We just launched a banner ad campaign for MailChimp on The Deck (an ad network that basically targets web developers and designers). So far so good.
But just the other day, a designer (with a very good eye) sent in a concerned email to The Deck that perhaps the MailChimp logo was a ripoff of a monkey illustration seen over at Lollipopcards.com.
Actually, it's the other way around. The Lollipopcards design is a ripoff of the MailChimp logo. I know that for a fact, because I designed both of 'em. Hey, I needed a monkey, and I needed it yesterday!
It was actually kind of funny that anyone even knew about lollipopcards.com. I built that site with Mark (who later partnered with me to start The Rocket Science Group), back in 1999. We did it in our spare time. We mainly wanted to see if we could ever build enough traffic to make some side money off of it. Maybe we could sell advertisements targeted at fathers inside our Father's Day cards. Brilliant! Let's do it! IPO!
Took Mark about a week to figure out the whole multipart-alternative MIME encapsulation thing (basically, how to get HTML email to work). He programmed, and I designed little cutesy cards. When we finally launched, we sent our St.Patrick's day card out to 7 friends. They sent cards to their friends. And on and on. In about a year, with virtually no marketing whatsoever, we had 30,000 uniques visiting the site every month. Meh. By then, we lost interest. We had day jobs.
We never made any money off of that site. It turned out to be just a hobby.
Just before we considered it a complete and utter failure, and just before we turned the switch off to save some hosting money, we got the idea to build MailChimp (an email newsletter delivery tool).
We took a bunch of the code we developed for lollipopcards, tweaked it, and it became the foundation for MailChimp. We had the delivery part down easy. It was the "tracking and sorting bounces" that took us so much time. I still remember those late nights helping Mark search the Internet for "how to handle bouncebacks." I finally hit on the word "VERPS" (thank you almighty Google) and the rest is history.
Now MailChimp has thousands of customers from all over the world, and makes us enough pennies that we don't really have to worry about much anymore.
So if you have some cool web technology you developed, don't throw it away. You'll think of some weird way to re-use it later. Same goes for monkey drawings.
But just the other day, a designer (with a very good eye) sent in a concerned email to The Deck that perhaps the MailChimp logo was a ripoff of a monkey illustration seen over at Lollipopcards.com.
Actually, it's the other way around. The Lollipopcards design is a ripoff of the MailChimp logo. I know that for a fact, because I designed both of 'em. Hey, I needed a monkey, and I needed it yesterday!
It was actually kind of funny that anyone even knew about lollipopcards.com. I built that site with Mark (who later partnered with me to start The Rocket Science Group), back in 1999. We did it in our spare time. We mainly wanted to see if we could ever build enough traffic to make some side money off of it. Maybe we could sell advertisements targeted at fathers inside our Father's Day cards. Brilliant! Let's do it! IPO!
Took Mark about a week to figure out the whole multipart-alternative MIME encapsulation thing (basically, how to get HTML email to work). He programmed, and I designed little cutesy cards. When we finally launched, we sent our St.Patrick's day card out to 7 friends. They sent cards to their friends. And on and on. In about a year, with virtually no marketing whatsoever, we had 30,000 uniques visiting the site every month. Meh. By then, we lost interest. We had day jobs.
We never made any money off of that site. It turned out to be just a hobby.
Just before we considered it a complete and utter failure, and just before we turned the switch off to save some hosting money, we got the idea to build MailChimp (an email newsletter delivery tool).
We took a bunch of the code we developed for lollipopcards, tweaked it, and it became the foundation for MailChimp. We had the delivery part down easy. It was the "tracking and sorting bounces" that took us so much time. I still remember those late nights helping Mark search the Internet for "how to handle bouncebacks." I finally hit on the word "VERPS" (thank you almighty Google) and the rest is history.
Now MailChimp has thousands of customers from all over the world, and makes us enough pennies that we don't really have to worry about much anymore.
So if you have some cool web technology you developed, don't throw it away. You'll think of some weird way to re-use it later. Same goes for monkey drawings.
Labels: branding
