MailChimp

An Interview with Boris Veldhuizen van Zanten of Twitterkeys

If you use Twitter, you've no doubt come across Twitter Keys, which is a super simple, cool way to insert symbols into your tweets. Like, "MailChimp ♥ Twitterkeys." Twitterkeys was created by the folks at The Next Web, who also happen to be MailChimp users.

What is the best part of your job?

Every day I look forward to what my day will bring. Some times it's talking to the press, other days it's developing software and writing PHP or designing stuff in HTML. Then sometimes I'm negotiating with venture capitalists. Every day is an adventure...

Tell us a little about your favorite pet project.

TwitterKeys is one of my recent pet projects. It allows you to insert UTF-8 compatible symbols in your Twitter messages by simply adding the TwitterKeys bookmarklet to your browser bar. We came up with the idea about ten minutes before I left work for the day, and then launched it about four hours later. In the mean time, I also made dinner for my family and put my kids to bed.

I'm also very excited about iPhone Apps right now. The excitement surrounding this new platform is thrilling! I can't wait to launch a few Apps myself-- If only I could code in Objective C!

Why MailChimp?

My girlfriend runs a Speakers' Agency and she asked me for a simple way to send email updates to her clients. I told her I wasn't aware of any services for that sort of thing, but I hoped she would find one that I could also use. After a few days she showed me MailChimp and I was sold right away! Now we both use it for our companies.

The ease of use was a huge factor in my decision to try MailChimp. At first I thought that an email newsletter would be too 'old school' for our early-adopter audience, but I get lots of compliments from even the most tech savvy Internet people.

Oh, and the chimp quotes make my day!