Dan Kurzius: You’ve got mail!

What have Dan Kurzius, Shutterstock founder Jon Orsinger, and the man behind the Go Pro, Nick Woodman, got in common? They are all advocates of ‘bootstrapping’ a practice where you retain full ownership of your startup by refusing the siren-song of venture capital investors. Instead, these entrepreneurs bet on themselves and their ability to make a success of their business idea. Another atypical feature is MailChimp’s location in Georgia, 4,000 kilometers east of Silicon Valley.

As a young boy growing up in New Mexico, Dan Kurzius was full of respect for the lengths his parents went to, to put food on the table.

His father Karl owned a mom-and-pop bakery in Albuquerque, in which the future startupper would toil before going to school. In spite of the hard work of the Kurzius clan, the competition from established chains was too great and so, in the early 80s, the family moved to Dallas in the hopes of improving their fortunes.

But tragedy struck a few weeks after the move to Texas when Karl died suddenly. His mother, Laurel, persevered as best she could, juggling jobs, but times were tight. Dan did what he could to help ease the family’s financial burden, working part time after school, but for Laurel, her son’s education remained the priority. He would go on to graduate from Georgia Tech University with a degree in computer science. 

Dynamic Duo
While at Georgia Tech, Kurzius met the man he would go on to found MailChimp with: Ben Chestnut. The duo complemented each other professionally, with Dan the boffin and Ben the impresario. In 2001 the pair launched a web-design agency called The Rocket Science Group.

“In 2021, by the time Dan and Ben sold their company to Intuit for $12 billion, MailChimp had 13 million users”

The fledgling businessmen soon realized that the bulk of their clients required not just an appealing visual identity, but a way to reach their customers. To cater to this demand, the email marketing service MailChimp was born.  

To be a success in sales and marketing you can’t waste time courting prospects that are unlikely to become clients, and MailChimp’s ability to keeping track of who’s paid for what, when and how many etc, proved prized information.

Fremium Scheme
Despite the obvious advantages of MailChimp, growth was slow at first. The main obstacle was the SMEs that made up the bulk of The Rocket Science Group’s clientele at the time had limited marketing budgets and were reluctant to fork out for a MailChimp subscription. The solution? Offer the service free of charge up to a certain number of emailed clients. It worked! What’s more, the beauty of the system was that if a client needed a premium account, it was a sign that they were a) growing as a business and b) reliant on MailChimp to do so. Within a year of launching the fremium model in 2009, MailChimp’s user-base rocketed from 85,000 to 450,000. 

In 2021, by the time Dan and Ben sold their company to Intuit for $12 billion, MailChimp had 13 million users, had sent 333 billion emails and was generating $800 million in annual turnover. Dan, who negotiated staying on as an executive as part of the Intuit buyout, has taken on a more ambassadorial role of late, speaking on everything from Intuit’s work with the local community in Atlanta to the opening of its state of the art 360,000-square-foot office in the City’s historic Old Fourth Ward district.

What’s next for the 52-year-old father of two? Difficult to say, but when you are worth $5.7 billion, one thing you don’t lack is options.