Nathan Berry

And there's truth to both sides of it.

But I just read, well, so two things.

In 2018, I sat down with Ben Chestnut, the CEO of MailChimp at the Inc.

5000 conference.

He was super generous with his time.

We just got to chat for 30 minutes in a hotel lobby.

And he was just like, look, free was huge for us.

That is the inflection point.

And it still is huge.

And it's not a bunch of low value customers.

It is those, but it's all of these high value customers

They just show up and you're like, where did this hundred thousand subscriber account come from?

You're like trying to attribute it.

And you're like, you know, you're not, you can't figure out, like, it's not from paid.

It's not from search.

You know, it just doesn't make sense.

And so you do customer interviews and your product managers sit down with this account.

You find out that this marketer used the free version of MailChimp, spun up a free account, did some stuff.

learned how to use the product, grew it to, I don't know, 50 subscribers, 500 subscribers, something that's not material for MailChimp, and then got a job at this big company who was using Constant Contact.

And he's like, no, I'm not using Constant Contact for this.