Interview with Ben Chestnut, MailChimp co-founder

  By Remy | April 25, 2012 - 08:00 | Interviews
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We keep the interviews going! This time we’re  not featuring a startup email marketing company, but a quite well known email service provider: in this case MailChimp. Co-founder Ben Chestnut has taken time out to answer the following questions about the office culture, his daily tasks and more at MailChimp. Enjoy!

Remy: You have a ‘fun’ culture at MailChimp, as the platform, the people working there and the special projects (the coloring book for instance ) all show. Do you feel like you have attracted certain companies as clients that have comparable company cultures?

Ben: Ha! Turns out the fun stuff works as a great filter to scare away stuffy people from our website. In our early days, we experimented with taking all that fun away, and being more serious and businessy. That attracted a lot more customers, but they generally included more “frowny” people that made life miserable for us. We brought back the chimpanzee, and yes, that attracted more of the creative types (customers *and* employees). So it does work well if you want to fend off mean people (customers *and* employees) out there who might hurt your young startup company culture.

But I’d argue it’s the fun/creative customers who raise the creative bar and force *us* to seek a similar company culture as theirs. Our support team’s an interesting example. They’re comprised of the sort of young, hip, creative kids you’d see behind the Genius Bar at an Apple Store, or who might be building iPhone apps on the side. They know design, they know some code, and they can multitask in chat windows and make funny ha-ha jokes with customers (then follow up by sending customers monkey hats and monkey post cards offline).

We seek out those types because our customers won’t accept anything less. If we tried to outsource our customer-facing support to another country, or try to scale it up to a couple hundred support drones, our customers would balk.

Remy: Are there any recent new features or other updates to the MailChimp platform that you are especially proud or fond of? (more…)

Handiemail: send your emails in handwritten form

  By Remy | April 24, 2012 - 08:00 | Email Marketing News
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Handiemail is a new service from a creative studio in Chicago called Knoed which will handwrite your emails and send them via postal service, envelope and all.

Here’s a video showing the service in action – first a regular ol’ digital email, and afterwards the handwritten version:

The service notes that there’s a maximum number of characters allowed per handwritten email:

After someone e-mailed the entire New Testament, we decided to limit “Letter Your E-mail” to 3,000 characters (~470 words / ~1 page). And there’s a one page limit to “E-mail Your Letter.”

 

Check out their site here, and they can be found on Twitter here.

It seems that, like vinyl and printed books, there’s still room for the analogue world in today’s age. The only thing to keep in mind that this handiemail service does not come cheap: it’s $25 per handwritten letter from email. Then again, the value of something like that should not be expressed in money, right? Let us know what you think of the service in the comments.

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Newsflash: Hotmail breaks special characters

  By Remy | April 20, 2012 - 14:30 | Email clients
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According to several sources (which will be posted at bottom of this post), Hotmail breaks special characters and turns them into graphical emoji since recently.

Here’s an example of the (r) special character being turned into a large image in Windows Love Hotmail’s own email:

Thankfully, Elliot Ross from Emaildesignreview.com posted a workaround solution to this a few days ago here. (more…)

Email marketing design winner: Sephora new website introduction with animation

  By Remy | April 20, 2012 - 08:30 | Email Marketing Design
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This week’s email marketing design winner is Sephora’s new website launch intro email, which includes a nice animation. The animation slides in the black bars with the new website features. Here’s the new design (not animated):

This email has several nifty features. One of them is the inclusion top right of a link to a mobile version, which -really- is a mobile version: (more…)

Interview: Fluent – workflow style email stream

  By Remy | April 18, 2012 - 08:00 | Interviews
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In this third installment we have conducted an email interview with Cameron Adams of Fluent, a new workflow style email client. If you haven’t given the demo a try yet, do so here.

Meet the team, from left to right: Cameron Adams, Dhanji Prasanna and Jochen Bekmann:

Here’s the interview:

Remy: How did the Fluent project get started? I know you guys are former Google engineers who have worked on the Wave project – did you already have some ideas for Fluent back then, or has it formed in more recent times?

Cameron: Fluent got started, essentially, as soon as we left Google. We had some idea that we wanted to improve communications, but it took a few months of bouncing around thoughts before we felt like we’d nailed a good idea. Wave, of course, influenced our thinking and we’re keen to take learnings from it, but those lessons tend to be more in the vein of how to run a project, when to listen to users, and to always stay quick & nimble in execution. (more…)