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.

A big part of the using-video-on-your-website mix is the video hosting service that you use. We’re a long way from 2005 when there was either YouTube, or an .flv or .mov embedded in your webpage. Today’s video hosting landscape is more like a food court at the airport; Do I want some cheap fast food? Or some cheap fast food posing as cheap healthy food because its on flatbread? Or do I want to spring for that place that looks all dark and leathery with lots of TVs and the $18 hamburger? There are plenty of choices out there, but making the choice of who to go with is not always so cut and dry.

We’ve tried out more than our share of hosts these past few years. All have had their pros and cons, their sweet spots and their misgivings. But this year we’ve moved our content to a new home that looks finally like a place to set down some roots. And that place is Wistia.

Along with a long list of the necessary fundamentals, such as solid service and performance, good support, and an easy workflow, Wistia provides some fun and helpful performance metrics that help us know how our videos are performing, and where there may be room for improvement.

One of the minor miracles of the internet and the video hosting revolution is that you have access to an abundance of statistics that can show you, down to the second, what your viewing audience is reacting to, and how. If you aren’t convinced that this is truly miraculous just do a little reading about the complexity and cost of the Nielson rating system for TV shows (viewer diaries, “Home Units” and “people meters”!), then realize that with the internets we get at least the same amount of information as they do for a minute fraction of what that system cost in terms of time, money, and effort.

Recently we sent an email campaign to 1.2 million users that announced a new service called Wavelength. In that email, we linked to a video hosted on Wistia, which meant we could go in after the fact to see how it performed. With Wistia’s metrics, not only can we see the normal stuff like total loads, total views, and average engagement,

The basic video statistic summary.

but we also get to see these nifty little “heat maps” that show each viewers engagement in a neat new way. They also show where in the world the view is from, which is always pretty cool.

Some Wistia heat maps.

The heat maps display a hotter color within the timeline of your video as people scrub or rewind to rewatch any portion of the video. So in a loose sense, we can look for patterns that may tell us what particular points in the video people needed, or wanted to see again. We can also see gaps in the timeline if they skipped sections. Of course interpreting these graphs is a fuzzy science, but if there are similar spots across the viewing audience that see more heat on the map, we can look at that point in the video and consider what was either extra attention grabbing, or maybe extra confusing, our maybe something so incredibly cute that people just couldn’t help but to watch it over and over again.

In this case, there wasn’t a strong pattern of viewing a particular point over and over again, but there was a telltale pattern of fall-off around the 20 second mark. After watching the video again I can see that in the first 20 seconds or so we define what Wavelength does in general terms. After that we launch into more detail. So, many people watched the first twenty seconds and got the gist of it, then switched off.

Statistics showed that 82% of the video was watched on average, which is actually pretty darn good for a web video that is 1:30 in length. If that number was significantly lower, I would be more concerned about that dropoff pattern 20 seconds in. I would be inclined to go back and rework the script or the treatment to encourage viewers not to leave. How would I do it? Maybe have the narration hint at something coming up later in the video, or possibly add a surprising or entertaining moment which may rekindle interest and buy us a little more time with our viewer. As more people are used to seeing and watching video on the web, convincing them to click the play button is getting easier. Convincing them to stick with the video, however, is actually getting harder imho.

All these cool metrics can really help us do just that. It’s simple enough these days to go back into the video and retool it as needed, then export a new version and swap out the last one. This way we can continue to iterate, update, and improve our content as needed. And in my experience, it’s rare that something that is ultimately a subjective piece of creativity, such as a video, gets so much direct objective feedback from a broad audience. So I’ve really found these stats to be a huge help as I’ve continued to create and shape the videos we produce. They’ve also thickened my skin a good bit.

Another nice thing about Wistia is how we also get a lot of control over the look and features of the player.

Simple player customization tools.

Many hosts allow you only limited control over what color your frame and buttons are, and what controls you can include. It’s nice to finally have an easy way to make the player look as minimal as we want it to and to be able to color it to match the palette of the page it will live in. It would have been a big bummer to have a bunch of big, off-color controls covering up the eyes and our pretty new logo in the poster frame of the Wavelength video.

As it so happens, we first learned about Wistia because they contacted us a few years ago when developing their own API thingy between MailChimp and Wistia. It allows you to integrate your video with your email campaign, which is pretty cool . And MailChimp has a Wistia merge tag which allows you to integrate a Wistia video of your own into your email newsletter and take advantage of the awesome statistics. Read about it here.  Ben also just wrote a blogpost about how we allow you to customize and automate your video merge tags.  Pretty simple stuff to do, but as you can see below, it may make waves if you actually use it:

Clickmap of an email newsletter.

This is a MailChimp click map of the email Ben sent out announcing Wavelength. As you can see, click rates on the text links averaged around 4-8 %, but that video staring atcha there got a whopping 62.8% of all the clicks. Maybe it’s that hypnotic eye power getting people to watch (I have a proprietary “hypnotic eye power” filter; merge tag coming soon!), or maybe it’s people’s inclination these days to prefer watching a quick video instead of, or in addition to, reading about something. Whatever it is, it’s these insightful statistics that help prove this video thing is worth keeping our eyes on.

Sometimes they’re a little more excited than normal:

At first, I thought the summer heat in June and July took away all their excitement. But you can see on the next line they snuck a little excitement back in:

They were just “pleased” in June:

Honestly, for a frequent system alert email like this, they know what they’re doing. A simple little logo, plus some text is all they really need, and is all we’d put up with. If the started getting too fancy-schmancy with their designs, I think people would get tired of them really fast. These seem to just fly under the radar. In fact, after watching them send these all year, it motivated me to stay in touch with our own customers (a little) more often with our System Alerts. But since they do send so frequently, it makes it a lot easier to spot little details like this. I started to notice it about halfway through the year, and decided to just keep checking to see if they’d ever change it up. At this point, I hope they don’t. It’s grown on me, and I think it just wouldn’t be the same if they weren’t excited anymore.

Update: Be sure to check out the awesome comment from Amazon’s Jeff Bar below. I was truly honored (and excited) to see he took the time to reply to my silliness.

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.

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…

Translated opt-in process:

All of our users, no matter where they’re from, can speak English. We’ve never had to translate the entire web app for them. But they’re often setting up MailChimp so their customers can sign up to their lists. And their customers often don’t speak a word of English. So it’s important that our opt-in forms can be translated to their language. Starting in 2008, we’ve translated our entire opt-in process to +30 different languages. This has worked decently well, though there are tiny bits and pieces (like some buttons and some tucked away screens) that keep popping up un-translated. Some users have asked us why we don’t just allow them to totally translate the entire opt-in process exactly as they please. Technically, you can use our API to control much of the opt-in experience. But as for our built-in signup process, we’ve historically maintained tight control over the content in order to prevent abuse (everything gets abused). But as our abuse prevention gets smarter, we can open up more processes in a smart, controlled manner. We making plans to open up the opt-in process so it can be translated by our users. You can expect those changes in the next couple months.

Meantime, see: How Do I Translate My Signup Form and Opt-in Process?

Google Translate Merge Tags

In October 2008, we announced our Google Translate merge tags, which lets you insert “translate this” links into your email campaigns. With one click, your readers can read a translated version of your email in their browser.

We also added Google Translation options to our built-in email archive toolbar.

Localized Humor

In March 2009, we added some localized humor to our geomaps. It’s a delightful surprise for our customers when they hover over their country and see a little of their local slang. And it was fun getting feedback from all our users for this little feature. On this note, we also added a few “additional” languages to our translation options, including:

• Chimplish
• Redneck
• Elmer Fudd

Teeny-Tiny Flags

To help our users understand how many international subscribers they have, we added some fun little flags to Chimp Chatter on the Dashboard. The flags are under the avatars, and are a quick reminder of where all your readers are coming from:

Multilingual Webinars

Just as we’ve always felt international sales teams aren’t efficient or scalable, we’ve never felt the need to host local sales seminars and events. Not when you can host a webinar and teach hundreds of attendees online in one fell (and fun) swoop. So a while back we formed a webinar team, built a whisper room, and started holding daily webinars. Slowly but surely, the team has been introducing webinars in different languages (I recently walked past the Whisper Room and swore I heard a German session taking place). The challenge here will be dealing with timezones, so most of these sessions are pre-recorded for now.

Pre-populated Country Fields

This one might seem obvious and simple now in hindsight. Back when we launched our visual signup form builder in early 2009, we thought it was pretty cool how you could build something like a drop down field. Heh, those were the days. Soon after, people began demanding pre-populated form fields, because it was a complete P.I.T.A. to build all 50 US states inside your dropdown. And it was a real pain to build all ~200(ish) countries. So we launched pre-populated country (among others) fields in July 2010. We also broke the country field out so that it could be added to your forms separately, instead of inside a big giant “address” field.

Autotranslate Campaigns & Signup forms

This was by far our most controversial feature. We built it out of love, but got sooo much hatred in return. With this option enabled, whenever people use your opt-in forms to sign up for your list, we can detect their browser, and we can detect the default language setting for their browser. So if their language is Korean for example, we can assume that Korean is their preferred language. So far so good.

Then, when you send your campaign, we automatically translated it to Korean using Google Translate. Of course machine language translations are never perfect, so recipients could always view the online version of their campaigns to revert back to the original language. Cool huh?

No. I’ve never received so much hate mail. Especially from the Germans. Es tut mir leid?

Which is an excellent segue to…

Straker Human Translation Integration

Our $1 million Integration Fund has resulted in all kinds of amazing integrations, including this “human translation plugin” from Straker. They’re a company that uses a very unique combination of machine and human power to translate content very efficiently. Their integration with MailChimp allows you to sync over your campaigns, have them translated to multiple languages (up to 100 languages and dialects), then saved back into your MailChimp account. In case you missed the news, here’s the press release. My meeting with the guy from Straker was one of my most memorable. He’s spent a ton of time in both Australia and Ireland, and had developed a very unique accent to prove it. It’s a great integration, especially for larger companies looking to consolidate all their translation efforts (websites, email, everything) into one vendor.

2011: Time To Get A Little More Serious

Late last year, our international user base seemed to start growing really fast. As a result, we started to get a loooot more feedback about all the tiny little details inside our app that are just not that friendly for users outside of the US (we’re even sensitive now about saying “outside the US”). For example, there were a few places in our app where we asked for ZIP codes or “State” or other things that some countries just don’t use. We also ran into situations where entire countries weren’t even listed in our contact forms. Things like this can ruin the experience for people, and that bugs the heck out of us.

We also started to attend more conferences and events around the world, and started meeting our customers. Time and time again, they told us, “We love MailChimp, but you’ve got this one little annoying thing for customers who aren’t in the US…”

So we hired someone in London. Not to act as a sales person or customer service person, but as a UX researcher for our international users. She’s been hosting small meet-ups and conducting usability studies with our customers to find out how they’re using MailChimp, and to collect general feedback. She sets up a laptop and records customers using MailChimp to do their work. Her videos are fascinating. Watching a customer in Amsterdam drinking a beer while using MailChimp and talking about how he “likes the vocabulary of MailChimp” and then points out where he gets a little confused or frustrated is extremely valuable. Here’s one of the first changes we made as a result of our researcher’s work.

Local Currency

We’ve also had to invest in changing our credit card processing provider. The one we were using was absolutely great, but it was time to move on. This has been a bumpy road, to say the least. The first provider we spoke with had what looked like an awesome product. Their sales team showed us all kinds of great functionality, so we were ready to get started. After signing an agreement, we became aware that the demo they gave wasn’t entirely true. Some key functionality was missing, and wouldn’t be available until a later release. Talk about infuriating. This seriously impacted our timeline, so we moved on and found a new provider. To make things more fun, the “bait-and-switch provider” is now trying to demand  a large “unauthorized termination fee” from us. Kind of a pathetic business practice if you ask me, but I’m a stubborn SOB and plan to fight back just on principle (even if it costs me more than the original bill). If you’re looking into credit card processors, my advice is not to sign any contracts or believe any sales people or even engineers, until you’ve been given access to their API. Anywhooooo, we’ve signed on with a new service (from a very large bank) and have been testing them for the last month with all our orders. We’re good to go, and will be introducing localized currency billing very soon.

It’s interesting the kind of changes we have to make, just to the transactional email receipts. Users in some countries require the word “invoice” instead of “receipt” (which would confuse US customers who’ve already paid) while others require VAT info, and then there’s the exchange rate at the time of purchase, the exchange rate at the time of refund, and on and on down the rabbit hole:

Where There’s A Will…

We’ve also hired Williams Castillo (cuh-STEE-yo for the unworldly blokes like me), a programmer and long time MailChimp customer from Venezuela. If you’ve ever participated in any discussion with us in the Jungle, the API forums, or our blog, you’ve probably bumped into Will. One day, he approached us with a question about our API. We have a few limitations to our API in order to prevent abuse, and his questions were centered around those limitations.  At first, his questions raised some red flags here. So we talked to him more, and offered to fly him over to Atlanta to discuss in more detail (mostly because our curiosity was killing us). Turns out he was basically building a Spanish version of MailChimp on top of our API, and then reselling it to his customers in Venezuela.  He gave us a demo, and we were so impressed we gave him an offer to join us full time in order to help us build out MailChimp for our Spanish-speaking customers around the world. He and his family just moved here last month, and he’s diving in to the MailChimp code as we speak. Here’s Will, on his first day here:

We’re so proud to have him join the MailChimp family (and to have actually completed the giant pile of paperwork from the government), we celebrated by catering lunch with burritos. Yes, I realize burritos have absolutely nothing to do with Venezuela, but it seemed closer than Korean tacos. Mmmmm, Korean tacoooos.

“Why Not Just Crowdsource It?”

I’ve received a lot of advice and questions (and offers) from people who think localization is a really dead simple process, and all I have to do is crowd source the translation. When I tell them I prefer to handle this in-house, they ask me why I’d spend that kind of money. My short answer is, “Um, because I care?”

Protecting the Brand
Okay, don’t get me wrong. If all we had was a content site, I might be more willing to “just crowd source” the translation. But we’ve got a full blown web app here. I’ve often said it’s more like an entire suite of web apps (we’ve got design tools, database management, reporting, word processing, image hosting, billing, testing tools, and on and on). And maintaining MailChimp’s brand is kind of important to me. Our little mascot’s personality might not translate perfectly to every language, but our mission to make work a little more fun should always be evident. There’s no way we’d trust all that to some 3rd party. There will be some places where we can use tools and crowd sourcing, but it won’t be our primary method.

Protecting Innovation
We’ve consciously delayed localizing our app for so long because we really, really like innovating. Fast. In my experience, hitting the “pause” button to wait for features to be translated is extremely frustrating. Until we got a handle on our growth curve, and got our dev cycle down to a very good routine, I think it would’ve been suicide to jump into that internationalization rabbit hole (here’s that link again).

Protecting the Email Ecosystem
There’s also the abuse issue. We care a lot about the email ecosystem. We invest a ton of money and time protecting it. The last thing I want to do is open the flood gates for international users to send their campaigns before we have the ability to properly monitor their outgoing campaigns. Our internal abuse monitoring dashboards (also an entire suite of apps) has to be modified (not to mention the abuse team would need to adapt accordingly, and add multilingual staff). This is going to take some serious work, but as they say, “no pain, no gain.”

We’re Big in Turkmenistan

When we started MailChimp, we always thought globally. We never even tried to “own” the local market (Atlanta). Driving down the street to pitch MailChimp to a local business seemed like an insane waste of time and gas, when companies could just hop online and pay us $10 with their credit card. We saw some of our competitors hiring big expensive sales forces and getting enterprise clients that paid tens of thousands of dollars per month. It was tempting to go down that path (and would’ve looked really impressive to family and friends and all), but we always said “we need to think bigger.” We think it’s much bigger and much more scalable (ahem, and challenging as it turns out) to have tons of users paying you small amounts instead of a handful of users paying you large amounts. Instead of investing in a giant sales team, we invested in making our app better (also our API). It’s hard work. I haven’t left my office in 10 years. But it’s totally worth it when you look at the numbers and see you’ve got customers as far away as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and I never had to hop on Skype to talk to them about being their “email marketing partner.” Not bad for a little Atlanta-based company. Hell, just between you and me — I don’t even have a passport.

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…”

So I marched down to talk to our DesignLab and marketing group, and told them that if they were going to come up with this sorta stuff without consulting with me, they now have to make me a coloring book, called “Love What You Do.” I told them that the tagline, while obviously written to appeal to our creative customers, has deeper meaning and is more appropriate than they might think. At MailChimp, we love what we do, and we try to make our work fun and innovative. Nowadays, since people are always wired and connected and working, we figure we might as well make work enjoyable for people (even if they’re working on something like email marketing). So it’s only fitting that we create a coloring book about little baby Freddie Chimpenheimer, loving all the little, everyday things in life.

The DesignLab staff looked at me in a weird, confused kinda way, but then they smiled and got to work.

Here’s the finished product:

They even added it to the Resources section of our website, among all the different email marketing best practices guides:

I think it fits in well! And it shows what makes us different: we’re willing to have fun with this stuff.

The coloring book is available for free as a PDF download, but we’ve also printed a couple thousand of them and will be sending them to random customers. Our support and compliance teams are always sending off random gifts to customers (t-shirts, monkey hats, cat hats, plushies, and ninja sticker postcards). Usually, we send swag to customers who make us chuckle in live chat or email, or just as a surprise to make someone smile (like this guy, or this dude). Some customers have asked if we sell any of our swag, and we do realize people want to buy extras for spouses and co-workers, but we think that would make them less fun for us. We love giving them away as gifts!

Oh, remember that weird look from our designers that I mentioned earlier? I’ve learned over the years that weird, awkward silences from employees usually mean I’ve said something totally stupid, and that those people are just being nice to me. It’s these awkward silences that keep me up at night: I replay what I said over and over again, trying to figure out what I said wrong. Anyway. I just now realized that since the tagline appeared in our app first, it must’ve been our UX team that did this. So I pinged Aarron Walter, and sure enough:

Ha. So I guess our DesignLab and Marketing teams didn’t have anything to do with this tagline, but they wanted to do a coloring book anyway, and just ran with it. And the fact that our head of UX would care so much about our ethos that he’d work this line into our app? I love what I do.

We’ve been sending Josh, our video guy, around the world to do these mini-documentaries on MailChimp customers (here’s his explanation). The most recent story is for Vice UK. At first, I thought Vice was just another edgy, NSFW website (which I likey). Turns out it’s this huge CNN-like media company. They’re a record label, a magazine, a music venue, a creative agency, and an online network. They’ve got people in 30 countries, and serve clients like Intel. And they’re growing. Fast.

The interview is pretty hilarious, but it’s actually an awesome business story (especially for creatives and designful companies). How do you grow fast, scale without imploding, stay creative, make money without selling out, and generally not piss off too many people? You work your butt off, embrace chaos, and never get complacent.

Some of my favorite quotes from Andy Capper, their global editor:

Starting around 2:55 -”Feels like a constant state of experimentation…everything changes every 2 seconds…that’s how it’s always felt…sometimes you get kids who work for us — they can’t take the fact that it’s always changing…and all of a sudden there’s a big panic…it’s fun…I think the reason for our success has been that we do work all the time, almost 7 days a week. Even when we’re not working, we’re kind of working…and that’s the only way you can make any business like this succeed these days…I usually talk too fast for Americans…

4:33 – Our opinion has always been to run away from whenever there’s a gang of people forming around you, like a movement, I think it’s good to run away from that..as much as possible…otherwise you get pinned in a corner.

7:31 - It’s fun…it’s just good to get around more and like feeling of world domination, but in a cute way. We’re trying to appear to the world like we’re a respectable company.

Here’s the full interview: Vice UK: Go Big Or Go Home

Related:

• “The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.” - Elizabeth Taylor (wikiquote)

Hi MailChimp,

My name is [NAME] and I am the Marketing Director of a Group Buying site in [COUNTRY] ([COMPANYNAME]).

I am currently looking to upgrade our Email Marketing System and am in conversations with [COMPETING ESP]. I have never used [COMPETING ESP] and have used MailChimp.

[COMPETING ESP] seem to think that they can gaurantee 20% better deliverability than MailChimp. Is that something you can disprove? How can you disprove this (e.g. comparison of technology, types of examples)

We will be sending many emails by the end of the year (in excess of 200 million). Can you guys effectively handle this type of volume?

This is the response that I proposed:

We published this page over here to show that so long as you, the sender, follow best practices, MailChimp’s infrastructure can help you achieve 99% (and sometimes 100%) delivery to the inbox. But if [COMPETING ESP] can actually get you 120% to the inbox, then wow. By all means, you should use them.

and that is why I am not on the front lines answering questions anymore. In fact, I’m not sure how I’m still allowed to answer comments on this blog.

Fortunately, our support team has a better, more professional response to this question (hyperlinks and emphasis below are added by me):

Hello [NAME],

Any email marketer can technically obtain 100% delivery so long as the following is in place:

• Data is collected through confirmable opt-in methods.  There are no assumptions about permission in play. (The account owners responsibility)
• Content sent is 100% spam filter safe. (The account owners responsibility, which we can help with this and this)
• Your delivery solution dynamically monitors and polices its environment for misuse and aggressively closes accounts that create situations that could harm other accounts within the system. (The ESP’s responsibility)

This is the technology that we use to police our service for bad apples:

http://www.mailchimp.com/omnivore/ (an overview)

http://blog.mailchimp.com/project-omnivore-declassified/ (more technical background)

You might want to review the account shut down stats for [COMPETING ESP] for insight into their protection measures.

This page provides additional deliverability information with regards to our service (including our definition of the word, and the seed list we use):

http://mailchimp.com/about/deliverability/

The delivery graphs there give examples of how someone that moves to our service, and who follow best practices outlined above, can quickly obtain 100% deliverability. There is a sample group buying site there, which you might find useful, as well as this article about daily senders, by someone on our delivery team.

Our system currently sends on average over 1 billion emails a month. So 200 million annually is not at all a problem.

I think, in a nutshell, the answer is that “Most well-established ESPs have gotten their infrastructure set up and proactively monitored to allow for extremely good delivery to the inbox. The rest is up to the sender. And if the sender does screw something up, it’s the ESPs responsibility to purge them from the system with extreme prejudice (whenever gentle hints and educational intervention are not enough).”

Other deliverability related stuff you may be interested in:

• How To Avoid Spam Filters (free guide)
• Email Delivery for Geeks (free guide)
• Warning Signs That Your Client is Spamming (free guide)
• Priority Inboxes and Measuring Engagement
• Daily Senders and Deliverability

Mario was super nice to give us his blessing for the outage:

We dedicated this song on blip.fm to Joe:

Hopefully, they’re not planning to wear matching shirts out together or anything:

Whenever your company sends transactional emails, does anyone watch for replies?

If not, you could be missing out on some good fun (and maybe losing a few precious Gmail engagement points).

I won’t bore you with more blah-blah. Just wanted to show you how we do data visualization around here. Instead of boring bar graphs and pie charts, this screen was projected up on our wall at MailChimp HQ:

Technically, I guess it’s still a pie chart. Anyway, as we chipped away at our FTS goal, the pizza got smaller and smaller…

Last week, when we hit the maximum bonus amount (15% for each employee) the screen switched from this:

to this:

That’s an animation of Ken, from Street Fighter, celebrating our victory. A closer view of the design:

And if you have no idea who Ken is, here ya go. We try to foster creativity and innovation in every department here at MailChimp. Keeps the brain juices flowing. So the way our dev team combined forces with our design team to do something experimental like this just makes me all giddy. They had me at pizza, but the surprise ending was super cool. Read more about the techie details over at the DesignLab blog.

Related:

If you’re into this sorta thing, check out Panic Software’s beautiful office dashboard:

The office dashboard at Panic Software is pretty awesome

What I find interesting is not so much how someone at MailChimp put my face on one of the dancing elves (though I did get a chuckle out of my breakdance routine), but that this year, there’s a “Report for Abuse” link in the upper left corner.

I don’t recall that being on last year’s Elf thing.

This reminds me. While doing research for a presentation on “The Abuse of Freemium” early this year, I was amazed at how many places I found “report abuse” links. I put together this slide:

The point I was trying to make was that if you’re a startup that’s building a web app, you’re probably not thinking all that much about abuse in the early stages. You know it’s inevitable, but your attitude is probably, “we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

Rightfully so. You can’t let fear get the best of you.

But you will cross that bridge.

By the way, this is what the bridge actually looks like:

You’ll probably need to invest in something slightly more sophisticated than a machete though.