Warning: This post is for API junkies and Cocoa developers. If that’s not you, feel free to move along—but be sure to tell your developer friends that MailChimp’s got something new for them.

I bet you’re working on the next highest grossing iPhone or iPad app, aren’t you? Are you using MailChimp to keep in touch with the people who download your app? You should be! Now you can integrate MailChimp functionality, like list subscription, into your iPhone or iPad apps in a few simple steps. I’m excited to announce that we’ve completed work on the initial release of ChimpKit.
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Wow. This is pretty exciting news: as previously speculated by the WSJ, Google just launched their own Apps Marketplace, and MailChimp was invited to be a part of the launch! Here’s our little listing.

There’s a video over at the Official Google Apps Blog that explains how the Apps Marketplace works, and how to install new apps. Hmm, looks like a few of our friends from the Small Business Web are listed there too. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it pays to invest in your API, fellow app developers.

We’re so excited about this because 9 years ago, we built MailChimp for our clients who were paying bloated, enterprise-sized fees for bloated, enterprise email marketing solutions. Our goal for MailChimp was to make powerful email marketing available to any business, whether big or small. And Google has that same goal with Apps. Now, to see that MailChimp is freely available with just a few clicks to roughly 2 million businesses, and 25 million users of Google Apps? Wow.

A while back, the folks from Flowtown contacted me about how they integrated with MailChimp via our API. To be honest, I wasn’t immediately sure how I felt about Flowtown. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s a service that lets you import an email list, then they cross-reference that data with public social profiles. I definitely understand how that can help a salesperson with a handful of local clients he wants to follow (and that scenario might even be where they got their name and logo). But what about my email marketing list of 25,000? Okay, so I can find out who among my subscribers is on Twitter and Facebook. It might even tell me who’s influential. What now? It’s not like I’m going to bug those subscribers with “more targeted emails” just because they’re “social.” I got one of those emails recently, and I can think of no better way to lose my hard earned subscribers. So I didn’t really think about this Flowtown thing much. Great for 1-to-1 sales, not so much for 1-to-many marketing.

But over time, we added engagement scoring, geotargeting, and the ability to download segments in MailChimp.

The combination of all these new tools changed my outlook completely…

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NOTE: A much more up-to-date (and thorough) write-up of our API can be found here: http://blog.mailchimp.com/10m-api-calls-per-day-more/

A couple years ago we had to decide between hiring a sales guy, or investing in MailChimp’s API by hiring a programmer. At the time, it was a really tough decision for us to make.

But I’ll let you in on my little management secret for making big decisions like this…

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Ever since we launched MailChimp in 2001, our customers have been asking us to build an events management tool for MailChimp.

Thing is, we’d rather focus on what we do best: making email marketing awesome. “Events” is not our specialty, so we felt we’d never be able to make it awesome enough.

Then we discovered Eventbrite, which is the best events management tool we’ve ever used. And it just so happens they also have an API.

So we’re really excited to announce that MailChimp is partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp (and so much more).

Here’s how the integration works…

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