We love helping people tell their stories, and we love finding creative projects to support. So when we have an opportunity to do both, that’s even better. Our customers’ stories are inspiring, weird, and often really funny. That’s why we put them front and center in some of our favorite publications.
Crimetown
Gimlet Media makes amazing podcasts that we’ve had the opportunity to support over the years. For their latest, we turned things over to Mailchimp customers so they could talk a bit about what they do and how they work to get their stories out into the world.
Before each episode of Crimetown, you’ll hear a different Mailchimp customer introduce their company or organization and share a bit about what makes them special. They’re a pretty diverse group, from nonprofits to retailers and everything in between. Tune in to hear from people like Naz Riahi, the founder of Bitten, an organization that brings creative people together to talk about food. Naz’s work was just spotlighted by President Obama, and she’s happy to disclose the fact that she uses Mailchimp to obsessively track who’s opened her latest newsletter.
You’ll also hear from Adrian Hon. Adrian created Zombies, Run!, a game that turns players into runners fleeing to safety during a zombie epidemic. Adrian’s an expert on interactive gaming, crowdfunding, and communicating with his customers—including the million-plus people who have purchased copies of the game.
Listen to Naz and Adrian’s podcast spots below.
The Thread
For our latest season of The Thread, a collaborative project that we sponsor with The California Sunday Magazine, we paired some of our favorite Mailchimp customers with some of our favorite entertainers and published copies of their email threads.
The resulting conversations are pretty delightful, and they speak to the joys and difficulties of running a business. Take Todd Masonis, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who decided to start Dandelion Chocolate after experimenting with chocolate in his friend’s garage. In his emails to Silicon Valley’s Martin Starr, Todd talks about the challenges of growing his company while staying true to who he is.
We also hear from the folks who run The Cactus Store, a bustling business in Los Angeles. The Cactus Boys, as they’re called, discuss why they think it’s important to specialize in something that you’re really good at. In their back-and-forth with comedian Megan Amram, we hear about what it means to embrace your imperfections and keep your identity even when there’s pressure to be like everybody else.
We can showcase only a relatively tiny number of our more than 14 million Mailchimp customers, but we hope that we can shed a little light on some of the awesome people who are running businesses and developing their unique take on the world.
One of the most interesting things about Mailchimp is the people who use it. Keeping up with what our customers have to say helps us remember what we’re ultimately all about: giving our users a platform to share what makes them different.