Why Intuit Bought Mailchimp for $12 Billion

I believe it’s telling us something important about small business audience building.

As I'm a known MailChimp fan, several have asked my thoughts on Intuit buying MailChimp for $12 billion. I've been watching MailChimp trying to push beyond email marketing the past few years but then it occured to me, maybe they've been watching Substack.com — a paid newsletter service which has been exploding since its founding in just 2017 (and a $650 million valuation).

A Forbes article from earlier this year talks about how Substack is changing the journalism industry because it's allowing independent writers to build and monetize an audience in one easy step — a pretty significant accomplishment when you consider how traditional media has struggled almost entirely since the web came on the scene in the late 90s.

What does this mean for marketing and your average company who is not a journalist? That newsletters are important and email is important. Maybe more important than ever.

Social media and traditional media is dropping in the trust department and email audiences can be owned and individualized.

You should be all over your email audience on a regular basis and driving them to your website where most companies should be monetizing their audiences in the way that's right for them.

And if you're on a platform like Squarespace — they just introduced a nice paid membership system where it's super easy to collect subscriptions and have content behind that membership system — so you can essentially do what Substack is, but on your site and collect all the $$$.

Check out Squarespace Member Areas where you can charge subscriptions:

Forbes article: The Rise Of Substack—And What’s Behind It