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- Unheard Roots of Mailchimp đź“Ş
Do you think it’s possible to make 12 billion dollars without investors and rich well-connected parents?
If you said no, this story might as well blow your mind 🤯
Ever heard of Mailchimp?
If you own or work in a business that does any kind of email marketing you’ve likely heard of and maybe even used their products.
Here is how two web designers from Atlanta, Georgia created a 12 billion dollar empire without any investors.
Yes that monkey photo in the background is real… Ben & Dan are known for doing weird marketing stunts.
Quick interruption
If you love Indie businesses, you will love 2nd Mountain.
You get: A case study about growing a newsletter biz, where Alex shares exactly whats working and is not working on his newsletter, so you can do the same
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Setting the Stage 🎪
You can’t have a good story without having a protagonist.
Although Mailchimp was started by two people - I want to mainly focus on Ben Chestnut & his story since he was the CEO of the company.
Ben Chestnut
For starters, Ben didn’t have rich parents.
His dad was in the military and mom was mostly a home-maker / hair salon owner (her hair salon was the kitchen of their house).
As a side note Dan Kurzius’s parents weren’t much different.
Dans mother was an artist who did odd jobs and his father had tried & failed to build a bakery then died of a heart attack when Dan was very young.
So how did two lower middle class guys go from struggling to make ends meet to becoming billionaires?
The first step to uncovering how is looking at why particularly Ben got into business in the first place.
Intro to business 🧳
Ben Chestnut’s mom was technically an “entrepreneur”, she ran a hair salon in the kitchen of their home.
Although the hair salon did well and Ben witnessed money exchanging hands very often, Ben’s mom never tried to scale it.
She was a Thai immigrant and she looked at business as just a way of making ends meet rather than something that could be scaled.
“I always dreamed of my mother just scaling out of the kitchen and she never really did. And I think that there was a little bit of like disappointment in me that this wonderful that my mother did never really turned into the next Vidal Sassoon or something like that.”
Ben took inspiration from his mom and started selling stickers and hand made cartoons starting in elementary school.
A common trait of successful people is only hyper focusing on things they’re good at, this was certainly the case with Ben since he was exceptionally talented at drawing.
Falling in love đź’ž
I’m not going to bore you with the mundane facts about his college life, etc.
Long story short Ben was good at drawing so he thought going to college for industrial design would be a good idea.
“I always wanted to be a designer. I loved drawing when I was a kid.”
He started out by thinking he would design cars but soon enough realized he was not good at designing things with his hands.
“The mentors that I had at the time were like all of these refrigerators are lopsided. So one of them gently nudged me towards the silicon graphics machine and said you might want to try 3D rendering instead.”
That is when Ben fell in love with designing things on the computer.
“I was good at designing things on the computer but I was really bad with my hands. I didn’t have the dexterity.”
So in the spirit of once again focusing on the things he is good at, he only did web design from that point onwards.
Lesson: Those of you who are paying attention so far have probably noticed me draw attention to Ben’s instinct to only focus on things he is good at. This is one of his “secrets” to building a billion dollar business. Staying in his own lane and staying the fu*k out of others lanes.
Turning a skill into a fortune đź’¸
As Ben got good at web design, he decided to take the entrepreneurial spirit from his childhood and use it to create an agency.
This was the very first step to making a fortune.
While building the agency, Ben met another web designer (who was also a former DJ and skateboarder) called Dan Kurzius.
They bonded over being a part of small businesses while growing up (Dans father would give Dan tasks in his small bakery and Ben would help his mother with cleaning her “hair salon”).
So they decided to work together.
Over the next couple of years Ben & Dan as well as their small team took the business to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
A small side project while building the agency unlocked the next step for Ben & Dan.
But to hear about that part of the story as well as all the things they did to grow, you’ll have to wait and tune in next week.
Until then, stay awesome 🎉