The WP Minute | $12 Billion for Mailchimp is bananas

Show Notes

I’ve invited Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue (hey! they power this newsletter!) to share her opinion on the recent Mailchimp acquisition by Inuit for $12 Billion dollars.

Mailchimp is almost as synonymous with WordPress as Yoast is, so I’m sure many of you have some mixed feelings about this.

I was delighted to hear her opinions on the software, community feedback, and what comes next for a product like NG which integrates so closely with large platforms like Mailchimp.

Click the podcast player to hear the episode and don’t forget to share this with others!

Mailchimp alternatives mentioned (but also, don’t drop Mailchimp):

• MailerLite
• Campaign Monitor
• Sendinblue
• Sendy
• Mailco
• Buttondown
• EmailOctypus
• flodesk
• Klaviyo

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matt: It’s the WP minute today’s special episode is brought to you by easy support videos, support your WordPress users, right inside your WordPress admin. Using embeddable videos to show them what to do. Check out easy support videos.com today’s special episode. Is hosted by Leslie SIM. One of the co-founders of newsletter glue, a fantastic email newsletter plugin that integrates with WordPress. It delivers this.
[00:00:27] Email that goes out for the WP minute today’s episode. She breaks down her take on the MailChimp acquisition.
[00:00:34] I invited Leslie to share her opinion on the acquisition since she works so closely. Well, not only with MailChimp, but with email, with newsletters, with customers. Leveraging these platforms. Okay. Let’s dive into Leslie’s episode about the MailChimp acquisition for nearly half the total value of the world’s banana industry.
[00:00:59] Lesley: I’m super happy for the team. I believe they’ve worked on MailChimp for over 20 years and that’s a long, long, long time to be working on anything. And if they want to move on, then that’s great. It’s a very large amount of money, so I’m glad that they were able to have such a great name.
[00:01:19] Not all companies, are able to have amazing exits, not all companies want to exit. But I can see, or I can imagine if, the founding team gets tired of stuff like their options are we sell the company or we transition out and hire a CEO CEO to work on top.
[00:01:39] For, we know we, they considered that and chose to exit and, they could liquidate some of their ownership and that’s great.
[00:01:46] Sometimes, with acquisitions of this size there it’s, it can be kind of polarizing. So I saw a tweet this morning from Ruben Gomez and yeah. Funny, I’ve seen completely opposite takes on MailChimp acquisition plus bootstrapping.
[00:02:03] The first being this proofs, bootstrapping is dead good riddance. And the second, this proofs bootstrapping works for building very big companies. So I’m on team. This proofs boot shopping works for very big companies. Yeah, they were bootstrapped. They got a gigantic exit. So that’s great.
[00:02:23] The other kind of polarizing take that I saw online for this was the founders got all the money because the employees didn’t have equity because this was a privately held company that the employees kind of, didn’t get a big win as well.
[00:02:37] And I kind of have some opinions on this. It said in the press release that I think the, the employees got like a 300 million RSU restricted stock options
[00:02:47] so it’s not like the, the employees came away with nothing, but also having said that, if you’re joining Coca-Cola or. Pepsi or PNG, you don’t join with the intention of getting equity from the company. I feel like that’s kind of a quirk of the tech startup wall and it’s not really something to be expected.
[00:03:10] Also let’s not forget the reason why a lot of these startups give equity in the first place. The reason being. At the beginning, this, these companies can’t afford to pay their employees a four week. And so the supplement, a smaller wage with stock options on the promise slash bet that the company grows big.
[00:03:33] So, so people forget that as well. They forget that so many of these startup, no matter what they promise, they end up going bust and, It’s where it doesn’t matter, like, that you had all those stock options, like you’re now out of a job. Right. And you stock means nothing.
[00:03:49] So I feel like some of that conversation is kind of that conversation and that unpleasantness is, kind of misplaced.
[00:03:57] Matt: Does the MailChimp acquisition. Have any effect on newsletter glue
[00:04:02] Lesley: MailChimp has some of the best public APS on the market and excellent, excellent documentation as well. I don’t think that it will get worse even if they don’t maintain it properly or whatever. It’s still, already industry-leading. And I mentioned the EPA is because that’s how we knew that the glue connects MailChimp to WordPress. No impact on us there.
[00:04:25] Matt: I’ve seen this reoccurring trend throughout the years of evaluating and using software where a great piece of software serves a very strong utility in the early days. And everyone loves it. Because it’s doing exactly what they need. And as that company grows. The software starts to scale into something of a larger platform. MailChimp is a perfect example of this. It used to send just newsletters and then it became an automation tool, an e-commerce tool.
[00:04:56] A landing page tool, and so many other things, probably under the hood. Do you have any words of wisdom for scaling a piece of software? For those of us who are out there? Uh building our own software tools
[00:05:08] Lesley: I don’t have any legitimate words of wisdom seeing as how I’ve never scaled any software from utility to a larger platform plea newsletter guru is still very much in the utility space.
[00:05:21] I do kind of see why software or why a company would do this.
[00:05:26] At some point you kind of, reach a market situation. Most people know about you. You’ve mostly put insight your possible users in a market have already used you. And there’s only so much more growth. You can act out.
[00:05:39] A specific feature. And so people start moving breadth ways rather than depth. So rather than building like deeper and deeper for a customer set, they start moving breadth ways to get new customers. And I guess like the ultimate breadth plea is to become a platform. MailChimp was trying to move into e-commerce for, I think the past two or three years, they moved into landing pages as well. And a lot of that didn’t really get much traction maybe because of their name, they have mail baked into their name. And so, it’s hard to become a e-commerce landing page builder if your name is mill Chimp.
[00:06:16] And so maybe jumping onto an established platform, like Intuit made more sense.
[00:06:20] Matt: Are there any MailChimp alternatives that you really like to work with or that you’d recommend to others?
[00:06:25] Lesley: I wouldn’t suggest to anyone that they should immediately move off of MailChimp and take their business. I think MailChimp so great email service provider, and there’s a reason why they were sought for billions of dollars. Having said that some of my favorite alternatives are may the light campaign monitor send in blue, if you want a self hosted cheaper option.
[00:06:49] I really like Sandy and nail coat. And if you want an indie option, I really like buttoned down and email octopus. One of the newer kids on the block is this company called flow desk. We don’t connect to them because they don’t have necessary re APS, but I really like their user interface.
[00:07:08] It’s really modern. It looks really clean and it looks good. And lastly, if you’re in the e-commerce space, then I think Cleevio is an excellent option as well. I really like their UI design.
[00:07:20] Matt: Is there anything new and up and coming with newsletter glue that you can share with the audience?
[00:07:24] Lesley: So many things it’s hard to see. We recently launched a newsroom plan and that’s targeted at large newsrooms with many different types of users.
[00:07:34] So whether that’s an editor, author tech team, product manager, and so on social media manager. So we’re building out permissions for this new newsroom tier because, they don’t necessarily want their authors to be sending out newsletters. So building out A user permissions interface with them is what’s most immediately on our horizon.
[00:07:59] In the further future there are a lot of things that we are super excited about. So you met, requested that we build out more Conversion focused forms or, deepen our form features. And so that’s something that we’re pretty excited about doing. We can add banners, we can add popups and all of that stuff.
[00:08:19] So we’re going to be working on that. I don’t know, maybe the end of the year or next year, I’m also looking forward to integrating more with the WooCommerce blog. So people can simply add a will commerce product block into a newsletter. And that just kind of like magically all works. So that’s going to be a next year project and likewise with LMSs.
[00:08:41] So we haven’t really integrated it very deeply with any of the LMSs, like learn dash and access LA yet. And that’s something that we are super excited about the last thing I wanted to mention is we are right now adding lots of new integrations. So we’ve edited SendGrid and mail jet, and we’re currently looking into a Weber and moose and, and Mailgun and a whole bunch of others.
[00:09:07] So, in the very near horizon in the next month or less we’ll have way more email service providers integrated with newsletter glue and more people can use. thanks again, Matt.
[00:09:18] Matt: That’s it for today’s episode, that was Leslie SIM of newsletter glue. If you haven’t seen newsletter glue and you send a bunch of emails, especially emails about your content on WordPress checkout newsletter, glue.com. It’s a WP minute. Don’t forget to share this episode with others. Subscribe to us on all of the places you listen to episode share, share, share with your friends. We’ll see you in the next episode.

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