Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a beautiful rough patch in the company’s history. See, Mailchimp was founded in 2001. It was a startup that learned quite a few lessons from that first dotcom boom and bust, and it managed to stay both successful and full independent for 20 years.
But in 2021, it sold to Intuit, the company best known for finance products like QuickBooks and TurboTax, and the very next year, Ben Chestnut, who was 1 of the company’s co-founders, stepped down as CEO after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over.
This is simply a beautiful immense culture change for the company, especially as it became more integrated with Intuit. It was besides a large challenge for a fresh leader who came in from the outside — well, the outside of Mailchimp, but the inside of Intuit.
You’ll hear us talk about that transition a lot. Rania and I besides got into the weeds of making decisions, which is very Decoder. She has quite a few thoughts on how decisions are made and why sometimes the things that seem easy are challenging and another things that seem hard aren’t. That includes shutting down cult favourite newsletter service TinyLetter, which you’ll hear Rania say was 1 of the easiest decisions she’s always made.
We besides got truly into the core business of email. Email was hot, then it wasn’t, and now it’s hot again. As part of Intuit, Mailchimp is just 1 part of a platform that helps tiny businesses operate. Mailchimp is there to do marketing and client management, and the platform sells itself as something that “turns emails into revenue.” You’ll hear Rania explain how all of that is expected to work.
Of course, we had to talk about generative AI, which is simply a large part of the Mailchimp road map. You’ll hear Rania explain that AI right now is more useful for segmentation and targeting: sending the right message to the right client at the right time alternatively of constantly bombarding everyone with emails.
But there’s a dark side to that, of course. Having AI send everybody perfectly targeted emails all the time might just lead to quite a few email spam, and it might lead to people responding to AI emails with AI emails of their own. So, I asked Rania about that loop and if there’s any way to break it and make all of this a small more human.
This was a truly fun conversation with any honestly scary ideas in it — and it’s all about email.
Okay, Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.
Rania Succar, you are the CEO of Intuit Mailchimp. Welcome to Decoder.
You are a new-ish CEO. You’ve made any changes. That’s what our show’s all about. I think email is just a fascinating forever task of the net — how we usage it, where it goes, who controls it. There’s rather a lot there to unpack. And then there’s just fundamentally the state of our networks in the age of AI and how we’re going to manage making things with AI and distributing things with AI. All wrapped up in Mailchimp, a company that distributes emails. So, lots to talk about.
Let’s start at the start: Mailchimp has been around for a while. I’m certain people have heard a fewer ads. How do you think about Mailchimp right now? Is it just email marketing? Is it more than that? What is the core intent of the company?
I love that you talk about how Mailchimp has been around for a while and has this incredible storied history. It’s been a company that’s been around for 20 years; 1 of the earliest players in tiny business [software-as-a-service] — started off very much as an email player. erstwhile we acquired Mailchimp into Intuit overall, we think about it having a much more expansive function to play for tiny businesses, and we think about it as playing a function to solve their growth problem. We are in the business of solving challenges for tiny businesses. The top challenge they have is getting fresh customers and increasing existing customers. And so, for us, it’s all about: how do you power growth? Email is simply a very crucial part of that, but there’s much more to that equation than just email.
When I think about the boom time of the millennial internet, I think about a bunch of the direct-to-consumer companies that lit up. They bought inexpensive Facebook ads or inexpensive Instagram ads. There was an detonation of these companies, where we can just name them and think about them — mattresses, suitcases, whatever you want to say. Then, the price of the ads skyrocketed, and they all ended up buying real estate, which I thought was truly interesting. But email was beautiful steady all through that. Is that the kind of product that you’re offering to those folks — “Here’s just a steady, consistent way to get people down the funnel to a purchase” — or is it more growth-oriented than that?
It’s more growth-oriented. The problem that tiny businesses face is simply a lot more complicated than that. We know that 50 percent of tiny businesses neglect in the first 5 years. The number 1 reason they neglect is they can’t get adequate customers or grow their existing customers. Marketing is hard for an enterprise. It’s especially hard for a tiny business, and it’s only gotten harder. It’s gotten harder due to the fact that consumers are across multiple platforms these days, so you gotta catch them in various different places, and that’s changing all the time. It’s challenging due to the fact that businesses are increasingly utilizing multiple apps to run their business, so their own client data is dispersed and fragmented. So, I love the space we’re working in across Mailchimp due to the fact that it’s a truly crucial client problem to solve, and it’s a complicated client problem to solve. It’s not just about getting the right emails out — it’s about profoundly knowing their prospects and their existing customers and helping them get the right message at the right time to the right audience in order to deliver those growth outcomes. So, it’s much more than just email.
I did something truly reductive before I jumped on the call with you: I just looked at the website. The tagline on the top of the Mailchimp website is very simple. It’s, “Turn emails into revenue,” which sounds great. I want I could turn more of my emails into revenue.
What is the actual process? What is the thing that turns email into money?
It starts with email, and over time, it’ll increasingly be more and more channels, but it starts with the depth of knowing about our customer’s customers. So, we want them to come in and connect all their client data into Mailchimp, and then we usage our predictive analytics to be able to profoundly realize their customers in a way that they can’t get from another platforms. Then, based on that, especially with the possibilities of AI, we aid them craft a message that’s personalized for that client that we know will drive outsize performance, and then we supply those recommendations for the business to just turn it on.
So, especially as AI continues to evolve, there’s a planet where a tiny business can come into any of the Intuit tiny business properties — whether it’s QuickBooks or Mailchimp — and these will operate as 1 operating system. They can come in and be served up a growth plan that says, “We found an chance to double your revenue,” and have a full built out growth plan to go after that omnichannel, et cetera. But the foundation of that is the depth of insight about their customers and the intelligence we have about what it takes to drive conversion for those customers.
So, I run an online store for widgets. I’ve collected any emails by offering 10 percent off erstwhile you come to the store, erstwhile you buy something. Now I’ve got your email address, that’s great. You can see that I’ve bought blue widgets alternatively of green widgets, and you’re going to have AI send me a deal on blue widgets. That’s kind of what that sounds like at the top level. You know the client well, so you’re going to send a very targeted email to the client saying, “Hey, do we have a deal for you.”
Just think about how hard that is! 1 of the things we find is the tiny business owner — they’re a one-man shop, and so they are trying to do everything. They’re trying to deliver the product or the service and do all these things. Even just the intelligence of how to set up a marketing run is not any expertise that they have. And the mid-market marketer has the expertise and the know-how, but their data is fragmented and sitting everywhere. And so, they seldom have access to those insights and those analytics to be able to build sophisticated campaigns like that. So, you described it well: it’s going to be very breathtaking as it all comes to market, and it’s been increasingly breathtaking as we’ve brought solutions like that to market.
Is that the mark client base — the small- and mid-size company?
That’s right. We’re truly arrogant across Intuit. We have a long-standing history, as does Mailchimp, for being 1 of the first software solutions tiny businesses choose as they go to solve their problems, so we want them to proceed to choose us. The majority of tiny business customers present across the Intuit ecosystem have less than 10 employees, so we truly are solving for the early phase business. In the last respective years, we’ve increasingly focused on that mid-market business — being able to service them not only erstwhile they start but as they grow and across their enterprise. So, not only in marketing or accounting but besides in getting paid, accessing capital, managing their employees, accessing expertise — all the gamut of things they request to grow and run their business.
This is simply a subject I’ve heard from quite a few the enterprise software leaders that have been on the show: “You run a dry cleaner or a yoga studio. You’re going to request a bunch of software to deal with your customers and marketplace your business. The chance is in providing all of the software. And then,” — much like you just did — “we’re going to call that an operating strategy for business.”
I’ve heard this pitch a lot: You request something to agenda customers to come in the door. You request a billing system. You request any way to email them. You request all this stuff just to run any kind of business nowadays. And that bundle is really, truly valuable. You’re starting from, “We’re going to aid you email your customers,” a much more digital-focused approach. Would you extend to that another stuff that is more brick and mortar, that is more scheduling all the stuff that a physical retailer would gotta do?
Yes. We think about the customers we service present as the Intuit tiny business customers, which are 10 million tiny business customers across QuickBooks and Mailchimp. And we have the majority of those verticals already present. We have a long-standing relation with them. We’re 1 of their cornerstone software solutions in terms of the work that they’re doing with us. They entrust us with quite a few their data. And so, we’ve already got an edge in working across all these businesses. And so, that’s 1 of the extraordinary things about Mailchimp: the historical vertical distribution.
You look across all verticals, whether it’s service-based or product-based and then e-commerce versus digital brick and mortar — they’re all represented truly well on Mailchimp. Then that besides translates into what you see across QuickBooks, too. So, we think about serving all these businesses and that we have a unique chance to do that due to the historical relationships we have with these businesses and the depth of data they entrust in and with Intuit.
We’ve been able to bring any truly amazing applications to the market. I was on the QuickBooks side before I joined Mailchimp a year and a half ago to lead that team. And the number of innovations we were able to bring to marketplace that we could uniquely do as a consequence of that long-standing relation and the data is extraordinary, and that’s how you begin to build that operating system. 1 example of that was the work I had the chance to do on QuickBooks Capital, where we were able to build lending products for tiny businesses and increase the approval rates and odds in a way that others wouldn’t be able to do.
The relation between Mailchimp and Intuit — and QuickBooks and the remainder of the Intuit software suite — is utterly fascinating, especially due to the fact that Mailchimp was an acquisition. This company has been around since 2001. Intuit acquired it 20 years into its existence in 2021. The acquisition and integration — I would not say were totally smooth. You’re the fresh CEO. You came from the acquiring company. Let me ask you just the basic question: why is it a separate division of Intuit with its own CEO at this point?
It’s a large question, and I think 1 that all companies think about. Acquisitions are hard, and they’re not always successful. And you gotta think hard about how to get it right and set it up in the right way. 1 of the things that was crucial as we thought about the structure for Mailchimp was the reason that we acquired it and making certain that the structure — in terms of how we organized it — would set us up for that. The reason to get Mailchimp was to proceed to build this operating strategy for tiny businesses and to solve the number 1 problem that tiny businesses had, which was growth, in addition to the another problems we were solving on QuickBooks. We wanted to make this end-to-end platform to grow and run your business, so we needed Mailchimp and QuickBooks to work together.
I study into the tiny business organization. The tiny businesses organization includes QuickBooks and Mailchimp, and it’s our full 10 million tiny businesses and how we service them. That decision was incredibly crucial due to the fact that it allowed us to stay close and to stay actual to the intent of the acquisition and to make actual differentiation in the market. Now, we besides kept it independent, so it’s connected, but the squad stayed separate, mostly speaking. There were certain functions that we integrated due to the fact that it was crucial to integrate to make a sense of belonging and consistency across the organization. But we besides very much wanted to accelerate Mailchimp to let it to be successful and to proceed without all of the work that comes with an integration. So, we’ve been very “choiceful” over time about how we do that, what technology we integrate, what we do, how we service our customers across our tiny business ecosystem with 1 solution. So, that gives you a small context into how we thought about it.
There are pieces there that are kind of the method pieces, and then there’s the culture piece. Let’s start with the method side, the truly nitty-gritty Decoder stuff. There’s stuff that all company integrates at scale, right? I’m assuming, as CEO, you’re not moving a totally independent division with your own legal and HR and stuff. That’s just my guess.
That’s usually the stuff that gets integrated first. Then, there’s things, peculiarly on the software side, where erstwhile you tell me you’re the CEO of QuickBooks, it feels like you have most likely more freedom to make software decisions or planning decisions or go-to-market decisions. Is that different? Has that been integrated? How does that work?
I’m truly arrogant of the technology integration decisions we’ve made that are more business outcome-oriented and choices that we made along the way, so, again, the choices we’re making are all to service our customers with an end-to-end platform and to service them in a unified way across QuickBooks and Mailchimp so we solve all those needs. The another thing I’d item is we made a declaration respective years ago at Intuit that we were a platform company building services at the center that were powering the various end client usage cases. So, we could decision with velocity in delivering those outcomes but besides make consistent experiences for those customers. I’ll give you any examples based on your question. Everything we’re doing with AI — and we’re doing a ton with AI — is integrated and connected into the GenOS that Intuit has built. That’s our GenAI operating system.
That was something we built at the center, and all teams are utilizing that, and that’s allowing us to decision with velocity and efficiency. Not only does that let Mailchimp to decision with speed, but also, it allows us to make connected experiences for tiny businesses, regardless of where they’re entering the platform. Whether they’re utilizing QuickBooks present or Mailchimp today, we can access all of their data and make connected workflows due to the fact that it’s all on a central platform. Similarly, we integrated Mailchimp onto Intuit’s Virtual Expert Platform. That’s another very large investment we made at the Intuit level as part of our strategy. Our strategy is to be an AI-powered expert platform. So, not only do we have AI, but we constantly can connect you to an expert in any of these usage cases to guarantee there are no dead ends in the experience and you always have an expert that can aid you.
That was another capability that Mailchimp integrated into that allowed us to make human assistance experiences truly rapidly but besides deliver on real differentiation that Intuit has built and extended into Mailchimp. So, those are any examples of what we’ve done. I’ll just say 1 more thing here. We made choices on who we brought into the management squad at Intuit. I think having me lead the business was an crucial part of how we make this connected strategy due to the fact that I had 7 years of context across Intuit and connections, and then we besides did that for our leader on technology. So, the Mailchimp technology leader is simply a long-standing Intuit leader, an incredible technologist, but besides profoundly connected into what Intuit can do so that we can decision with velocity on any of those choices that we made along the way.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has joined us on the show a couple times, most late about a year ago. I asked him what it meant for him to become the president of Microsoft, in addition to the CEO, and he fundamentally said, “I gotta go to more meetings.”
So, let me ask you a version of that question: What does it mean for you to be the CEO of Mailchimp inside of Intuit? What freedom does that function give you — does that title signify to your squad — that possibly another title wouldn’t? due to the fact that that, to me, is truly interesting that Intuit is composed of these large divisions or these large software products that people perceive, but you’ve been talking very much about it as 1 company for our full conversation so far.
Several things. 1 is accountability: we have this very much across Intuit. It’s 1 of the things I’ve loved in my 8 years since joining the organization. There’s a large focus on accountability and ownership, and you surely see that here. I felt that in my another roles as well, so that hasn’t changed in that sense. But frankly, we have quite a few debate on how we think about Mailchimp, and the way we think about Mailchimp is actually broader than just Mailchimp itself. We think about it as solving the client growth request across our tiny business ecosystem. So, I’m accountable not only for the results of the Mailchimp business, but I’m accountable for driving growth outcomes for all the SMBs in our tiny business ecosystem. And we very much think about Mailchimp’s function that way. So, that’s another way we think about it.
That makes sense. How large is that business? How much gross does Mailchimp represent inside of Intuit?
In our last Investor Day, we shared that it was, I think, $1.1 billion.
That’s quite a few emails. So, that’s the method side, the nitty-gritty structural B-school side of how you run this thing and integrate Mailchimp inside of Intuit.
Let’s talk about the culture side due to the fact that that’s where quite a few the, I think, bumps in the road came. The company was 20 years old. It had any loud CEOs. It was a beautiful brash startup culture. I would just say Intuit is simply a much more buttoned-up company than Mailchimp was. There were any hard things that came along for that ride. There were allegations of discrimination, pay disparity, sex bias. That’s all stuff that you were brought in to, I assume, to fix, to correct, to improve. How has that gone?
You’re absolutely right. The first part of the acquisition was a small bumpier, and I surely realize that. This had been a squad that had been independent for 20 years and incredibly arrogant of that independence, and they were acquired by a larger company. For any employees, that was challenging. There’s a lot in the Mailchimp culture. There’s so much that is just so powerful and I’m so arrogant of. It’s this deep client obsession. It’s this connection to the community. It’s truly focusing on powering the tiny business underdog. It’s insane creativity. So, here’s how I approached it as I came into the role. First, it was surely a focus. And erstwhile I came into the role, I spent quite a few time with our teams and our employees. And what I understood in those meetings is that they were frustrated by quite a few things, and it was the main focus of their conversation. [It] was taking up quite a few the airspace, the conversation around this.
But I besides recognized that they cared profoundly about our customers. And so, I refocused the organization, in my first 30 or 60 days, very rapidly on fresh priorities that were very customer-backed, that had a sense of urgency in terms of delivering against them. And I focused the full organization on delivering. And what that did is it crowded out quite a few the noise, all this conversation, and it got people focused on doing large work that they loved. And it helped them see the connected nature between any of the values of Intuit and the values of Mailchimp, which turned out to be aligned in many ways. And it pivoted us. It got us back to a conversation on growth and energy and innovation as opposed to worrying about what the acquisition would mean for them. And they started to see the positives associated with that.
Let’s put that into practice. I’ll give you the example — just so the listener knows, Rania alluded to this before we even started speaking. The erstwhile CEO of Mailchimp sent an email that was beautiful controversial, saying, “I don’t want to usage pronouns in meetings. They do more harm than good.” You’ve evidently reversed that decision. Rania told me her pronouns before we started speaking — they’re she/her. How do you get people off of that onto focus on your customer? due to the fact that it seems like, “My company does not admit sex as a spectrum or might not admit me,” is simply a beautiful large deal compared to, “I request to aid people turn email into revenue.”
Whether it’s Mailchimp or Intuit, the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion is so actual and so strong to our values and what we focus on. At Intuit, it’s so central. And so, we were just very clear at that time, and we proceed to be very clear. We make an environment where all worker feels comfortable bringing their full selves to work, and that’s the environment we create. That is just the approach and the policy, and we were very clear about that. And so, that’s something we constantly reenforce all day with our actions. And our employees see that, and they feel that. We’ve got a very active ERG community across our Atlanta offices and chapters where quite a few the Mailchimp squad resides. We have that across Intuit more generally. We focus a lot on that in our hiring decisions. So, I would say it’s about how we operate all day and the values we show to our teams.
I watch quite a few music documentaries, and you always see the band in the garage, and then you see the band at Wembley Stadium, and you never see that mediate part. And I feel like I want to ask you about the mediate part here. There was a large acquisition. You were at another part of Mailchimp. You are evidently arrogant of that time on the QuickBooks team. This acquisition is going kind of sideways. There’s an chance to become the CEO, right? due to the fact that Ben, the erstwhile CEO, is leaving. What was that minute like for you? Did you choice up the telephone and say, “I want to do this”? Did the board call you and say, “You’ve got to get in there”? What was that exact minute like?
One of the amazing things about Intuit is it is truly a leadership lab. I’ve been here 8 years — longer than any company I’ve always been a part of. I’d been at Google for 5 and McKinsey for 5 before this, and I’ve stayed due to the fact that I’ve grown so much as a leader. Whenever I get comfortable, I get a call, and I get thrown into the next thing, and it’s always intense. And it’s intense due to the fact that we’ve got truly large ambitions about the innovation we want to bring to customers. I’ve had that chance multiple times due to our growth profile as a business and our doctrine around mobility and increasing our leaders. I came in to run QuickBooks Capital. It was a $6 million business erstwhile I started it. We grew it into rather a large business that I’m incredibly arrogant of.
I then went on to lead our payments business; that grew into multiple additional businesses that we built over time. And then I had this opportunity. So, it was a continued set of fresh opportunities. In each case, what I look for is: how much possible do we gotta innovate and disrupt for our customers? In all these cases, it’s specified a large chance that you jump into it, and you don’t always have the answer right away, but you jump in with assurance based on the experiences you’ve had over time. But I would put it in the context of these another growth opportunities I’ve had since I joined.
Did you make the call, or did you get the call?
It was a joint conversation. So, a year before that, I talked to my boss about being ready to take on the next large thing, and that’s how we handle it at Intuit. We have open conversations, and then we constantly discuss, at all level of leadership, who’s ready for the next role. It’s a conversation that’s happening always in advance so that, as fresh roles open up, we’ve got clarity on who’s ready for the next role, what are people looking to do so we can proceed to grow them. And so it was a conversation that started a year in advance that led into this.
That conversation was, “Well, this function is about to open. It’s a small messy, but you’re ready for it”?
Yep, that was the conversation. It wasn’t about, “It’s a small messy” — it’s, “We have assurance you can go in there and do everything we want to have happen.” There was quite a few ambition there: “We request to solve this massive client problem. We want to grow internationally. We want to transform Mailchimp to besides service the needs of mid-market businesses. And we know you’ve got this.” So, it was a conversation like that.
I love it. I love, “We request to solve the needs of mid-market businesses, and you’ve got it.” They’re going to make a sports movie about that someday, I promise you. 2 more Decoder questions, and then I have an full section here labeled “Existential questions about email.”
How is Mailchimp structured today? How have you built that team?
We made quite a few changes, and we made quite a few changes truly rapidly due to the fact that we needed to set up this squad that could drive the next chapter of growth for Mailchimp. The first 20 years were extraordinary, and we request the next 20 years to be as extraordinary. We think about that, again, in the context of our tiny business ecosystem, not just Mailchimp. So, we request a combination of people who are profoundly connected into Intuit, who can make those connections. We request people with deep manufacture expertise in the areas we’re looking to shift Mailchimp, whether that’s mid-market or global or leading the way on growth capabilities and technology. And then we request people who can talk to Mailchimp’s past and proceed to build on that and the strengths and the culture and all of that.
So, I’ve assembled a leadership squad that represents all 3 dimensions of that — it’s an incredible team. But as I mentioned before, any of the key leaders on that squad have deep roots in Intuit history, including me, our head of technology, our head of HR. We’ve leaned in to any of the fresh areas we want to go into — so, international: Mailchimp has 50 percent of its gross coming from global markets. That was actual before the acquisition — it’s the result of this incredible brand and product. We can do so much more in global markets. You can see that in the way we’ve grown the squad in the areas we’ve grown in. Secondly, in mid-market, we invested importantly so that we could not only be the place where tiny businesses start but the place they grow with us. We’ve invested rather a bit in those human-assisted areas and then, of course, in all the technology around AI and the investments we’ve made there.
That first large chunk of investments you’re talking about — mid-market, international, et cetera — is that all sales investments? Is that go-to-market investments? How does that look? due to the fact that you bracketed that out of technology and AI, so I’m wondering what that first chunk looks like.
A lot of it’s go-to-market, everything from sales and onboarding and account management. So, there’s a lot there and then in partnerships, channel partnerships, technology partnerships. So, it’s that, and then, of course, this is all done with the approach we take across Intuit, which is technology-powered go-to-market teams. So, we invest from an AI position not only on customer-facing AI but human-assisted supporting AI. And so, that’s been a large part of the Virtual Expert Platform I talked to you about earlier, where our experts or our sellers or our account managers have access to truly powerful AI to enable them to do differentiated things with our customers as they spend time with them.
Big Decoder question, this one’s the full brand: how do you make decisions? You’ve done quite a few things, you’ve grown a lot. You’ve talked about how much you’ve grown. What’s your framework for making decisions now, and how has it changed?
I make decisions all day. By the time I get home, I think to myself, “I’m besides tired to make a decision about what we’re going to have for dinner.”
Oh, I’ve been there, absolutely. Why do you think I wear black all day?
That’s a perpetual thing, decisions all day. So, it includes a combination of many things. 1 is building intuition over time. The intuition comes from being close to our customers, being close to data. That’s the first piece. It’s the intuition of having made lots of decisions over time and then watched another decisions get made. erstwhile I watch another leaders make large decisions that affect courage, I take a note of them to see how they’re going to play out so that I can mention them later. So, that’s another part of how I think about things. So, the first thing is intuition. The second is surrounding myself with different perspectives as I go into a decision so I can truly bring a group of experts together and ask questions. So, I average a discussion, and I say, “Well, how might you think about this?” And truly make space for the divergent views to be shared. So, that’s another part of how I think about making decisions.
The 3rd is I have a bias for action and making decisions fast and then learning truly rapidly after the decision, so we can learn from it and pivot as needed. And so, that’s a immense part of how I operate. How I’ve changed in making decisions over time? I think I’ve leaned in more to the pulling out the voices of people who might think about things differently. I have a very strong voice in the room, and I request to make space for another voices due to the fact that that’s erstwhile you get truly powerful decisions — erstwhile people pressure-test them in a very strong way, and individual feels comfortable saying, “Actually, I’d think about it differently, and here’s how we should think about it.” And so, not only has that translated into making decisions quickly, which is crucial for velocity, but expanding the number of decisions that are made with that precision to make it an even more powerful decision.
The way I think about it is: I effort to have the worst ideas in the area so people can tell me that my ideas are bad, and then that creates the freedom for everyone else to have bad ideas and, hopefully, yet have a good idea. Let me poke at something a small bit more strongly: you mentioned intuition is the first thing, right? You trust your intuition. It takes a long time for people to trust their intuition. erstwhile did that click for you?
That’s a large question, and it’s in different levels of experience. So, I’ll item the point of I love the chance to learn all day. And so, it grows over time. I have learned so much in this Mailchimp context that I could have never read by reading a book due to the fact that you gotta get in there and make a mistake and learn from that mistake. I couldn’t be more arrogant of the chance I gotta make mistakes almost all day. due to the fact that you learn so much, and you build that intuition, and then that becomes your playbook. And so, I admit erstwhile I’m in a space where we’ve done that before. I’ll give you an example. Sometimes, as I lead product teams, I push hard for velocity and outcomes: “We’re going to launch our fresh QuickBooks checking account by this date.” And I remember erstwhile being told, “We’ve never worked with a partner that launched a checking account in that amount of time.”
And you sit there and you question: Am I making the right decision for the team? Am I going to push them to a breaking point? Are we going to deliver something that’s not high-impact? But erstwhile you’ve done that 3 times and you’ve seen the outcome, you have confidence. And so you gotta admit the categories where you have more confidence. But I frequently will take a risk, like I did with that checking account example, where I’m not certain how it’s going to work, and I take a hazard even if I don’t have that intuition, and I see what happens. And I’m always staying close to the learnings across the way and willing to pivot as we go.
But you take a risk, and you note that you’re taking a hazard so that you can evidence the result at the end and add it to your intuition. So, I’m constantly trying to build this library of learnings, and I’ve been reflecting in the last respective months about how valuable it is to have these failures in your playbook, too, due to the fact that you learn so much from those. And I think about micro failures all day that you course correct as you grow.
It seems like the task at Intuit overall — and at Mailchimp — is more focused. I think most tech companies are in a period of expanding focus, and that focus comes at the cost of, potentially, any marketplace opportunities. So, we start off by saying: email is forever. It’s hot right now and in various ways, which is interesting. I think as the algorithmic media gets unpredictable and expensive, email seems consistent and unchangeable and predictable. I look at it from my position of individual in the media and say, “Okay, there is Substack and Ghost and Beehiv and all these things that are growing. That’s where the action in media is.”
And Mailchimp is walking distant from that. You all shut down TinyLetter. You utilized to be in that space, and you aren’t. I had the CEO of Substack on the show, and I was like, “Is Mailchimp your competitor?” And he was like, “No, I don’t think so.” Why are you not in that space? Why focus on the enterprise space and not this another thing that seems to be growing?
Focus is so incredibly important, as you said. It’s so crucial due to the fact that you request to hone in your resources to innovate in a way that only you can and make actual differentiation. For us, we’ve got clarity on the problem we’re trying to solve. We are trying to increase the success rate of tiny businesses, and everything we do is focused on that. And in the domain of Mailchimp, it’s all about helping them find fresh customers and grow existing customers. And to do that, we request to strengthen our email product and to broaden that out in a way where we can solve the problem in a way it’s not solved in the manufacture today. And that’s the reason we’ve chosen to focus there. It’s just having clarity on the problem we’re solving and our unique capabilities and chance to solve it in a way that no 1 else can.
Walk me through that decision to shut down TinyLetter. You’re entirely focused on tiny and medium-sized businesses; TinyLetter was not that. You’ve got this thing — it was an acquisition. People were truly excited erstwhile Mailchimp acquired it due to the fact that they thought that meant it would be stable. You’ve got to make the call. Walk me through how you made that decision.
This is 1 of the easier decisions we’ve always made. We fundamentally looked at it from a position of “we’ve got clarity on the client problem we’re solving,” which is, as I said, helping tiny businesses grow. And we request to make certain that our technology is as efficient as possible. erstwhile you’re maintaining parts of the tech stack that are no longer core to what you’re delivering for customers, your technology becomes beautiful clunky. And so, we look at that over time to say, “What was something that was crucial in the past that’s no longer crucial to the mission or was not successful?” You see that all the time as you do innovation and startups — you launch things that may no longer be successful years later. And you request to be efficient in shutting those things down so you can focus on the core and make efficiency for your engineers. So, this decision was not 1 of those that was a challenging 1 to make.
How did it come to you? Was it just an email saying, “Hey, I’m shutting down TinyLetter,” and you’re like, “Great, not core.” Were you in a conference room? Did you draw on a whiteboard?
I raised it erstwhile I came in as a conversation I’d heard from across our teams and our engineering teams, in particular, around, “There are many parts of the Mailchimp app that are no longer core to our focus.” TinyLetter was 1 of them. And so, the conversation was not about TinyLetter — it was about “how do we shut down things more efficiently so we can increase the velocity of the way we’re operating and moving as a business?” And so, it was part of a set of things we were looking at shutting down to focus. And so, we made a decision about the request to prioritize that because, often, teams are so focused on innovation they don’t focus on those things, but that’s 1 of the keys to velocity: you request to slow down and do that work to accelerate your ability to innovate. And so, we made the decision in that context.
Here’s a question: do you run Mailchimp on email, or do you usage Slack and Teams and Zoom?
I spend all my day in Slack. I love Slack. I love telephone calls, so that’s where I spend quite a few time. But we usage email, too, of course, but I spend quite a few time on Slack.
“How email-dependent is the email company?” is not a question I thought about asking, but now that I think about it, it seems very important.
We are not an email company — we are a growth company. And we focus on getting the right message at the right time to the user and, therefore, think about all the channels that are possible to reach.
Have you utilized the fresh AI tools in Slack? We just got them yesterday, and I can’t tell if they’re truly useful or completely distracting.
I haven’t utilized them yet.
“Summarize this discussion,” if that is actually helpful to you.
It’s actually an crucial point. I think quite a few the early-generation AI tools that are out in the marketplace are inactive beautiful superficial and in the early innings of their ability to supply value. And I think that creates quite a few area for companies that are very serious about it and then have unique amounts of data and very large client bases to experimentation and learn with to truly differentiate themselves. So, it’s interesting to see, a year in, how any of these tools that had quite a few promise, how fewer of them have actually been able to realize all the promise yet.
Would you always send Slacks written by AI? I think about this all the time: Would I always send an email written by an AI to a co-worker or a partner external to the company? Would I always let Slack compose more than a predictive text? Yes or no? Actually, just say something on my behalf. That feels very fraught. I feel like all leader confronts it the most due to the fact that the communication bandwidth is possibly reduced if you just let the robot talk for you. Would you always do it? It sounds like you’ve been playing with these tools and profoundly considering them. Would you always let it send more than a one-line predictive Gmail consequence or whatever?
I think I absolutely would. I’ll answer that, and then I want to get into how marketers should think about it and how we think about it for marketers. But yes, we’re all very busy. If you even look at the predictive tools in Google, how much better they’ve gotten over time, as they learn from the user and the voice and tone, it gets much better. In order for you to feel comfortable utilizing them, respective things should be true. One, it needs to be consistent with your voice and tone. And oftentimes, the early generation of these solutions are not, and therefore, we don’t feel comfortable utilizing them. The promise is for players that are able to do that and personalize it in your voice and tone; then there is simply quite a few possible for the AI to aid you be more efficient. So, I absolutely would. I’m looking for efficiency gains all over my life.
You can besides think about it as the assisted version versus the do-it-for-me version. And so, even just the assisted version where it finishes and completes your sentence, that saves quite a few time, especially on a mobile telephone — it’s incredibly helpful. And so, you think about it as a continuum, but I absolutely… It’s not the case today, where my individual emails, I’m utilizing AI to send end-to-end or work emails. But I do see a planet where that’s very possible. From a marketer’s perspective, let’s realize the implications of not utilizing AI. The implications of not utilizing AI is simply quite a few gross is left on the table. due to the fact that marketers present are not utilizing segmentation as much as they should due to the fact that it’s hard without AI to admit what segments you should be using.
Really quickly, can you unpack 2 words for me for the Decoder audience: marketers and segmentation?
Yes. Marketers at a tiny business is typically your tiny business owner-
People hear marketers, and you think of the marketing department, but you’re talking about the people trying to get customers.
That’s right. So, you think about our customers that we serve. erstwhile a business has less than six employees, it tends to be the business owner who’s writing the marketing and doing that. So, that’s the marketer. erstwhile you grow to more than six employees, the next worker tends to be their marketing director, and then, over time, it becomes a department of six people. So, we can think about it that way. The next word you wanted me to decode was?
Segmentation. Yes. Segmentation is all about uncovering clusters of people with akin behaviour and akin demographic characteristics that are going to behave in the same way so that you can send them a different message that’s customized for them, that’s going to let you to personalize the message and increase the likelihood of responding. I have young children, a five- and a two-year-old, so I’m going to more… They’re now older, a six- and a four-year-old. And I’m more likely to open an email from a clothing company — due to the fact that I’m looking for efficiency — that’s showing me content for them than if it’s not personalized and it’s more generic. And so, that kind of personalization drives much higher outcomes than if it’s not personalized.
Segmentation is simply a concept of the past, though, because, with AI, you can hyper-personalize. You don’t gotta group people together anymore. You can compose a single message to that individual. And so, if you’re not utilizing AI to make the content, you’re never going to be able to personalize at scale. You’d gotta compose a very large number of emails to be able to do that, and people won’t accomplish that. And so, all marketer needs to be utilizing AI now and over time in order to be able to accomplish those gross outcomes.
You utilized to group people together by saying, “Okay, you are a bunch of, I don’t know, 25- to 40-year-olds. You all lived in this town. You make about this much money. And, I don’t know, you all drive Hondas. You’re much more likely to all request an oil change at a discount at this time, at this price.” (You can tell that I request an oil change in my car, by the way. Just to be very clear, I’ve now ruthlessly targeted myself for oil change discounts. I’m ready for it.) And that was the most efficient you could get. With AI, you’re saying you’re going to know the client individually and compose that client an individual email at the right exact time.
So, here’s my worry, and this is my existential question about email: that is an tremendous step change in the amount of email that will be generated — “We’re just going to send more emails to more people.” And on the another end of it, they’re going to have their AI respond to that email or filter that email. I’m looking at my inbox today, and it is simply a wasteland of evidently AI-generated emails. I can feel the difference. And there’s a part of me that says, “Alright, I’m going to get an AI and just let it deal with it.” And suddenly, the full email ecosystem feels like a bunch of robots talking to each another while the human beings are all on Slack. And I’m like, “Does that feel like a doom loop?” How do we break out of that outcome?
I look at it a lot more favorably in terms of the outcome.
Just to be clear, I would hope so, but that’s the most cynical I can be about it.
I look at it as a marketer, never inundating customers with emails they’re not going to love. due to the fact that you won’t then send the generic email to your full base, you’ll… It doesn’t mean you’re going to send more emails or SMS messages or find them more in social media and another places. Instead, you’re going to send them the right message at the right time that’s going to be highly personalized and relevant. And so, on the marketer side, I think you’re actually going to be a lot more efficient and likely send less emails that are a lot more powerful or less content pieces to your customers to effort to get them to convert.
On the consumer side, I think that’s great. If AI’s helping me as a consumer truly identify what marketing messages are going to be most effective for me, what’s going to delight me in that minute with a surprise on something I may not have been buying for or precisely what I’m buying for right now and aid me sift through that, great. But marketers are going to be in a large position to figure out how to get those top messages to customers if they’re utilizing the AI tools that can differentiate them in that space. So, I’m very excited by the possibilities for both marketers and consumers in that scenario.
As a consumer, do you perceive that increase of incoming communication that is evidently AI-generated? Or is that are you just besides busy, you’re in Slack all day?
As a consumer, our inboxes are exploding, for sure. But it’s so delightful erstwhile you find that message that hits you at the right minute in the right time, whether if you’re the kind of individual who wants to get an SMS at the right minute erstwhile you happen to be holding your telephone or you’re in social media and you get the right message or in your inbox. And I’ve been delighted in fresh weeks as I find something popped to the top with a subject line that gets my attention and the product is precisely what I want. So, it’s about getting through the sound and the clutter and having the right tool that will let you to do that. And we talked earlier about the fact that consumers are busy. They’re inundated with messages. They’re increasingly across different channels. Everything we’re talking about reinforces how hard it is for a marketer to break through and, therefore, needing a solution that can aid them do it. And the power of AI can play a massive function here. It’s going to be a full game-changer.
You can see as you just store online, retailers are kind of desperate to get a hold of your direct contact information. They’ll lower their prices substantially. They’re like, “We’ll just take a 25 percent haircut to get your direct contact information on this first acquisition due to the fact that now you’re much more likely to buy from us again.” And I think that’s a function of that being the most direct distribution mechanics on the internet, compared to Facebook ads or TikTok ads or whatever algorithmic media people might be consuming. There is inactive 1 algorithm between most people and an email marketer, right? It’s Gmail. Gmail exists. It is filtered. Political campaigns wage war against Google around that filtering. It is just as contentious a content moderation strategy and algorithm as anything else, even if it might not be at the forefront all the time. How do you think about that relationship? Do you feel email is controlled or monopolized in the way that any of the most strident critics of Gmail feel?
We think about this in the context of deliverability and making certain that we can supply our customers the highest deliverability rates in the manufacture so that we are actually able to deliver their messages and get them into the inbox, so we think a lot about our algorithm that way. And then we do increasingly think about the end platforms that they’re consuming that information in and staying ahead of the changes that they’re making to those platforms and making certain that we can be surfaced there. So, we do think a lot about that. But again, we’re reasoning a lot more broadly than email. And it’s increasingly disparate in terms of where consumers and Gen Z are spending their time. And, as we build Mailchimp and the broader Intuit tiny business ecosystem to be this growth engine for tiny businesses, we request to make certain that we can have a multichannel approach where we can scope customers and we’re not impacted by the decisions that 1 platform makes, but we can aid them stay of all those outcomes and get to good outcomes for their business.
Do you think about Gmail as a platform in that way?
It’s 1 of the main places where quite a few customers read their email, so yeah.
Do you have conversations with Google? Do you always go in there and say, “Look, let Mailchimp emails hit a tab that isn’t the promotions tab”?
We spend quite a few time with all of our major tech partners, as you can imagine. The ecosystem is strong, and we build deep relationships with them and talk about the possibilities to innovate together and what that could look like. But yeah, there’s lots of conversations that happen both around innovation and besides just building solutions together so they can work for our customers.
This is another kind of existential problem AI has brought to the fore. If there is simply a text box on the internet, individual is going to fill it with AI-generated content at a rate that is possibly unmanageable for any of our existing spam services. You’re sending to people with inboxes. They would like to manage the rate at which they’re seeing things. Those inboxes are run by large tech companies like Google and Yahoo and another companies, who supply to their customers a service of filtration and getting free of any of the spam. And then you run an input box of your own that people are most likely spamming with AI. That’s a swirl of things. Let’s start with your input box and then work all the way to the end of “Where does the email go?” You run a content distribution business that’s kind of most reductive. Are there things you won’t let people do with Mailchimp?
We have an acceptable usage policy that is very clear and is adjusted all the time. And yes, we have things that we let people to do on Mailchimp and things that we don’t. It’s focused on achieving respective things. 1 is ensuring that we can proceed to accomplish a advanced deliverability rate. And that’s crucial due to the fact that as our deliverability rate stays high, that allows us to support our ecosystem effectively. So, industries that may be prone to lower deliverability rates may not be able to usage the platform.
Let’s pull that apart — I’ve never heard anybody pull that apart before. So, you’re saying Mailchimp, as a whole, is simply a sender of emails. And if you have customers that ruin your deliverability rating with the large email providers, you actually don’t want them, right?
So, there’s any kind of customers you don’t want due to the fact that it will negatively impact your another customers due to the fact that Mailchimp, as a platform, will get deranked in any way.
That’s consistent with our values as well. due to the fact that oftentimes, that’s associated with spam or fraudulent activities or things like that. due to the fact that low deliverability is besides associated with more concerns being raised about those emails. And yes, so if it’s going to lead to low deliverability rates, we don’t want them on our platform.
You said it was consistent with your values as well. Obviously, you have values — you’ve talked about them already. But there’s a cold business logic there, right? You don’t want spammers and scammers on your platform or fraudsters due to the fact that the tiny business is trying to get 1 more client — their emails will get filtered more aggressively. How do you make that calculation? erstwhile you’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to update the acceptable usage policy, the AI-powered fraudsters are out. We request to specify them and make certain they don’t get accounts.” Does that come up with you, like, a model of how your deliverability rates will get affected if you enable a fresh kind of client class or get free of them?
Yes. So, we think about it that way, and certainly, we request to keep our deliverability rates as advanced due to the fact that that’s 1 of the top reasons businesses choose us as a platform, and that’s 1 of the top value propositions we provide.
To your point on models, this is an area where it’s crucial for models to aid you be as precise as possible. And I learned this erstwhile I led the fraud and hazard squad at Intuit. You want to defend against bad actors, but you want the models to aid you not make false affirmative decisions so that you can be as precise as possible. And that’s where technology can truly aid you be effective. So, as a business leader, you say, yes, in principle, we shouldn’t let businesses that show low deliverability to be on the platform, but how do we usage the best technology in the manufacture to identify those so we reduce the false affirmative rate?
Is there any time you fired a category of customers due to the fact that they were negatively impacting your deliverability?
It’s something we measure all the time and update it all the time based on data we’re seeing. And, as our models get better, we look at that as well, where we can pull out an individual actor versus a more blunt instrument.
Can you give me an example?
I don’t have circumstantial examples to share, but it’s what I always push on. erstwhile we started with AI, for example, in generative AI, we opened it up to a tiny fistful of industries to start, where we felt assured that the content would be produced, wouldn’t be sensitive, and we wouldn’t worry as much about the nature of the content that was produced. And, as we became more and more assured about our content moderation associated with AI and what we could do with the automated models and then the human in the loop, we opened it up further and further. So, we’re constantly looking to refine our policies to be able to let as many industries onto the platform and to make decisions in an automated way.
What’s the riskiest 1 that you think you’ve seen?
There are businesses like gambling and crypto and things like that, historically, that have had lower deliverability rates.
The safety side and the crypto fraud side, they seem beautiful straight linked. You evidently think about safety — you were on the fraud team. But a couple of years ago, there was a pretty sophisticated crypto theft operation that was operating inside of Mailchimp. due to the fact that you’re giving people so much access to data and targeting and refinement and segmentation and all these things, that seems like a beautiful attractive place for a fraudster to come do business. How do you manage that?
We take the safety side truly seriously across Intuit. That’s an area where we’ve had to build any of the industry’s most powerful safety mechanisms due to the fact that our customers entrust us with truly delicate data across all Intuit properties. So, it’s an area where we’ve built quite a few capability and strength, and we brought that to Mailchimp. It wasn’t part of Mailchimp in the earlier days of the acquisition. And since then, we’ve bolstered all the safety settings with the capabilities from across Intuit. And so, that’s how we think about it. We take it highly seriously. We have any of the world’s most sophisticated algorithms here, as well as a human monitoring squad that’s constantly staying ahead of it.
Fraudsters are constantly coming back. You build the next thing, and they come back. And so, this is something we’ve invested rather heavy in over time and have very strong safeguards to always stay 1 step ahead. But it’s an area you gotta constantly stay on your toes with. And I learned that from my time leading the hazard and money movement squad at Intuit and various another parts of the company.
It’s an election year. I’m assuming there’s going to be quite a few political campaigning on your platform utilizing your tools, people trying to get donations, whether it’s the candidates themselves or their affiliated super PACs or whatever. Are there any restrictions on that kind of activity on Mailchimp? Is that something that seems dicey? Is that something that seems lucrative? Political advertising can be very lucrative. Is that something you gotta think about differently?
It comes back to our acceptable usage policy. We work to just guarantee that there’s no harmful content on the platform or hatred speech on the platform, so we just stick to the guidelines we have and guarantee that all the messaging coming out of the platform is consistent with that.
One of the candidates in the presidential election cycle seems vastly more prone to things that feel like hatred speech than the another candidate. Is that something you would restrict?
It would depend on the content being generated on the platform, and it would come back to looking at the guidelines we have in place. And erstwhile the situations are trickier, we spend quite a few time deliberating those decisions to get to the right decision and revisiting and learning as we go.
Is that something that’s always come up before? It seems like this is going to be challenging for all platform in this peculiar presidential election cycle. Was that something you’ve had to deal with before? The company’s had to deal with before?
We’ve had respective topics we look at that relate to content moderation. These are sensitive, and so we spend quite a few time deliberating over them and making the right call. And this is 1 where you’ve got to go back to your policies and principles and usage multi levels of judgement and decisions and then make a decision and then just proceed to measure it over time.
So, that’s your text box. That’s just your text box. It’s very challenging. That’s just yours.
Now you’ve got to send the email. You’ve got to make certain it’s deliverable to a bunch of another people’s input systems that might filter or otherwise adjudicate the content of your email. And, like you said, you talk to all those tech partners all the time, but any of them are besides your competitors, right? I think Google thinks of itself as in-service to people who would like to buy advertising and increase their businesses. Does that feel like a competition? Does that feel like cooperation? Does that feel like they’re trustworthy? I’m picking on Google, but you could name a 100 different companies that sit between you and the actual recipient of an email.
There are surely overlapping areas in quite a few tech companies in terms of areas they’re playing in and opportunities to partner. That’s surely the case across the board in so many of these tech spaces. I would say we have a beautiful unique place in this ecosystem as Intuit due to our relation with tiny businesses and the depth of the relation with tiny businesses and the number of things we do, whether it’s accounting or payments or access to capital or any of the advice and expertise we’re providing. So, in general, we find there’s quite a few appetite from tech partners to want to work and partner with us and build creative solutions together. And they can see a planet where this can truly work. There’s so many things we can do with each of these partners that we’re uniquely positioned to do in partnership with them.
We’ve talked about email as being an alternate to social platforms throughout this conversation. But you go out to a restaurant now, and their menus are just on Instagram, and they’re possibly not updating their website so much. And they’re possibly not asking for your email to email you discounts. There are lots of businesses now. tiny Business TikTok is 1 of my favourite stories we’ve always done at The Verge. Just guys with force washers building businesses on TikTok. Do you think about ways to address those platforms as well due to the fact that that’s where so many audiences, peculiarly young audiences, are? Or are you focused on email, the web, tiny business stuff?
We’re surely focused on reaching our customer’s audiences wherever they are, as we want to be the central growth platform where they’re managing all their growth activities through us. They request to start with Mailchimp and the Intuit ecosystem more generally, bring all their client data, and usage it as their client data platform where all their data’s coming in getting enriched, where we’re knowing their customers better than they always could or they could anywhere else.
Can you import that data from Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and all the another places where they might be? I’m just reasoning about the — let’s just go with the force washer people on TikTok. They’re my favourite tiny business to talk about. I don’t really know if that’s inactive a thing, but there was a time erstwhile pressure-washing TikTok was a large deal. They’re getting lots of views. They most likely want to section those views by location, possibly service them any ads. The people that are close them, that’s a very physical local business. Is that data you can see and import and aid them with, or is that manual, or is that just a black box to you?
You can inform who you’re targeting on those platforms based on what you’re learning about your audience in Mailchimp, which is your central client data platform. You can section your audiences in Mailchimp and who you want to scope and then usage that to get that messaging out to those another platforms. So, you can do it that way.
But there’s no direct connection?
The direct connection can come through… Today, we do have any direct connections where you can update an audience in Facebook, for example, based on the tooling that’s available in Mailchimp, and you can besides agenda any messages you want to post in different places from Mailchimp.
I’m asking it this way due to the fact that it feels like the email providers that you’re sending to, they’re predictable. You can model deliverability and impacts on deliverability. I think if Yahoo or Microsoft or Google or whatever large email service supplier decided to start screening people’s email, there’d be more of an outcry than not. That feels like a neutral inbox. The another platforms are anything but, right? They are marketing platforms unto themselves. That is where the large direct-to-consumer companies built their businesses in the beginning, and I think they would like to eat more of your marketplace to say, “Okay, we are the place where you’re going to realize your customer,” and that feels like a much more open competition than not. But you’re saying you can inactive someway address those platforms?
Well, a couple of things. First of all, many tiny businesses present are not doing paid advertising due to the fact that it’s overwhelming and confusing and hard for them to do it. So, it’s 1 of the areas where the large tech platforms have struggled to break in, and that’s an area where, through partnership, we can aid them break in due to the fact that we have the relationships with these very tiny businesses. And we have unique proprietary data where we could aid them execute against these campaigns effectively. So, that’s 1 area of opportunity.
Secondly, it’s harder for these businesses to be able to manage their full client base on these platforms due to the fact that they frequently don’t own the client relation one-to-one and don’t have all the data about their client in 1 place. And so therefore, they request to come to a platform like Mailchimp, where they can build the logic and cognition about their customers end-to-end and they own the client data and, therefore, are able to take advantage of it.
One of the themes on Decoder over the last year or so is the kind of large conflict versus the open net that we’ve had for so long and the algorithmic net that seems to be dominant at this minute — and possibly even creaking at the seams. I don’t think the algorithmic net feels peculiarly unchangeable or even good to people right now, but there’s a pendulum that swings back and forth. Do you see yourself betting more on this kind of open net like email, like web? Or do you see more of the action going toward the algorithmic platforms?
Building a business on email is simply a thing you can do, and you can run a business for 20 years on it, and no 1 can take email away. Like building a business on Facebook: a bunch of media companies tried to do that, and Facebook took their businesses away. Right now, 170 million Americans who have built communities and businesses on TikTok are looking at that possibly going away. People who have built businesses on the web are never under force like that. So, there’s a yin and a yang, and the audiences seem to have vastly preferred the closed platforms, but the stableness is on the open platforms. And I think you’re right at the center of that tension. I’m just wondering how you’re reasoning about that right now.
It comes back to the discussion we had earlier, which is the way we think about power and growth for tiny businesses, which is our focus. We guarantee that they build a connected view of their end customers, which is highly hard to do. Today, they’re very far from able to do that. And then erstwhile we have depth of knowing on their end customers, we’re able to aid them craft the right message to scope their customers in the right place at the right time. And so, that means that we request to be able to scope their customers in all sorts of different places — across social media platforms, paid media platforms, email, WhatsApp, messaging, Discord, different platforms overall.
We’re going to proceed to build the ability to scope customers everywhere, end customers everywhere. Our secret sauce is that we’ve built the depth of knowing of their end customers and then can aid them craft the right message at the right time and identify what the right platform is and guarantee that, regardless of the dynamics that will proceed to happen on all of these end platforms, we’ve got omnichannel representation to be able to scope the end client at the right place at the right time.
That last turn — “We’ll identify what the right platform is at the right time” — that seems like, one, an expanding amount of complexity, but two, the thing that you’re actually betting on, right? It’s not open versus closed for you.
That’s right. We’re betting on the ability to leverage AI to craft the right message that’s going to drive the best performance outcomes in the manufacture and then to be able to look across all the different channels to figure out what’s going to execute best and craft a strategy for a business that way.
Would Mailchimp always get to the place that’s like, “The AI made you a TikTok video. Just put it on your TikTok channel and we think it’ll hit the right target”?
We’ll leverage in-house-built capabilities and then partner capabilities to be able to deliver an end-to-end run for businesses, including who you should target, what you should say to them, what the message should be, whether it’s a video or an image or text or a combination of all those things. Our imagination is to deliver against all of that.
Let’s wrap up here. I’m assuming you cannot do this today. How long until individual opens up their Mailchimp dashboard and it says, “You’ve got a large opportunity. You’re a denim retailer.” (I love making up the names of tiny businesses that might be your customers, by the way. This is possibly the most fun I’ve had.) “You’re a denim retailer, and there’s a guy in Westchester, fresh York, who needs a fresh pair of jeans. Make a TikTok video and send it to him.” And then push the button, and it just happens, and it’s sent to TikTok. How long from now until that is possible, do you think?
Well, I’ll tell you, this is an incredibly breathtaking time and space. I’ve never seen the pace of innovation be faster than it is today. And it’s been beautiful fast in my time and technology. And so, what’s incredible with generative AI, all time you open the Mailchimp app, you will see fresh generative AI capabilities. And where we are present is very different than where we were in September in terms of what we’re able to do and what’s happening. And so, if I answer your question, erstwhile will that be? I think it’s all month, we are going to decision dramatically closer to that outcome.
But that is an outcome. I think part of my question was: is that a realistic outcome?
It’s very much part of the imagination we have for what’s possible.
Well, that’s amazing — also, I think, a small scary. Rania, thank you so much for joining Decoder.
Thanks for the large discussion.
