Nathan Berry

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, right?

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

And 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.

Let me go use MailChimp, which is the tool that I know how to use.

And so basically Freemium drove all of this where they would get big accounts switching over, knowing how to use the tool right away.

And he was just like, this is mind-blowing.

This is amazing.

And we were in the process of figuring out how could we offer a free plan.

We basically looked at it and said, look, what if as a profitable company with plenty of cash in the bank and all that, we started to adopt some of these more like Silicon Valley startup methodologies and said, we don't have to make money from every customer up front.