about mailninja

Hey, we’re MailNinja 👋

The MailNinja story, so far…

The story begins

MailNinja’s story begins way back in 2005, when I bought myself a laptop and decided to call myself a web designer. Shortly after I fell into email design by mistake, and as email designers were scarce I decided to focus on that and launch MailNinja, one of the first email-only marketing agencies.

Over the years following that, I slowly built up a small team of coders and designers and set to work on world domination!

Supporting Mailchimp

Back in the day, our bread-and-butter work was designing and building email templates, providing support and full campaign management for customers on a variety of email marketing platforms, but the fastest growing and coolest of the bunch was of course… Mailchimp.

Due to Mailchimp’s awful Trustpilot rating, I saw that supporting customers using Mailchimp was a no-brainer, cos they clearly weren’t getting the support they needed from Mailchimp themselves. The tricky part was charging for a service they felt they should be getting for free!

Back then, Mailchimp saw themselves as the “scrappy underdog”, empathising with small businesses and providing a low cost solution to help them grow. I believed in that mantra and felt a symbiance with them.

Mailchimp ‘sell out’

This focus all changed when Intuit took over the reigns in 2021. The ethos Ben and Dan (the two founders) had nurtured for two decades seemed to vanish overnight and ‘Corporate America’ took over. In the months since the takeover, Intuit have increased prices a bunch of times, and the overall impression is one of complacency and greed.

I wrote an article about this here.

To say I was let down is an understatement. I felt we had invested a decade or more in a relationship that no longer existed. Boo.

Launching a platform

Shortly after this, I decided to pivot and launch our own platform to rival Mailchimp.

In typical ‘David and Goliath’ style, MailNinja are David and are out to steal customers away from Goliath (Mailchimp). It’s now our turn to be the “scrappy underdog”.

MailNinja is designed, built and supported by a team of email marketing experts, out to prove email marketing doesn’t have to cost the earth. We want to support and partner up with our customers (not users, I hate the term users) and build a community of marketers that want to grow their business with email, and work with a small company that understands their pain, cos we’ve been there too.