That meant, in the real world, something like this. That bus became a super-spreader. That airline route did. Maybe that

The amounts were still negligible. When you’re chasing $30,000 web design projects, a few $50 invoices don’t warrant significant attention. Ironically, it was the increasingly inefficient task of issuing these small invoices that prompted Ben to introduce a monthly subscription model and build a credit card feature for MailChimp — effectively giving birth to one of the first software-as-a-service products ever created.,How does an internally used background tool turn into a $4.2 billion, industry-spawning behemoth with zero investment? In short, by using every guerrilla tactic in the book:,Niche social platforms. The company’s adage in the early days was Code, Blog, Tweet, Repeat — simply because this marketing strategy worked. Twitter was a lot less crowded in 2007, and MailChimp was getting real exposure on the network. Similarly, they purchased ads to be played at the beginning of every new episode of a crime podcast called Serial. The podcast is now a hit — having been the first one to hit 5m downloads in the history of podcasts — but buying ads on it was a hipster thing to do back in the day. Hence, cheap.,Unfortunately, running a web design agency proved to be less about your prowess in design and more about how flawless you sounded over the phone. Agencies often attract the most whimsical business, where clients’ opinions replace real KPIs and a soothing voice can be more important than a moving product. Naturally, a group of introverted, caring designers called the Rocket Science Group didn’t thrive in an environment that rewarded appearances over substance.,The question prompted Ben and his team to review the core logic — and the foreseeable future — of their business. A spreadsheet was opened, listing detailed revenues from all of the agency’s projects. It was one of the lines on that spreadsheet that produced the only answer Ben needed to hear. Turns out, one of their internal side-projects was quietly generating more money than all of the agency’s consulting projects, combined.,So those millions of American Idiots did what they were always going to. Not listen to a word. Do whatever they damned well pleased. Hey, that’s freedom, after all. Don’t tread on me!! I have the right to be as ignorant, stupid, and selfish as I want to be!!,And yet none of that seemed to matter. Or at least not matter enough. To the millions of American Idiots, for whom sitting around a table eating turkey proved to be more than important than stopping the spread of a deadly disease.,“Instead of ignoring the problem, Ben and Dan identified this as an opportunity to help their clients solve the problem. They got code from a failed digital greeting card product they had made and tweaked it to launch MailChimp to their web agency client base in 2001.” (source),Five years passed, and the hamster wheel of unfulfilling client work was about done soothing Ben into a self-employed existence of a stagnating agency owner. The revenues were locked into a stubborn plateau and the team was exhausted by a potent mix of uncertainty and punishing workload. The very meaning of this masochistic lifestyle was put into question.,I like Thanksgiving. I love spending time with the family. The holidays are important to me. But I’m also not a stubborn fool, like too many Americans. I can understand that this is not a normal year, and maybe sacrifices have to be made. You probably can understand that, too.,Why? As I pointed out, it was probably going to create a hyper-spreader event — several super-spreader events, across the country. Not just one, but several, simultaneously. That is the only way, really, that Covid can keep climbing to new heights in America, by the way.,There are many forms of abuse and all of them can have serious physical and emotional effects. If you’re concerned about a friend who may be experiencing violence or feels unsafe around someone, review these signs and learn about the ways to help them find safety and support.,The semi-viral freemium model is the biggest culprit in the Chimp’s success story, and it propelled its growth from 100,000 users to 1m users in just one year. It was novel at the time to give users free access to the entirety of your platform. The explosive success of the freemium model was two-fold: for one, every ‘free’ email sent contained a MailChimp logo in the footnotes, creating a semi-viral loop of organic referrals; since the users had to pay only once they reached a certain number of emails on their list, getting your first paid MailChimp plan acted as a rite of passage you had to ‘earn’ your way to.,At the Rocket Science Group, the creative minds were growing weary of implementing the same feature into their clients’ websites over and over again: an email-list-building tool. The work billed was repetitive and ripe for creative automation. To lose the burden, the team coded a one-size-fits-all, self-serve solution, and charged clients $0.01 per email sent.,The word spread, slowly. Old clients who no longer worked with the Rocket Science Group were still using the email tool. Small business owners who never were the agency’s clients started contacting with requests. While Ben was zeroed in on putting meat on the table for the agency, his email tool quietly grew its own little following.