📧 If email is dead, why did Intuit buy Mailchimp for 12B$?

Intuit just bought Mailchimp for $12 billion, making it the largest-ever acquisition of a bootstrapped company. Mindblowing? Not at all.

Dear [First Name],

Odds are you have received an email like this in the past 20 years from a small business. Most likely, that business was using Mailchimp and forgot to link your contact to a first name.

It happened to all of us in marketing at least once. 🙋

That sweaty gorilla hand before sending out an email campaign is something no one in marketing can ever forget. It made Mailchimp a household name from the bakery next door to the Fortune 500.

Why is Intuit buying Mailchimp? Circular Economy.

Intuit is the leader of financial services for small and medium businesses. With products such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, and Credit Karma, Intuit already holds a powerful position in the financial management of small businesses across different markets. Mailchimp completes the circle. The joint PR statement is very clear about it:
Together, Intuit and Mailchimp will work to deliver on the vision of an innovative, end-to-end customer growth platform for small and mid-market businesses, allowing them to get their business online, market their business, manage customer relationships, benefit from insights and analytics, get paid, access capital, pay employees, optimize cash flow, be organized and stay compliant, with experts at their fingertips. Delivering on the promise to be the single source of truth, small and mid-market businesses will have the power to combine their customer data from Mailchimp and QuickBooks’ purchase data to get the actionable insights they need to grow and run their businesses with confidence.

More importantly, the numbers speak for themselves. Mailchimp brings to Intuit:

• Global customer reach with 13 million total users globally, 2.4 million monthly active users, and 800,000 paid customers, with 50 percent of customers outside of the U.S.

• Data and technology in the form of 70 billion contacts and 250+ rich partner integrations.

• AI-powered automation at scale fuels 2.2 million daily AI-driven predictions.

In return, Intuit allows Mailchimp to connect audience and buyers bringing in over 7 million customers of QuickBooks.

The combo power of customer data — via Mailchimp — with the purchasing data — via QuickBooks — is immense, and it will tackle one of the biggest problems for small businesses: growth.

Why does it matter?

Mailchimp is a bootstrapped company without any VC capital investment that chose to do profit-sharing instead of creating equity plans for their employees. It did not need to be acquired to stand in its own two feet. With Intuit buying it for $12 billion, it makes history as the biggest ever bootstrapped deal. For comparison, Microsoft bought Minecraft’s Mojang for $2.5 billion — this is almost 10x that amount.

At Newspitality, we got an “exclusive” of how the Mailchimp team asked Intuit to close the deal:

Thankfully, we cannot deepfake acquisitions yet, but there’s some creepy tech around for everything else.