Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in Atlanta, Georgia. Originally a side project of their web design agency Rocket Science Group, Mailchimp grew into the default small-business email service, layering audience segmentation, automation, landing pages, and marketing CRM on top of its bulk email delivery infrastructure.
Mailchimp was famously bootstrapped — Chestnut and Kurzius never raised outside capital and never sold equity for 20 years — making its 2021 sale to Intuit for $12 billion the largest acquisition of a bootstrapped company in history. Inside Intuit, Mailchimp now sits alongside QuickBooks and TurboTax as the small-business marketing pillar of Intuit's SMB cloud, with the platform's logo and panda-mascot aesthetic preserved as a recognizable consumer brand. The product competes most directly with 📝Hubspot, 📝Substack, and Klaviyo in the email and lifecycle marketing category.
I've used Mailchimp for about ten years, but at this point it feels a bit old and tired — and certainly more expensive than comparable options like Beehiiv and Resend.