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Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software Event 2008

Monday, September 8th, 2008

spolsky-fried.JPG3 of us MailChimpsters were in Boston last week for Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software Event. Spolsky describes it like this: “The audience is made up of pretty serious software companies…typically companies that are quietly making money selling software that people actually need, so they can afford to go to these conferences. “ It’s a great event. Actually, scratch that—I don’t want too many people coming and ruining the entrepreneurial environment next year—so um, this is an awful event. Don’t go.

On day one, we had speakers like Seth Godin, Jason Fried, and Eric Sink. I noticed they each had 3 different takes on that classic bell curve used in crossing the chasm:

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Posted in Emarketing, Business, IMHO | No Comments »

Spam Getting Funnier?

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Is it just me, or are spammers getting a little funnier with their subject lines?

Maybe they’re just stealing article titles from The Onion.

Here’s some spam I just got:

Funny spam subject lines

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Posted in IMHO, Spam Topics | 7 Comments »

Buy ‘n’ Large Privacy Policy

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Buy n LargeKevin from Pivot+Levy sends me this link to the Buy n Large privacy policy. Key points:

  • By visiting the Buy n Large website you become a registered member of the Buy n Large Database. You may not unsubscribe to this database at any time.
  • Buy n Large will share your personal information with third parties whenever it deems such sharing to be advantageous to it, including when you engage in certain activities on our site such as using a menu, viewing, clicking your mouse or breathing.
  • By visiting Buy n Large you are contractually obligated to read all email that is sent to you via the Buy n Large servers. Failure to do so will be considered a breach of contract.

Buy n Large is a fictional company from Disney’s WALL-E movie. But as you read through their privacy policy, do you ever get the feeling that this is exactly what most companies’ privacy polices say anyway, with all the BS filtered out?

Anyway, love the fake corporate site. Would have been fun to be part of the web-dev team who created it. They’ve even got fake banner ads pointing to fake prescription drugs with fake brochures and fake side effects.

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Posted in Emarketing, Business, IMHO | 1 Comment »

Firefox 3 is coming!

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Download DayIf you haven’t heard by now, the new Firefox is coming soon.

They’re actually trying to set a Guinness (Mmmm, Guinness) world record for most software downloads in a day.

You can get more info on that, and pledge to help set the record, at: spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/

Deb Richardson has a writeup of all the new features and improvements in FF3 here.

Personal favs include the faster rendering (up to 4x faster than FF2, 9X faster than IE7), site identification bar, and the nice little touches to your browsing history and password manager.

MailChimp is making some improvements (coming soon in MailChimp 3.1) that will work with some of the new features in FF3. More on that later.

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Posted in IMHO, MailChimp Customers | 1 Comment »

Seth Godin’s Email Checklist

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Seth Godin’s got a nice little “Before you send that email” checklist at:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/email-checklist.html

My personal favorite is #28 (check snopes before forwarding emails about viruses or charity efforts).

On that same note, we’ve posted an email aptitude test that we propose all new email users should be required to take:

The Email Aptitude Test For Noobs 

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Posted in Emarketing, Business, IMHO | No Comments »

iContact hearts MailChimp?

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Looks like iContact really loves the improvements we made in MailChimp v3.

After we launched, one of our customers searched for “MailChimp” in Google, and saw this ad from iContact (right column):

iContact-hearts-mailchimp

I can only guess that someone at iContact took one look at our new features list, and said, “Wow. Someone finally got it right! Let’s run an ad to congratulate MailChimp! ”

Thanks, guys! We think we got it right, too. But you got our URL wrong. You accidentally pointed it to your own home page, not ours. I’m sure it’s just a goof up by your SEM agency. Sometimes managing all those keywords can get really confusing.

Still though, it’s nice to be recognized by our industry peers as being the right choice.

We heart you too, guys!

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Posted in IMHO | 9 Comments »

95% of problems come from newsletters, not promotions

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

I just got off an ESPC call where Cloudmark was presenting. Very cool stuff. Learned they protect over 600 million inboxes around the globe via just about all the major ISPs.

Anyway, the guy from Cloudmark said he knew he’d be on a call with a bunch of email service providers (ESPs), so he looked us all up in their database to see if he had any records on us (this is the part of the call where you could hear a pin drop).
Then he said something along the lines of, “95% of problems that ESPs have seem to be coming from relationship newsletters, not sales promotions.”

Huh?

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Posted in IMHO, Spam Topics | 4 Comments »

Navigating Websites Using Your Webcam

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Just came across Hal Riney & Partners’ new website, which lets you navigate around by waving your arms in front of your screen (kind of like that computer interface on Minority Report). It uses your computer’s webcam to track your arm gestures. I thought it was fascinating, then got really tired of waving my arms around (hey, it’s early and I’m not a morning person). Then I learned I can trigger it while drinking from my coffee mug, so I just used that instead. Now that’s how web navigation ought to be. Sip to the left, sip to the right. Eat your heart out, Tom Cruise.

Hal Riney Minority Report

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Posted in Emarketing, Business, IMHO | 4 Comments »

2 hidden ways to use Gmail

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Have you ever wished you could quickly and easily setup different email addresses whenever you signup at some new website?

For example, we review every single new account at MailChimp. Occasionally, we’ll come across a techie who created an email address like, “mailchimp-techie@example.com” I guess it’s a way to filter all email from us, and it’s also a nifty way to detect if we ever sell their email address or something (this should go without saying, but no—we don’t do evil stuff like that).

Anyway, there’s a quick and easy way you can do all that with Gmail:

2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address

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Posted in IMHO, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 3 Comments »

Something’s afoot at Habeas

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but their CEO wants us to know something’s going on.

Congratulations, guys (I think?).

Update via Box of Meat: Ken Magill has some insight here

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Posted in Emarketing, Business, IMHO | No Comments »

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