChimp, learn about new features and learn about our awesome customers.

But how do we know if these videos are doing their job? I get asked that a lot. Well, it’s all about the stats.

Graph of viewership, spiking the day we emailed the Wavelength video.

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I love Amazon Web Services and I’m always in awe of their frequent upgrades. Lots of exciting innovation there, it seems. But man, someone there needs to invest in a thesaurus (which are actually really cheap on Amazon). Has anyone else noticed they’re always so excited there? Here are some screenshots of the intros for almost all their emails I’ve received this year:

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I get these automatic alerts whenever Zappos gets new ugly shoes (I’ve blogged about my fondness for ugly shoes before). Anyway, I just noticed they changed their email alerts format from plain text to HTML.

Read the bullet points. Particularly, #2 and #5:

When you’re writing your emails (especially automated inventory alerts like this one) you can get away with boring, functional, corporate writing and nobody will mind. But can you get away with sneaking in a little fun? That’s a lot more challenging imho.

A couple weeks ago, it was time to renew our E&O insurance policy. Our provider asked us to give them a breakdown of how much business we do internationally. So we scanned our database of +900,000 users and printed out a report. We were shocked by what we saw. Turns out we have customers in 158 countries. Who knew?

I mean — don’t get me wrong. We built MailChimp in 2001 thinking/hoping people all over the world would use it one day. I mean, it is a web app and all. It was just never a big “international strategy” or anything. Just a web app. Over the years, countless “experts” advised that if we wanted to grow internationally, we’d need to hire sales people and setup offices in different countries. We’d just look at them like they were crazy. Why on earth would we spend the money to open an office somewhere, so that a sales person could get a few customers paying us $10 per month? How’s that scalable again? I can understand if MailChimp was some kind of really big expensive enterprise bloatware (but even then we’d probably try to make it self-serve bloatware).

Instead, we just focused on making a really powerful app that’s fun to use. And we’re constantly and curiously working on features to help our international customers. Some have worked, and some have flopped. Here’s the rundown, for anybody in the same situation…

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For 10 years, I’ve tried many times — and failed miserably — to come up with a tagline for our company. I’m not sure why it’s so hard. I guess when you build a company, you don’t want to commit to one single direction, even if it’s just for a simple marketing statement. You kinda want to keep things flexible. So I decided to just give up on taglines and slogans. Then one day, I saw a tweet from someone that said they loved MailChimp’s tagline: “Love what you do.”

What? I sure as heck didn’t remember approving that. I logged in to MailChimp and sure enough, there it was in our footer:

At first, I was a little worried because stuff like this is significant, and probably shouldn’t just pop up without someone telling me. But then again, it’s pretty spot-on, so I got over it. But I did think that as co-founder of this company, I should at least pretend to be angry and get something in return for this “rogue action…”

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