On September 1st, 2009 we announced that MailChimp was going freemium. On that day, we had 85,000 users. Now, slightly more than a year later, we have more than 450,000 users. We grew our user base five times in one year.

Earlier this month, we actually doubled our freemium plan from 500 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers. So now, even more people can take advantage of MailChimp’s powerful email marketing and social features. We had been averaging around 30,000 new users per month (about 1,000 per day), but since we increased the freemium plan this month, we’re seeing +2,000 new user days.

Another thing that’s increased dramatically since going freemium is the number of lunches I’m invited to; seems entrepreneurs and VCs really want to “pick my brain” about how freemium is doing for us. Usually, it’s because they think freemium might be that silver bullet they’ve been searching for. It can be, but you’ve really gotta be careful not to point that bullet at yourself…

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I was reading this article on Mashable:

A World Without Email: One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace

about Luis Suarez, who works remotely for IBM (in the Canary Islands!), and who has used social media to reduce 90% of the email in his inbox. It’s not a doom-and-gloom, “email is dead” kind of story. He basically gives common sense advice about how you don’t have to use email for everything for Pete’s sake. For example, let’s share files on intranets, not our inboxes. Let’s update each other using twitter, or if you’re at work, yammer. Share your funny YouTube clips on Facebook, please. Just keep as much junk out of the inbox as you can, but keep the personal, human communications that you truly care about.

Look closely at some of his advice on how to get to inbox nirvana. I can’t help but compare his advice to what’s happening with Gmail Priority and Hotmail’s Sweep feature…

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I just came across a fascinating, albeit old, article about influencers: Is the Tipping Point Toast?

and it reminded me of a blog post I was supposed to write about this topic. Better late than never. Here goes…

If you’re from the marketing world, you know Seth Godin. He is what marketers call “an influencer.”

You probably dream of the day he blogs about you or puts you in one of his books, because that kind of endorsement means instant fame and profit for you, right? Maybe you send him emails or jokes or interesting articles to get his attention (guilty as charged). It doesn’t work. Influencers really don’t want to be influenced. Most of them (the good ones, at least) probably don’t even think of themselves as influencers. They just try to be useful, and wonder why so many people keep sending them free samples of crap.

Anyway, I gave up trying to influence the influencers years ago. Much more productive to — I dunno — focus on your customers, and make your product more awesome, in order to make them more awesome? Besides, some of the influencers I’ve known (the bad ones) really abuse their influence and get all “high maintenance.” Maybe they deserve the attention, but they do tend to distract from focusing on your business.

But one day, Seth Godin actually sat down next to me for breakfast at a Business of Software event.

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So I noticed this weird bear tweeting a message at us:

and he was tweeting at @chrisbrogan and other ESPs (@emmaemail) too, so it seemed like he was trying to be mysterious and get attention or something. Also, “bear in a bar” is obviously a joke-intro, and competitors have been known to make jokes about our mascot (I believe we’ve been called “Mail-Wookie” once), so I decided to take the bait.

I am so glad I did…

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We’ve been going to more email marketing industry events recently (and by “we” I mean Amy, from our marketing team). We’re not going to exhibit, sell, or get new clients. I’m not even sure Amy has business cards. We’re just going to learn. And boy are we learning. Apparently, people are a little confused about MailChimp. They ask us, “you guys are powerful and innovative and fun and all, but can you handle large lists, like some of the enterprise solutions out there?”

The short answer is yes. And here’s a graph showing our email delivery volume for all accounts with over 50,000 subscribers:

But you should really read the long answer…

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