Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B
investors.intuit.com
investors.intuit.com
That is, from all I've heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the "scrappyness" that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too.
Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for "regulatory capture" company. Also, since employees don't have equity (though I'm assuming they'll get fat bonuses for this), it's bound to cause some level of strife in the company.
> Intuit offers a free online service called TurboTax Free File as well as a similarly named service called TurboTax Free Edition which is not free for most users
> Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has lobbied extensively against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) creating its own online system of tax filing
> [I]nvestigations by ProPublica found that Intuit deliberately steered taxpayers from the free TurboTax Free File to the paid TurboTax Free Edition using tactics including search engine delisting and a deceptive discount targeted to members of the military.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboTax
No, TurboTax seems like a clear case of lobbying where millions are inconvenience just so that a handful of executive keep an underserved revenue.
Or are you referring to some other provisions?
"Design" implies intent requiring coordination and effort on the part of a group of people strategically situated to deliver a result. "To benefit the wealthy" identifies a clear and well-defined objective as the focus of such activities.
Who came up with the original idea to "design" a tax code "to benefit the wealthy"?
Was it more than one person? Names please.
What were the design principles? No hand-wavy stuff, looking for specific objectives, etc.
Over what period of time?
Can you provide a year-by-year (or close enough) summary of the progression of this design and how it met your stated purpose?
How? By this I mean: How was such a coordinated effort organized and run over, presumably, decades and through various generations of politicians participating in the process.
And, for all of the above, documentation please.
I remain puzzled about whether people just stay stuff like this or actually believe it. You don't have to make too much of an effort in digging into these ideas to fully identify them as nonsensical. Yet people believe this stuff without having one shred of proof, evidence, history or documentation. Not very different from folks who believe the COVID vaccine injects you with tiny little robots the government can use to control you (one of the things people say and I don't really know how to react other than to shrug and wish them well).
I'll add my own observation to this: No, the US tax code is not designed to benefit the wealthy. It is based on incentivizing behavior through tax breaks/credits.
For individuals the simplest example is the ability to deduct your mortgage interest from your income. Another example is the 30% solar system tax credit (I think it's down to 26% now).
At the business level you get such things as Section 179 tax credits, which allow you to reduce your tax burden by as much as 100% of the purchase value of qualifying business property. For example, when we purchased our last Haas CNC vertical machining center and all the tooling and software required to design, program and run it, we got a Section 179 tax credit of nearly $250K.
The theory behind these incentives is to promote behaviors. We bought equipment. The tax code treats this as a desirable behavior because it creates jobs. The options were: Send the IRS a check for $250K or send them $0 and use that money to buy additional machining capabilities. This is what is called a "no brainer". Everyone wins.
This is why businesses can seem to pay zero taxes. Well, if they invest enough money into things the tax code wants them to put money into, they get to pay less taxes. Yet, in certain circles, this is treated with blinding ignorance; the headlines often reading company "x paid zero taxes". Nobody bothers to understand any of it.
For the record, I don't like the idea of using the tax code to control behavior. I think this is (was) a terrible idea. It gives politicians tools they should not be able to access. Taxation should be as simple as possible, to a limit. The problems start once you try to simplify it. For example, "You must pay 10% of your income". OK, someone sets up an LLC and pay themselves very little. They pay very little in taxes. This is a very simplistic example to say that one of the reasons for which the tax code quickly gets convoluted is because, in software developer terms, it has to be a massive chain of "if-else if" statements in order to address all permutations and limit cheating to the extent possible. Once you start down that path you end-up with never-ending complexity because we don't have a way to control it.
Perhaps a simpler approach would have no income tax at all for anyone (state of federal). All the money needed to run governments at various levels comes from taxing transactions. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of options here. For example, tax every electronic funds transfer; tax every single imported good; national VAT, etc. Not a simple idea. There are no simple options. Maybe that's my point. It wasn't designed to benefit the rich, it turned into a monster that requires more and more "if else-if" statements to be added every year because we find more and more conditions that require evaluation. It's crazy. Not sure what they right answer might be. Not sure there is a right answer at all. And, no, what they do in (country) "m" has no bearing whatsoever on what is done or should be done in any other country. Tax codes evolve almost like natural selection, they respond to evolutionary pressure and each makes sense (to the extent possible) within the nation it evolved from.
Me: How much do I owe?
Gov’t: You have to figure that out.
Me: I just pay what I want?
Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too.
Me: What if I get it wrong?
Gov’t: You go to prison"
https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719...
Edit: I'm being downvoted for THIS particular comment? lol is intuit monitoring this thread or something?
Compare to, for example, Twitter and Facebook. All they did was amp up grievances that already existed, some centuries old. No one can agree on how much fault they deserve for the consequences even if it's clear they played a huge role in the current state of things.
In the next decade there will be market capture for one or two companies of the entire sub 50 employee retail business market segment. Everything from food trucks to floral shops will have one monthly subscription that covers pos system, employee scheduling/payroll, invoicing, tax, and much more in a platform of tools that resembles AWS or Azure. This is clearly Quickbooks expanding into fulfilling marketing needs for their clients.
Keep in mind it’s competitive in two ways. If businesses running Square have a competitive advantage because of tooling compared to businesses running Quickbooks than Quickbooks will suffer more churn and lose in the long run to Square.
> Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-Turbo... ]... Based on publicly available data and statements by Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on disability and minimum-wage workers.
Note as well that Intuit recently acquired Credit Karma for $8.1 billion - a company whose business model relies on granularly predicting what financial products will be most profitable when offered to consumers.
At the end of the day, it's often impossible to avoid using Intuit's B2B solutions like QuickBooks - as others have noted, they're an industry standard. But in the packed market of email service providers, is this the company who will set the most robust ethical boundaries on how to use a treasure trove of highly-actionable PII and purchasing data? Do we want to contribute to feeding our customers' data to such a company? That's a choice that those of us choosing ESP solutions should make with eyes wide open.
It is literally impossible to start up your own email server now and have it accepted by major email hosts like microsoft and gmail now without your emails ending up in spam or even worse, completely dropped.
People should be asking why email is so broken that companies like mailchimp exist and is being bought for billions.
I am 100% ignorant on the subject. If you have a moment can you provide the 30k foot view of what has changed to make this the case?
Only real way around this is to instead host your email server with them, aka Office365 or gWorkspace. This basically breaks the federated aspect of email and turns it into a siloed SaaS offering from two of the big cloud providers. AWS can also be used to send newsletters but doesn't really do consumer email hosting (they don't have a good client), and you're still tied to a SaaS cloud provider.
https://www.theverge.com/22300931/mailchimp-company-culture-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mailchimp-mass-exodus...
Does HN live in a bubble because of ycombinator where they think it's unusual for companies to be able to self start?
The 'unusual' part is more that a company this old and profitable has a traditional 'exit' vs. being run as a cashflow generator for the duration of the founders' lives.
Is there any more detail on that? I'm not sure why they wouldn't.
https://mailchimp.com/culture/investing-in-people-through-pr...
The only gripes I heard were not really gripes just an expression of the challenge of grappling with the legacy of TurboTax. The team seemed intent on finding new ways to manage the complexity and they seemed very open to new tech.
Everyone seemed happy to be working there. The few managers i interacted with seemed to really care about their teams. The most surprising thing I experienced was how grateful some were that they weren’t working at Hooli across the street in Mountain View. I didn’t understand this sentiment till I wandered over to Hooli’s campus. Everyone there seemed as depressed as the folks on a particular insurance campus in Lansing Michigan I visited. Not scientific, just sharing my lived exp.
Mailchimp has ~13MM users and 800k paying customers. In 2019 they had revenues of $700MM. In 2020 they had EBITDA of ~$300MM.
They are fully bootstrapped and have taken on zero outside funding.
This is not some great injustice or a company acting in any kind of morally questionable way. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that in the grand scheme of things (not just the tech bubble), offering equity to employees is the exception, not the norm.
If they would've been more generous with equity (even at the expense of base salaries), I think we would've been high-fiving each other when the sales team closed a huge deal instead of cursing them under our breath and plotting our escape.
Maybe they could have gotten some great employees by giving out more equity. Or maybe they tried and couldn't find them so they sold.
>Founded in 2001 and based in Atlanta with offices in Brooklyn, Oakland, Vancouver, London, and Santa Monica, Mailchimp has 1,200+ employees
Sending email must be much harder than I thought.
Selling to Intuit is not fine by me - and i consider it morally questionable in both senses of the term.
If they had gone public instead, Intuit could just as easily have bought up all the shares and reached the same end goal.
If giving an employee 1% of equity improves acquisition valuation by 2%, then it was probably a good move, as the remaining shareholders got 1% more than they would have otherwise.
It gets less intuitive with multiple people: what to do if one founder owning a valuable small business adds a salesperson and a UI guru, each of whom adds 10x the valuation to the company?
The main problem with equity is that it is extremely difficult to value how much a person will increase a future valuation by (ignoring complications with voting rights etcetera).
If the two options were rationally considered equal that would mean the missing $50,000 NPV of the employee’s salary would be paid by future investors once they bought the shares. Either in an IPO or in this case by the acquiring company.
Options are also a method to retain and incentivize talent, but they’re certainly a form of funding.
* they do allow employees to buy options with a portion of their salary and included a 5% stock option a few years ago.
I hate this selective criticism; for goodness' sake, she was the CEO of reddit -- a company with ethical controversies every other week, but she attacks MailChimp? Give me a break.
At a point in time before Mailchimp was clearly a success (and thus equity would actually be worth something), most engineers would jump at a salary-over-equity compensation scheme because it's common knowledge (at least around here) that equity is a lottery ticket that usually doesn't pay off.
There is no substance to the objection. They aren't entitled to anything, they didn't negotiate anything, and they shouldn't get anything. Her argument is akin to saying that the Uber driver that dropped me off at the gas station is entitled to part of my lottery winnings because the ticket I bought happened to have the jackpot numbers.
The position is both logically inconsistent and severely asymmetrical—we are only talking about this because MailChimp did have a successful exit, not because they failed miserably (as literally hundreds of startups do on a yearly basis). Even as a staunch capitalist, I'll be the first to say there are plenty of problems with corporate tax law, offshore tax havens, money laundering, etc.
But this ain't one.
https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499
Ellen Pao sucks. Didn't she fire a Reddit employee who had cancer?
and this is why i'm against unions in tech - the people like she will be the bosses.
That is the thing, we are seeing an extreme negative view of basic capitalism, people tend to believe founders and capital have no value believing in a socialist utopia where by all the workers get an equal share of the "means of production"
https://www.brownadvisory.com/us/theadvisory/qsbs-tax-exempt...
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/bidens-propos...
If Ben and Dan split it 50/50, that's $6b each and they would each be looking at $1.2b in capital gains tax.
It's unusual seeing a company that sells goods and services for money be valued highly in silicon valley ;)
(12 billion purchase price / 800000 paying customers)
But can't fault them. Congrats to the entire mailchimp team! You all deserve all the rewards, especially for bootstrapping.
Hope everyone there made out like bandits, and may this give them the financial freedom to pursue new passions in their lives.
For those curious about the founding story, How I Built This did a podcast with Ben Chestnut (released July 12, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-ches...
Small tidbit: mailchimp was a major pivot into SaaS (before that was a phrase) from another already successful services business (building websites). The team realized scaling a software product was a better idea than selling their time.
From 2015 on the corporatization took over, the flat hierarchy was completely discarded in favor of multi-tier CwhateverO monster departments, team fragmentation and purposeful reassignments, and basically a 100% annual employee count growth mandate.
That's also around when the big raises and bonuses stopped, and everyone was assigned to a role and level which has a set salary value range etc.
For me 2018 was the end of my patience for it, but I think some are trapped believing in an older version of themselves.
As much as I appreciate equality goals (what role, level, value ranges are there for), and believe their benefits outweigh their costs, they function by lowering ceilings and lifting floors. The only way to earn outsize bonuses these days is to be directly tied to outsize earnings (e.g. commissions), and that's hard to do with engineers.
The engineers route to that kind of risk/reward dynamic is by founding / joining something early (that actually grants options) and trying to make it huge.
Our decision to "grow up" was more a decision to try addressing non-email markets, and hire so many people and buy so much real estate that profit then depended on that choice.
Now they have half the talented staff because of boneheaded management decisions, half the loyal customers because the team stopped being able to address their needs, etc. If that's "mature" to bankers or VC's then I'd call them over-mature.
Ignoring the shifting sands would’ve likely meant a more gradual decline, instead of an unpleasant growth, and would’ve almost certainly yielded less than the chosen path.
The talented people and half the customers would’ve likely bailed either way.
And that makes it even more depressing.
From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to work. But I guess most of that will change when the corporate overlords decend and start optimizing things.
Not in the scheme of things, especially with regard to comp. Plus, they had a shitty PHP stack that was a spaghetti web.
I desperately tried to convince my Atlanta Mailchimp friends to quit and join me at a pre-IPO company. No takers. After our IPO, I made a life changing amount. Enough to retire before 30. They got paltry "bonuses" every year.
Mailchimp had some weird cool aid that made people like working there despite there being plenty of better alternatives. I just wish I could have convinced my friends to leave.
A company can just be a great place to work. No cool aid necessary.
It would have been a solid choice.
Imposter syndrome is a bitch, when there's always someone better than you out there, so there's probably a lot of Kool Aid in making people feel like they've made it, are part of the tech party, and are valued employees.
And working customer-facing is always a cooler cocktail party gig than being a master of the universe behind the curtain at Oz. For some.
Different folks optimize for different things. I doubt they'd turn down you buying the next round of drinks, and for some people... that's enough.
Mailchimp had run it's course. It was a marketing play, and e-mail marketing has become a commodity business. Atlanta is, at it's heart, a marketing town. But even there, that can only take a marketing company so far.
Mailchimp is also paying out $300M in bonuses https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499
Oppose with what many said, delivery to gmail.com is easisest. Now, where it's land is another question. Their spam filtering also very quick to learn.
icloud and hotmail are the worst because no way to get unblocked. You just fill in the form and wait in the dark. If you got luckly enough, they work on your ticket and unblock the ip. And here is the thing, they outright reject connection so your email cannot event reach the spam inbox.
So when launch a new IP, you should check on https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com and https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/data.a...
Any host providers that are cheap are most liklely has their IP blocked by proofpoint or microsoft already.
My strategy was to use server on Hetzner, then try to buy float IP then I can attach to any server. I have to try like 40 before I was able to get a pair of IP that aren't blocked by proofpoint/outlook.
Then I tried to warm up and build reputation by having a bunch of inbox email each others like 100 email per day then up to 1000 email per day.
Even with that I got blocked by proofpoint for no reason time by time...
So it's hard but with right strategy you can still do it. Just take more time and plan to build up and keep good reputation of your IPs.
But if I can offer a suggestion, it sounds like you were blocked by proofpoint while actively trying to spoof legitimate traffic in order to avoid detection by proofpoint. That's hardly "no reason at all," despite your having the best of intentions.
Last I checked (which was a while ago), APNIC has enough IPs to give new applicants two /24s with justification which will get you started without spending a lot of time/money in the IP resale market. If you're in ARIN or the RIPE regions I think you need to go to the market (but also need to justify, so you're looking for a single /24 to start). I don't know of it's accurate, but blog posts and auction sites seem to show about $15,000 for a /24, which is kind of a lot, but doable. You'll also need to arrange some hosting somewhere that you can credibly BGP with at least two networks to justify having an AS... There are some providers that will tunnel you to an internet exchange point and services like Vultr that might help you get started without a lot of investment.
And you'll need to learn BGP on the job. But I think you can do a lot with a simple unix box, you may not need a giant cisco router these days.
When forwarding email, we are receiving email from unknow domains. If we rewrite the FROM headers then the DKIM will invalid, so service will have to rewrite the FROM and clear out DKIM.
This is a well-known SES issue and project has to work around https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder
``` For example, if an email sent by Jane Example <jane@example.com> to info@example.com is processed by this script, the From and Reply-To headers will be set to:
From: Jane Example at jane@example.com <info@example.com> Reply-To: jane@example.com To override this behavior, set a verified fromEmail address (e.g., noreply@example.com) in the config object and the header will look like this. ```
We want to forward email as it is and retain everything so we have to run our own postix in order to do that.
Even though all the docs and technology is there, you really can't do it without the help of a big company like Amazon due to the following reasons:
- almost all residential ips are blocked.
- most data center ips are mostly blocked because there are like 100s of blacklists and every blacklist has it's own unique way of getting delisted.
- every big email provider has its own version of FBL and it's often a big black box. For example till date gmail won't even give Amazon access to its fbl(1)
- spam filtering is not an exact science and while there are things like spf, dkim, dmarc etc to ensure the authenticity of message at the end of the day it all comes down to your reputation as a sender and managing it is nothing short of a full time job.
(1) https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257487
Genuine questions, how do companies like Mailchimp get started then?
Mailchip is 20. Campaign Monitor is 17 (and have been buying up other email related companies/brands for years). SendGrid is about 12. Mailgun is 11.
There's a lot of competition out there, and it's not easy to overcome all the blocklist challenges - paying customers aren't willing for you to experiment with their customer's getting their email.
If you were to try to start one today, I suppose you could rely on sending via another company like Amazon until you have a big enough customer base, then roll out your own infrastructure.
Agreed. I think the hardest part is getting started; folks not familiar with hosting their own email just don't have as much awareness of what to do and how to do it. But take a bit of time to learn, get a reputable ISP, don't spam people, and you can do just fine without too much effort. I got a cheap VPS specifically to host email, and the worst I've had to do is fill out a Spamhaus form one time.
"Everything is hard at scale."
The number one thing you are selling is deliverability. The second thing you are selling is the tracking (opens, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.). Next, you are selling segmentation for subscriber lists (i.e being able to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time). You have to be diligent about your customers too, because if you are letting bad actors use your system... there goes your reputation and there goes your business.
But deliverability is the key. We had relationships with ISPs so we could fix $MAJOR_CORP's million email pre-holiday sales campaign while it was sending and we staffed the teams to do that, 24/7. This had nothing to do with programming and everything to do with company mission, reputation, contacts at Google, MSN, Yahoo, ..., and the history of having done it. We were "lucky" enough to have started as the industry matured.
* I say "lucky" because the founder's really caught this vision at the right time (2000/2001) and made it happen.
The value in what Mailchimp does is not so much just sending email, but in all the things around it, like managing subscribers, tracking opens, easily creating nice-looking emails that look good in a variety of mail clients, etc.
Contrary to some of the replies you've received here, it definitely is possible to run your own mail server with good deliverability, and we routinely did this for companies, even fairly small ones, physically on-prem and in datacenters, and cloud. It is not trivial, but far from impossible, and will likely involve communicating with a human when getting a static IP to find a good one. With that being said, I do not recommend you run your own mail server starting out, that is probably not the problem you are trying to solve.
My own assumption about why the system doesn't work.
Sorry if the question is a bit noob, feel free to point me at any resources and I can do some reading myself too
Once you get big enough, you can consider buying an IP address prefix, getting your Autonomous System number, setting up peering, etc. For example Mailchimp seems to have AS14782.
You also need to monitor your customers to make sure they aren’t doing things that will get you blocked.
It will always be a dance. I own a small IT company in the UK and have always managed to run local SMTP. I've done it for about 22 years. I could not run a Mail Chimp.
For starters, I could not live with myself! I don't do spam. MailChimp is a spammer for hire by definition. Your idea of spam and mine may be different. OK: Unsolicited Bulk Email is the key phrase. At which point are you solicited or unsolicited? Opt out or opt in? Where do you get your lists and how do you monetize this beast? How do you vet your customers or do you even care? What standards of ethics do you ascribe to?
I could possibly create another MailChimp because I know rather a lot about SMTP and own a fair few IPv4s and could cycle them and I'm fairly IPv6 savvy so I'll use that to get some more mileage. I know DMARC/DKIM/SPF and all the rest and can play those little games to up the authenticity score.
Can't be arsed to spam the world. I prefer to host recipients than senders.
So asking "How do I start my own spamming service and not get spamlisted" is kind of a silly question.
Mailchimp emails are well known for having 1 click unsubcribe by default.
There has been a huge resurgence in email newsletters for companies and content creators to have a direct relationship with their audience.
Mailchimp have done well because email seems to continually survive as a medium.
I’d guess that’s for personal, product, and customer service emails respectively.
I’m just not seeing the “synergy” between these two companies other than they both focus on SMB.
Which alone is probably worth a substantial amount of the purchase price in advertising / sales time equivalency.
Intuit is also pivoting themselves to being a data aggregator, who sells products powered by that (see: Mint purchase). And they seem to realize that whoever owns the collection point wins (see: Google). Consequently, mailchimp gets them a durable product and data coverage of a difficult to target and lucrative market (SMB).
Intuit Inc. is an American business that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. As of 2019, more than 95% of its revenues and earnings come from its activities within the United States.[3] Intuit's products include the tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint and the small business accounting program QuickBooks.
we often think of synergy being where you can apply your skill in solving problem Y to problem X even though the markets for those solutions are wildly different.
but you can also think about the "thing" as being "selling to a particular category of customer". you can cross sell, bundle, gain some forms of economy of scale.
this is basically the internet equivalent of WB Mason selling you toner, coffee, paper, chairs, and water coolers.
Also, if you look at mailchimp recent product changes with addition of MC stores, they are positioning themselves to compete against ecommerce platforms. This could be planned beforehand to be part of the package for the acquisition.
"You can simply start a business, run it to serve your customers" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-...
They're also bootstrapped and independent. They have a really easy to use API[2] (other providers have horrifically inscrutable APIs[3]). The customer service used to be excellent since you were talking directly to the founders. Now they've outsourced customer support so that's not as good, but I still like them far more than any other email service provider.
[0] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect
[1] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing
Postmark has been doing bulk emailing since 2019.
> Q: How will you maintain high deliverability for transactional email?
> A: Separating transactional traffic from other types of email using different sending IPs and From domains is a longstanding best practice for ensuring optimal deliverability.
...
> That means transactional and broadcast traffic never intersect in Postmark, including IP ranges.
https://postmarkapp.com/blog/api-bulk-the-final-frontier#how...
† now owned by Twilio
Source: https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FA...
While I also would prefer email to be text only, it seems most of the world feels differently. So I stopped worrying about it.
Side note: In theory an HTML email can be more visibly respectful of privacy while being nicely formatted, than visiting a webpage, although in practice that distinction seems increasingly rare.
Not sure what the big wigs are thinking but I'm expecting a big dilution in the RSU's I'm still holding...
This acquisition didn't really make much sense to me either, but apparently it's a bid to become hub for small businesses. $12B is a pretty big wad to blow on just email though. Maybe they go after a site builder, ecomm or CRM SaaS next? What's HubSpot worth these days?
It also feels a bit ironic that to ask mailchimp to not store my data I need to send that request via another company, do I need to ask them to delete my data too?
Results not guaranteed on different screen sizes of course.
That was about the 3-4th time I had to do that over the years and after looking into their way of doing things that's when I decided to set up my own email server. I don't do mass mailing so that has been a good solution for me. Not great, but better than being stuck using a 3rd party service that can sell your dependence on them like an asset.
I'm not sure Intuit will intentionally break this trust, but it will be something I'm probably going to be wary of happening unintentionally.
I say: let it die
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTU/intuit/profit...
Intuit is the slowest, most comfortable dev dept I've ever seen. Everything takes forever to get done. Even small projects take 3-6 months. They would ask us for a feature and budget 6 months and we would have it done in 1-2 weeks.
At first they looked at us like rockstars. Then their culture started getting into our organization and we slowed down to their level. Everyone left when they wanted to move us out of our cool downtown offices to a space in one of their big suburban office parks, way outside the city.
Almost everyone left when that was announced.
TLDR; Intuit is an awesome place to work if you want to hide, do nothing and get paid a truckload of money.
What is the cheapest provider for transactional E-Mail through an API?
Mailchimp is quite expense. A few solutions are a bit cheaper but not that much.
I used to have my own mailserver using Roundcube and my E-Mails never ended in the spams. So it quickly gets more economic to run my own mail server. Only problem is that it is quite a headache to manage. Can't some one create a 10x cheaper alternative to Mailchimp since sending E-Mails comes at almost no cost?
Why does mail sender (SPAM as a service?) need "AI"?
1. "AI" exists
2. They are using "AI" to begin with
This is just marketing. Nearly any time you see the phrase "AI" used, it's pure marketing.
[1] Ignoring outright fraudulent press releases of course. This doesn't seem like a fraudulent company.
They can estimate how likely addresses are to lead to spam complaints (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-omnivore/), how likely customers are to spend more (https://mailchimp.com/help/about-customer-lifetime-value-and...), things like that.
I'm not familiar with what mailchimp is actually doing with their marketing automation / analytics stuff but you could use "AI" ( or basically statistics in this case ) to analyze the resultant data.
Good to see that rewarded!
Mint.com comes to mind from years ago. I loved that app until Intuit took over. I know there are others.
How are they defining contacts? Certainly not unique contacts (which would be 10 contacts per person in the world?)
What does Mailchimp do that I can't replicate in a weekend of coding?
Reminds me of the conference where one of the panelists said they did a lot for wealth inequality
And the other panelist said “in what direction”
and yell “wider!” and all the panelists start cackling like cartoon super villains, but unironically
Smart move by Intuit
Odds this ends up like Mint?
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Active Campaign
Boomtrain
Campaign Monitor
Cordial
Amazon SES
Eloqua
Emma
Experian Cheetahmail
Exact Target
Hubspot
Maropost
OneSignal
PostUp
Responsys
Sailthru
SeconStreet
Sendgrid
SparkPostIt really depends on your business... variables like do you just want to do email, or do you want to message in app or on website too? Selling physical goods? There are a million ways to do app or marketing automation comms.
I guess that's to be expected, free tiers of any email services are going to be horribly abused. Hopefully the paid service is better.
The average consumer doesn't know that Intuit has a gross business model that is entirely based on the idea of deliberately keeping bureaucracy alive. They think the exact opposite.
They believe Intuit is giving them a solution to deal with the government's outdated and overly-complex tax filing system. And unsurpisingly the government has no issues with being the escape goat on this one, because the way you pay your taxes will never be as politically contentious as determining who gets to pay taxes and how much they pay.
I also don't want the government to get in the business of writing tax software.
Filing taxes in the rest of the developed world is essentially a one-click process, because every tax authority in the rest of the developed world already have all the information necessary to create such software (and so does the IRS).
This is a problem entirely caused by lobbying efforts. It literally does not exist for the rest of the developed world. Why insist on having it worse than everyone else, for the sole gain of the likes of Intuit? It's baffling to say the least.
I'm a little fed up of this canard. No. This is not the case. I've lived in the UK and had to do self assessment filing. It was not "essentially a one-click process". I have lived in Japan and filed taxes there. It was also not "essentially a one-click process".
>have all the information necessary to create such software (and so does the IRS)
No, it does not. A significant chunk of social programs are run in the US via the tax system (primarily through the forms of various credits) and are dependent on facts that the IRS does not know.
Seems to strike me as a lesson I learned when I was young.. "Well if your friends all jumped off the bridge would you?"
Simply because other nations do X, is not IMO a valid justification for X...
Search this page for Intuit https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/static/fed_terms_of_se...
And here's where you search for xml error codes when your return gets rejected.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/individuals/free-file-fillable-fo...
This thread a replier expresses first hand knowledge of doing government software development contracted out to their company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28003793
I'm not saying they don't, but don't you think the tax code is complicated because politicians have to be doing something, and they get donations by adding special provisions for their donors?
A prerequisite to a simple tax system would be a rate so low that (1) no deductions are necessary, and (2) it's not worth making any special effort to avoid the tax or to cheat.
On (1), that's right: no child deduction, no mortgage deduction, no charitable deduction, no state & local tax deduction, no nothing. Just pay 15% of your income, period, full stop. And TurboTax got no further reason to live.
No, because they lobby to keep filing taxes complicated. Yes, taxes most likely will always be complicated, but if there's no artificial barriers to filing (like in most of the rest of the developed world), there can be real competition in the tax-solutions-software space and most likely there'll also be acceptable open-source solutions that can be used for free.