Ben Chestnut is the co-founder and CEO of Mailchimp, the world’s leading email marketing platform.
In 2001, Ben and Dan Kurzius founded this company, and since then, they have grown it into a $4.2 billion enterprise without bringing on any outside investors. Ben and Dan each retain 50 percent ownership of the company.
The story of Mailchimp begins with the layoff of its founders. Both lost their jobs in 2000 and started a web design company. This company has become a marketing platform for small businesses—Chesnut calls it the “ultimate underdog”—and saw revenues of $700 million for 2019.
“We were going to be web designers, going to build these new things called websites,” Chestnut recalls. “We saw websites and the internet as a great tool for business. At the time, a whole bunch of websites were just flashy and superfluous.” They wanted to make them useful.
“We built websites for a lot of firms here in town – the Arthritis Foundation, Coca-Cola, BellSouth, Cingular. While we were building these, we noticed that a lot of our clients needed email marketing – whether they were gigantic enterprises or tiny little restaurants – so we built a little tool on the side just for email marketing.”
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Daisy Raudales— Founder of DRPR
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Jalila Singerff- Director of Jive PR + Digital
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Jennifer LeBlanc – Founder & President, ThinkResults Marketing
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Justyn Howard: Co-Founder and Former CEO of Sprout Social
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