{"author_name":"BITP - How I Built This with Guy Raz","author_url":"https://art19.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episodes/18c7176d-6656-4833-acdd-9347940ed45c","description":"In the late 1990s, Ben Chestnut was a struggling young designer interning at an appliance company, when somebody suggested that he try designing for the internet instead. A few years later, Ben and two co-founders launched a web design agency, only to discover that the service they'd included almost as an afterthought—email marketing—was taking off among their small-business clients. The founders named that service Mailchimp and pivoted to it full-time in 2007, choosing a winking monkey as their mascot, and stumbling onto the Freemium model before it became mainstream. But their most impeccable timing came in 2014, when they decided to sponsor a new podcast called <em>Serial</em>, a move that catapulted the winking monkey into popular culture. Over the years, despite management jitters and a public reckoning over office culture, Mailchimp has remained profitable and self-funded, with revenue of $800 million in 2020.","html":"<iframe src=\"https://art19.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episodes/18c7176d-6656-4833-acdd-9347940ed45c/embed\" style=\"width: 720px; height: 200px; border: 0 none;\" width=\"720\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"></iframe>","provider_name":"ART19","provider_url":"https://art19.com","title":"Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut","type":"rich","version":"1.0","width":720,"height":200}