> To investors, the math just didn’t check out. Why serve a highly fragmented, emotional, low-budget small business audience when 30% of them will be out of business in 2 years, and 50% of them will fail within the next 5 years? What Ben understood from personal experience was that even when solo-preneurs fail, they keep their email lists alive, and most of them start something new some time down the road.
Always encouraging to hear that you may be working on something worthwhile even if smart people still don’t get it. Even some smart friends of mine have been pretty unconvinced simply because they don’t understand the domain, or maybe they’re just not that interested. Investors are often pretty smart, but apparently those they spoke with were biased against the massive small business market. Conventional hurdles of selling and retaining such customers didn’t apply to Mailchimp but it was difficult for them to see that. Today, Mailchimp still has over half the market.