Mailchimp

How Capital Daily started: a MailChimp account and a stay-at-home mom

Frustrated that his local Victoria paper had laid off its journalists, Wilkinson started a local news newsletter, Capital Daily, with a stay-at-home-mom writer and a MailChimp account, then discovered ads for local-news subscribers were dirt cheap because no one was competing.

“I went to a friend who is a stay-at-home mom who had some experience doing a bunch of writing. And I said, hey, why don't we just start a MailChimp account and we'll come up with a brand. We called it Capital Daily. And we'll send out a daily newsletter and we'll just summarize like, hey, here's like 3 or 4 stories of things that are happening in town. So we start doing this and, uh, I have a friend who runs a PPC agency and I get him to just go buy ads. And I realized I can buy ads for like nothing. No one's advertising for local news.”

The SaaS 'dead zone': $200-300/year products plateau fast

Sam's heuristic from studying revenue graphs (Buffer, ConvertKit): software priced around $20-100/month hits a 'dead zone' where revenue ramps fast then plateaus, because it's incredibly hard to build a big company at $200-300/year price points. Mailchimp and Canva are rare exceptions.

“There's this dead zone of like $200 a year or $300 a year or something like that. And it's incredibly hard to build a big company when shit costs that much. Some people have done it. Mailchimp has done it. Canva has done it. I think it's almost impossible for most other types of people to do it.”

Steal thisIf your SaaS sits at $200-300/year, either drop to true low-touch self-serve scale or move upmarket — the mid-tier plateaus.

Mailchimp for internal company comms with a read-receipt loop

Sam pitches an internal-newsletter tool that makes corporate communications concise and trackable: HR sends a policy to 10,000 employees, each email has a 'click to confirm you read this' button, and non-clickers get chased after 24 hours. Shaan calls it one of the better ideas from the show.

“here's what I would do is I would build a basically a Mailchimp for internal companies, and at the bottom I'd be like, to confirm that you read this, click this. And then if you didn't click it in 24 hours, you get You didn't, I like this Mailchimp internal thing.”

Steal thisBuild an internal-comms email tool with mandatory read-confirmation and automatic follow-ups for non-readers.

ConvertKit: ~$2M MRR, 100% founder-owned, no outside investors

Sam highlights Nathan Barry's ConvertKit (a Mailchimp competitor) doing close to $2M in monthly recurring revenue (~$24M/year), fully owned by the founder, which he pegs as a $100-200M company because locked-in email customers rarely switch.

“And Nathan has this company called ConvertKit. They do close to $2 million in monthly recurring revenue. So $24 million. He owns 100% of it. It's probably a $100 to $200 million company. Like, it's really valuable because once customers are locked in, it's basically a Mailchimp competitor.”

Rev paid $400K for the Rev.com domain

After failing to acquire circle.com (which Jeremy Allaire later used for his Bitcoin wallet company), Chicola spent $400,000 to buy the Rev.com domain — a huge chunk of the company's assets at the time, justified as a drop in the bucket if the company succeeds and a resellable asset if it fails.

“I don't know if I've disclosed, but I'll say it now for fun, we spent $400 grand on the name.”

Be the Wirecutter of business software, earn affiliate-for-life

Sam wants a content site that just tells small companies which software suite to install, monetized by affiliate fees — e.g. Mailchimp pays an affiliate ~$30/month for life on a $100/month customer.

“something like a Mailchimp. If I tell you to sign up to Mailchimp and use my link and you pay $100 a month for Mailchimp, Mailchimp will pay me the affiliate $30 a month for life.”

Steal thisBuild a Wirecutter for business software and monetize with recurring affiliate fees that pay for the life of each customer.