Mailchimp is offering a $1 million Integration Fund to help developers create new integrations for our global small business customers. The COVID-19* crisis has left small businesses, developers, and the startup community in a difficult place. We’re launching the Integration Fund to support developers during a time of economic uncertainty by investing in them to create tools that will help our small business customers be smarter and more effective with their marketing.
Specifically, we’re accepting applications from developers and startups who can create an integration with the Mailchimp platform that provides advanced features via Mailchimp’s Marketing API for free to our users. Eligible developers can submit an application here. Once selected, developers will be offered financial support upfront, and on an ongoing basis to help them perform the work. Developers can apply even if they have not been impacted by the current economic climate.
“Supporting developers with opportunities and resources, especially during this time, is critical to the success of our global small business ecosystem,” said Eric Muntz, CTO at Mailchimp. “I understand the power of the developer community first-hand—Ben Chestnut offered me a job at Mailchimp after I built a BlackBerry integration called Mini Chimp. Investing in the developer community to create integrations that bring a small business' data into one place will help them stay connected to their audience, market smarter, and grow faster."
Mailchimp launched its first Integration Fund in November 2010 for startups building integrations for our APIs. Since then, we’ve seen 34% of our active customers adopt integrations into their marketing. We’re rebooting this fund during the COVID-19 crisis to offer financial support to the developers who help small businesses grow through their integrations.
Mailchimp also recently made significant improvements to the developer experience within our platform. The new web experience for developers offers better documentation, code snippets, and user guides to make it easier for developers to use our APIs for Transactional Email and other marketing use cases. Earlier this year, Mailchimp brought Transactional Email, formerly known as Mandrill, closer to the Mailchimp platform. Users can access the Transactional experience through the Mailchimp platform and can expect improved deliverability, reliability, and scale with its most recent updates. And with the recent acquisition of Reaction Commerce, we’ve brought the expertise of an open source e-commerce solution to Mailchimp to continue to improve our marketing technology for small businesses, developers, and e-commerce partners.
*Read the latest updates on Mailchimp’s response to COVID-19 here.
Published on August 4, 2020. Last updated on August 27, 2020.