Mike Schinkel hosts a local meetup group called Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs. He called me up recently to speak about “Email Marketing Basics,” but I told him that whenever I do that, attendees think I’m actually The Dude who sends all the email around here. And so what happens is 2 years later, people send me their logo files and customer spreadsheets, telling me, “Okay, I’m finally ready to do some email marketing, so here’s my stuff—put together a mockup of our newsletter, post it for approval, and I’ll send you the $15 check.” Maybe it’s the way I dress.

I usually have to explain we’re kind of a “self serve” tool, with kind of a lot of customers, and I kinda have to do other stuff right now. But sometimes I just do everything they tell me, so I can test our product (our engineers tell me the technical term for that is “eating your dogfood“).

ANY-way, Mike thought that was funny, so he asked me to come in and discuss the MailChimp entrepreneur story instead: how we started as a little web-dev agency, and became a software company with tens of thousands of customers all over the world (condensed version at /about/).

It was fun. Sandi Karchmer Solow gave a good lecture on email marketing best practices, and I got to jump in at the end with a few stats and case studies to support what she said. If you’re new to email marketing, and you’re not sure how to get your business started, Sandi’s a good consultant to go to.

I learned a few things at this event:

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