MailChimp

What do we do?

We make it easy to send email newsletters to your customers, manage your subscriber lists, and track campaign performance. Unlike some of our competitors, we don't "dumb things down." We take extremely powerful tools that sophisticated marketers use (like segmentation, a/b testing, and ROI tracking), and we make them accessible to anyone. And because our platform uses an open API, it's easy to integrate internal systems (like Salesforce) and web applications (like Magento and Drupal) with our email marketing engine. That's why over 400,000 users, who range from small 1-person startups to Fortune 500 corporations use MailChimp.

Our History & Where We Got The Funny Name

We started out as a web development company (The Rocket Science Group) back in April 2000. We specialized in "nerdy stuff" like database-driven websites and web applications (before they were called "web applications") for companies like CNN, Coca-Cola, Arthritis Foundation, Worldspan, and Delta Airlines. We built a reputation for building quality applications that were "actually useful."

Then in 2001, we saw that some of our clients were having trouble sending HTML email newsletters to their customers. They basically had two options. They could somehow rig Microsoft Outlook to send an HTML email with broken links, broken images, and broken attachments, or they could pay thousands of dollars a month for some bloated enterprise-level service that was packed with features they never used and never understood. We thought, "Sheesh, people are too busy running their businesses to learn how to code HTML emails. Email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it for them." We put our pragmatic programming skills to work and built a simple tool that included everything our clients needed and nothing they didn't. We made it so easy, a human could use it. Our clients loved it. So we made it available to the public. The word kinda spread.

In 2007, we officially ended all web development work as "The Rocket Science Group" and focused exclusively on MailChimp. And the rest is history.