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- Limit yourself to one month.
- Rec'd by:
- levelsio
- Michael Seibel
- Rec'd by:
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- 2016.10.06 - NYT - MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up
- Mr. Chestnut and Mr. Kurzius founded the company in 2000, at the crest of the dot-com bubble, after they had gotten laid off from corporate web design jobs. They used their small severance checks to start a firm they called the Rocket Science Group, which offered design consulting for large and small businesses in Atlanta.
Late in 2000, some of those customers started asking for ways to reach their customers by email. Mr. Chestnut thought he could repurpose some old code he had used to create a failed online greeting card business. One of his old greeting cards featured a drawing of a chimp, so he thought he would call the new email service ChimpMail, but the domain name was taken. So he went with MailChimp.For years, the pair ran the email service as a side project to the main web design gig. Around 2006, they began to grow wary of web design; the business was growing, but not very quickly, and they weren’t passionate about it.
What Mr. Chestnut and Mr. Kurzius were passionate about was helping small businesses grow. They had both been raised in entrepreneurial families — Mr. Chestnut’s mother ran a salon out of her kitchen, and Mr. Kurzius’s father was a baker whose business was forced to close after Wonder Bread moved into town — and they thought that maligned as it was, email presented a low-cost marketing channel for companies on small budgets. In 2007, they stopped doing web design and focused exclusively on MailChimp.
At the time, MailChimp faced a host of larger and better-capitalized rivals, including Constant Contact, which went public late in 2007. But Mr. Chestnut said MailChimp had a proximity to its customers that its competitors lacked. Because MailChimp was itself a small business, it understood what those businesses wanted out of their marketing tools. Its offerings were cheaper, it added features more quickly, and it allowed greater customizations to fit customers’ needs.
- Mr. Chestnut and Mr. Kurzius founded the company in 2000, at the crest of the dot-com bubble, after they had gotten laid off from corporate web design jobs. They used their small severance checks to start a firm they called the Rocket Science Group, which offered design consulting for large and small businesses in Atlanta.
Tech to use
- levelsio avoids frameworks because they take more time. Instead he just uses PHP.
- The easiest UI to create is one in which people are sent some kind of emailed notification.
- Try to do something like that for your craigslistautorespond idea. Don't worry about making a fancy UI.
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Articles about how people created their MVP
- ActionWins.co
- levelsio
- How I built Remote | OK and launched it to #1 on Product Hunt
- 12 startups in 12 months: here’s how this digital nomad is f**king doing it
“I’ve always had serious difficulties finishing the ideas I started,” he explains. “I would work on stuff for ages to make it perfect, then when it’d almost be finished, I would scrap it and start on the next big idea. But in the end I was left with only unfinished projects, many of which had quite some potential.” This is apparently a huge problem among creative people, who have a seemingly boundless number of ideas bouncing around in their heads.
He thought to himself, “How can I battle this?”, and came up with this solution:
If I could develop and launch faster, I wouldn’t fall into the trap of polishing something forever. So I set the goal to develop, market and launch one startup from start to finish, every single month, for a year.
- Book: MAKE
- From web dev to 3d: Learning 3d modeling in a month
- The main takeaway I got from this was the importance of making incremental progress, and not being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task you've set for yourself.
- Zapier
- Put the links to the Zapier interviews in here
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