So I got an email this morning wishing MailChimp a happy birthday.

Then it hit me.

Today is MailChimp’s birthday! (thanks for the reminder, JR). Little Freddie von Chimpenheimer IV is now 8 years old. And if my math is correct, that makes him about 83 in chimpanzee years.

It’s hard for me to believe this, but we launched MailChimp back on August 20th, 2001. The only goal we had back then was to make email marketing less of a hassle. In the old days, you had to hand code all your HTML, tracking links, program your own list management scripts, unsub scripts, etc. You know, stuff a monkey should be doing. You’ve got a business to run. In terms of revenue goals, we just hoped that some day MailChimp would be able to pay for our lunches. “Naaah, that’ll never happen” we thought.

Things have changed over the last 8 years, not just for MailChimp, but for our entire industry. Also, our goals have since grown slightly more ambitious.

Now, MailChimp’s running strong with over 80,000 users all over the globe. On behalf of the entire MailChimp team, I’d like to thank our customers for your business all these years!

We first met local artist Chris Hamer (Myspace | Etsy) over in the MailChimp Jungle (see his profile), and fell in love with his work. So we asked him to “graffiti up” our office with some of his monsterific style. He’ll be visiting our headquarters and painting monkey-related monsters all over the place. Here’s some of his preliminary work:

Some sketches of more monkey-related monsters to come:

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