The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere.
We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenominal.
You can comfortably live in the city with a roommate and pay only $500-600 rent. Just outside the city, you can get a 1200 sqft apartment for $700.
Our music scene is amazing, and the local food is fantastic.
I try to convince my friends in SF to come out here and give Atlanta a look, but nobody bites. I think this city is an incredible opportunity, especially for an early stage startup that wants to focus on growth prior to investment. The talent is here, the city is amazing, and the rent isn't absurd.
As a counterpoint: My family is in Atlanta (well, just outside of it), and it's probably my least favorite major American city. The traffic is out of control (and has possibly the rudest drivers in the whole country), McMansions and suburban sprawl are a way of life (my brother-in-law has an hour long commute to his near-downtown office, and keeps an office in his house so he doesn't have to drive down every day), and it feels like everything is at least 30 minutes away by car (and unreachable any other way; even to catch a bus or train you have to drive to a park-and-ride) no matter where you are in the city. Also, there's casual racism on a scale I've not seen in any other major city I can think of.
I grew up nearby, in Greenville, SC, and Atlanta was "The City". But, I've never liked it. Even with family there, I'd never consider it a place I'd want to live (and I really like my family!). I also don't choose to live in SF, but I'd pick it long before Atlanta.
That said, it is a growing city with a ton of opportunity. I know some folks who've moved there from other cities and they almost immediately found good work in their industry of choice (film, where they'd been struggling for years in Austin, having to have a second job in retail just to make ends meet). So, sure, cost of living isn't bad and the economy is definitely booming. But, it's not a nice city, IMHO.
> and has possibly the rudest drivers in the whole country)
There are 2 truths I've found, having lived outside Chicago, Manhattan, Atlanta (in 3 different areas), Orlando, Tampa, and Los Angeles:
1. Wherever you are, people think the drivers there are worse than other places.
2. Wherever you are, people think the weather changes more frequently there than other places.
I have NEVER lived, and rarely visited places (including Europe), where someone hasn't used the "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour" joke, non-ironically.
As to your point I quoted, the drivers in Orlando are orders of magnitude worse than Atlanta. And I'm wondering if you've ever been to south Jersey or Boston, if you think Atlanta drivers are rude.
Your other points about McMansions and SUB-urban sprawl are spot on. And, everything IS 30 minutes away, and unreachable by mass transit.
re: casual racism... Dunno, maybe. At least it's not overt racism like I've seen in many other places, but I'm guessing that's not what you were getting at.
"There are 2 truths I've found, having lived outside Chicago, Manhattan, Atlanta (in 3 different areas), Orlando, Tampa, and Los Angeles:
1. Wherever you are, people think the drivers there are worse than other places."
I have lived in an RV and traveled full-time for six of the past seven years. I've driven a bus-sized house through more cities than most folks have visited. I feel like I could write a (very boring) book about traffic. I agree that everyone complains about traffic, and everyone does say the same tired old line about the weather changing. But, there are differences in the character of drivers and traffic in various cities.
I will agree with you about Orlando (and Florida, in general); those are some shitty drivers, too. But, Atlanta really takes the cake. I was on the road for seven months in the RV before going to visit my folks for the first time (the first time in the RV, not the first time ever). I got cut off more, and had more people ignore my turn signals, in the hour it took me to drive across Atlanta than I had in the entire seven months prior in dozens of other cities, including Los Angeles (which has surprisingly polite drivers, given its reputation). I really don't get road ragey...except in Atlanta.
I have driven in both Boston and New Jersey. While they are crowded and the drivers (particularly cabs and buses) can be somewhat aggressive, and there are some ridiculous behaviors you wouldn't see in most other places (double-parking delivery trucks, honking and even yelling a lot more than you see in most places) I wouldn't categorize them in the same league of hatefulness as Atlanta drivers. Driving in Atlanta felt downright dangerous because of how aggressive drivers are.
Having driven a school bus during rush hour on the connector and down ponce, I can confirm what you're saying.
We had done a 9 day trip across the US and Canada, through mud, ice, through a nasty storm, down mountains with hot brakes and transmission, but no part of that more stressful than the merges in Atlanta.
I also happen to live here, and what you say about aggression (I wouldn't call it hateful) is pretty accurate. Not only do people typically ignore signals, some will close gaps _because_ of your signal. As a result, way too many people (police included) never signal. It's lord of the flies.
> But, there are differences in the character of drivers and traffic in various cities.
I've driven in Manhattan before and it's not that bad. Nobody will let you in but nobody will actively try to prevent you from merging either. You have room or you don't, figure it out. Driving in south Jersey is like driving in a maze of cars who are actively trying to prevent you from changing lanes or getting where you want to go. Between the Crown Vic going 10 under the limit or the WRX going 110, it's a wonder anything lives past the first six months driving in the Cherry Hill area. Orlando was the same way but the places I was in it just wasn't crowded enough to be that much an issue.
They drive hard, but there's a very clear & consistent code/system everyone abides by, drivers are attentive and bewilderingly polite: signal, and—more often than not—someone immediately makes room for you. Makes for stress-free, predictable driving despite being 20 over at all times.
… or maybe that's the norm, but I'm from Seattle where drivers are timid, indecisive, unpredictable, and passive-aggressive.
>I have NEVER lived, and rarely visited places (including Europe), where someone hasn't used the "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour" joke, non-ironically.
That can't possibly have been a common occurrence in LA... Our weather changes about half a dozen times a year.
People make that joke about Seattle quite a lot during certain seasons.
Seattle has a few months of near-uninterrupted sunshine and a few months of near-uninterrupted drizzle, but the intervening months interpolate by changing the weight of their random switches between the two.
Grew up in Boston, moved to the Bay Area, and I think Boston drivers are worse. Sister lives in Houston, and I think that Houston drivers are even worse. At least in most of the country, they won't fire a shotgun at you because you cut them off in traffic.
Also, I don't know anyone in the South Bay (SF is different) who thinks the weather changes more frequently than other places. Here the joke is "Walk outside. It's sunny. It'll be sunny from April until November."
I spent several years in Houston, and the drivers there are polite to a fault (four way stops are hilarious in Houston). But, if you aren't driving at least 10 MPH, 20+ on highways and toll roads, over the speed limit, you're gonna have a bad time. Houston traffic is the most insistently/dangerously fast traffic I've experienced.
There have also been more shootings on the road in Houston than anywhere else I've lived. So, yeah, that seems scary, but it's not something I worried about when I lived there. In the instances where someone got shot that I know of, the person was kinda asking for it (they initiated violence and the person they were beating on happened to have a gun under the seat or in the glove box).
>I have NEVER lived, and rarely visited places (including Europe), where someone hasn't used the "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour" joke, non-ironically.
I've NEVER lived anywhere anyone has made that joke, ironically or otherwise. That may have to do with the fact that the last 2 places I've lived (Portland, OR and Phoenix, AZ) have very long stretches of monotonous weather. But 2 certainly doesn't seem nearly as true as 1.
> I'm wondering if you've ever been to south Jersey or Boston, if you think Atlanta drivers are rude.
I spent the first 24 years of my life in south Jersey and never perceived the drivers as particularly rude, especially compared to Boston ... can I ask where specifically?
I think there is a cultural bias at work here somewhat, too. Wherever you learned to drive seems normal, even if it is way different than other places.
I think this is why Orlando and Atlanta are perceived as the wild west of driving; very few people are FROM there. Everyone brings their driving norms from wherever they learned, and they don't often mix well.
Jersey City was very scary in my motorhome, and I'm unlikely to go back in a big vehicle...but it was because of how dense everything is and how small and busy the roads are. I didn't actually find the drivers all that rude. They were kinda pushy about merging and such, but I didn't feel targeted the way I feel when driving in Atlanta.
That whole region, in general, has nicer people than their reputation would indicate, in my experience. New Yorkers and New Jerseyans (is that the right word?) were all pretty nice and helpful. I spent a month parked in Ridgewood, NJ (it was the closest I could park the RV to NYC for that long), and was struck by how friendly folks were across the whole area, given the reputation for rudeness. Riding the train was fun, asking for directions was rarely problematic, etc. Driving the house around sucked, but the people were fine.
And I'm wondering if you've ever been to south Jersey
When I was younger my friends and I would drive way more aggressively whenever we saw out of state plates. We thought it would be funny if they went home with horror stories.
I've road tripped through Atlanta at least a few times now, and without fail, no matter where the other people in the car are from, Atlanta drivers always inspire misery.
As someone who's lived in Atlanta for 8 years there's a massive difference in mindset and culture between the city (often referred to as ITP/Inside-the-Perimeter, referencing the ring of I-285 circling the city) and the various suburbs surrounding it. There's no way I'd live OTP by choice, especially with a non-flex, non-remote gig.
Imho, Marietta/Cobb County (NW of Atlanta) and Alpharetta/North Fulton (N of Atlanta) especially tend to have... less than cosmopolitan perspectives. DeKalb (NE & E of Atlanta) can go various ways.
My rebuttal to Atlanta being casually racist is always "Have you lived in the NW/NE?" We're absolutely still racially stratified (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Atlanta ), but compared to the other places I've lived and visited you run into a wider variety of people in everyday life. Which is important to me.
Hell, when I was younger I once worked a service gig at a beach restaurant in CT and could count on two hands the number of non-white customers I served the entire summer.
The more I think about it, the more I think it's less about Atlanta being more racist...there's just more opportunity for white people to be shitty and racist because they interact people of color much more often than in most of the other major cities I've lived in. So, I probably should soften my accusation of racism. I still see it, and it is still uncomfortable, but I also have to acknowledge that Atlanta seems to have proven itself to be a great place for black folks to build careers, build businesses, etc. So, race relations may be tense in Atlanta, but it is probably not because the people are inherently more shitty than people everywhere else. And, I also have to acknowledge that some of my favorite cities that are not overtly racist are seemingly racist on a systemic level in ways that I as a white person don't see very clearly; Austin, for example, has a rapidly shrinking black population. That's probably a useful measure of racism, as well.
I used to feel the same way you do; I grew up here, moved away, and eventually came back. Atlanta is a much different place now.
I wouldn't choose to live "just outside" of Atlanta either, for all the terrible traffic/commute reasons you mentioned -- I live ITP and a 5 minute walk from a train station with a 10-minute hassle-free commute. Somehow I can survive here as part of a one-car household.
Also please don't paint an entire city (let alone one with Atlanta's demographics) as full of "casual racism." C'mon.
"Also please don't paint an entire city (let alone one with Atlanta's demographics) as full of "casual racism." C'mon."
It's the only major city I've been to where a white person dropping the word "nigger" (and used in a clearly negative way) not only happens in conversation, but it doesn't elicit gasps or any negative response. To be fair, it's also among the more diverse major cities, with tons of black-owned businesses, and that's awesome. So, it may be the clash of cultures (shitty old poor white southerners surrounded by successful black folks leading to resentment) rather than Atlanta being more racist. But, the south, in general, has such a long history of segregation, red-lining, private clubs that mysteriously have no black members, neighborhoods with no black residents, etc.
So, I'm probably being overly harsh based on surface level stuff. Opportunity is an important part of the power of racism, and Atlanta seems to have shown itself capable of providing opportunity to black folks; at least enough to lead to lots of black folks choosing to live there. Cities like Austin, Portland, San Francisco, etc. may actually be more harmful (or at least less welcoming) to people of color than Atlanta, without any overt signals of racism.
I would say that, at least in my neighborhood (Midtown), someone saying that would be absolutely shunned. I can't speak for all neighborhoods, but I've lived here for about 30 years and I have never ever heard someone say that in casual conversation.
Yeah, we've got problems, but I would actually point you to our BLM protests as an example of our racial tolerance. They were almost completely nonviolent, well-organized, and incredibly diverse. Atlanta has a "we're all in this together" kind of spirit, at least in my experience. Casual racism is, for the most part, not tolerated.
> It's the only major city I've been to where a white person dropping the word "nigger" (and used in a clearly negative way) in conversation doesn't elicit gasps.
Maybe you should find new friends.
I was born in ATL and lived there the first 20 years of my life and then for 18 months after college. I can say unequivocally that I've never been in a situation where it would have been acceptable or "just felt normal" to encounter that.
> It's the only major city I've been to where a white person dropping the word "nigger" (and used in a clearly negative way) not only happens in conversation, but it doesn't elicit gasps or any negative response.
As a counterexample, I have lived in Atlanta for the past 7 years and never once heard anything like this. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it feels like you're painting the city with an overly broad brush.
That's such BS. I've lived here most of my life and never had some random person use N* in a conversation. Innuendoes maybe, even then it's usually some grumpy old person and they are flat out ignored.
Look at St. Louis and Baltimore. Much more brutality on both sides and riots. Atlanta isn't the old Atlanta and we don't tolerate that crap.
I haven't spent all that much time in Atlanta (and its suburbs), and I've heard/seen overt racism there. It was shocking enough, to me, that it stood out and has stuck with me. I can't imagine how someone who lives there hasn't experienced it, but I don't know your experience. In my experience, Atlanta is very much a southern city, along with all the good and bad that comes with that.
I'm sure it's getting better over time; most places in the US are. But, it's only been a few years since I last saw someone behaving in an overtly racist manner in Atlanta. I can't imagine it's changed drastically in that time. I'd appreciate if you'd read everything I've written on racism in Atlanta in this thread (and the other child thread). I'm not trying to paint it as a black and white thing, or suggest that Atlanta is the only city that suffers from racism.
It's probably the only major city in the Southeast, so that could be a factor. Drive an hour north from Atlanta, and you'll see confederate flags in this place. I'm not defending Atl, just rationalizing expectations.
Grew up in the suburbs, hated it. Moved into Atlanta and fell in love. It's perfectly proportioned for cycling. The food everywhere is amazing (I still miss Atlanta's food, now that I'm in SF).
I used to live in Decatur and now live in the burbs. Atlanta is diverse and has everything for everyone. Why bicker about it? You want to live in an expensive high rise? We got it. Want to live by a train station and commute to work? We got it. Want a McMansion? We got it. Want to live cheaply? We got it.
People need to stop judging others on how they want to live and pretend theirs is better.
Know why people move to the burbs? It's because most of the schools ITP are shitty, I can buy a bigger and newer house for my family to live comfortably. My small, 1974 home in Decatur is worth almost as much as my new home and the schools are not as good.
I work in Alpharetta, and probably will always work there so my commute is reasonable.
I have to fly into Atlanta from the West Coast 3-4 times a year and it is also my least favorite major American city.
There are nice places there (Top Golf, Bourbon Bar, tons of good restaurants)... But there are nice places everywhere and they certainly don't make up for Atlanta's other shortcomings. I can't articulate all the reasons for my distaste, but it just looks dirty and depressing. The traffic is horrible, the weather is usually bad. We refer to it as Shitlanta (which is an exaggeration, but not much of one).
Dirty? What parts of Atlanta? One of my favorite things about Atlanta is how green it is. After living on the west coast for awhile it felt amazing to come back and actually see something green.
Dirty is probably the wrong word... maybe run down? Roads are in poor condition, abandoned warehouses/factories everywhere, it looks like people don't care about the area. Probably nearby the airport, because that's where I fly in and drive out from there. But even inside the city, it doesn't look much better... I still get that same feeling.
ATL is green, has lots of trees, it's beautiful, but the trash on the side of the roads is ridiculous (I'm talking 285, 400, 75, 85) and seems to be getting worse. It's especially bad around the airport; so much for first impressions. If you go outside of ATL (or even inside) the situation improves a lot.
Well yeah, in and around the airport is a pretty horrible area but that seems like an odd way of judging a city. As for the highways I can't really say it is any worse than any other city I have been to.
We all have our standards. If I come to your house and there's trash on the lawn I won't leave with a good impression. For me that shows lack of management / organization. It's not like they can't afford it.
I can see piles of trash left from former homeless encampments on the side of the highway from my downtown Seattle office, so I guess Seattle is a shitty city too.
Doesn't make the entire city shitty, but it's not excusable either. There are much poorer cities (in relative poor countries) that don't have that problem. Also, the fact that you're defensive about this gives us a clue as to why the problem persists.
I didn't, no, someone in my family came up with it.
And I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, which is fine as a response. It's a strong word, and I'm sure plenty of people love that area. We just emphatically do not.
All true, but it's getting better. Also, there's a huge quality of life difference in Atlanta between living just outside city limits and living in the urban core or one of the adjacent former streetcar suburbs. Not only in terms of traffic and transit options but proximity to entertainment and cultural attractions.
Historically, most of the technology companies in the metro area were located in office parks in the northern suburbs. But momentum seems to be shifting back to in-town locations. When my firm moved to its present location in NW Midtown in 2007, we were the only tenant in our building. Since then, we've been joined by a marketing agency, Uber, Square, Worldpay, and a few others.
I'm in Atlanta. It's a great place to work for a non-tech corporation, but the startup scene is so so. Most of the "tech" startups fall in to one of two categories. First, ones that will not get traction and are doing something that someone else is already doing or two high tech boiler room operations where they hire a few tech people and an army of sales types to try to sell it. Sadly tech people in Atlanta are second class citizens even today. But there are plenty of "Choose Atlanta" marketing types touting the city.... There is a reason that rents and housing prices are low in ATL.
Not from what I've observed with Atlanta having been involved deeply in the Atlanta community for a number of years while also being involved in other communities. But everyone is welcome to have their own opinion.
Both myself and others who have been involved in the community share this sentiment. Straight up if you have a startup and want to get funding, getting funding in Atlanta will mean a less favorable term sheet and not as many connections to help you grow your startup.
Indeed. It replaces one challenge with another. When you're the first to market, your primary challenge is to prove your business model and product market fit. When you're later to market, your challenge is to build a better product and execute a strategy better than your competitors.
Different teams excel at different challenges.
Personally I'd prefer a market with competitors. That means the market exists.
The difference was that WhatsApp was about execution with a small team. The Atlanta way would have been to hire 2 engineers and then a army of marketing people to sell it.
It's a shame because there is a lot of potential, but the leaders concentrate on the marketing of the community instead of actually developing a better community. Lots of cargo culting with incubators etc., but not a lot of large wins. There are pockets of awesome in the town, but Atlanta is more about who you know and your image, not the substance that has made runaway successful tech startups.
There will always be an element of who you know in any community, but Atlanta goes a bit further than the norm to the point of ignoring/devaluing the pieces that are at the soul of successful tech startups.....namely the tech.
Whatsapp was not a "instant messaging" app in the way you put it. It was started specifically to get around high SMS carrier rates in countries around the world, hence their ultra-fast adoption in ROW.
Not trying to nitpick, just pointing out that Whatsapp didn't start in a crowded market. They actually did something unique that made messaging their friends & family way cheaper and easier.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Look up the Atlanta Tech Village and the buildings around it. Atlanta has it's own "Silicon Valley" and the startup / tech industry is pretty booming here.
Ah a troll account....but... Atlanta has it's own "Silicon Valley". Sorry, not true. I am VERY aware ATV and the companies surrounding it. Lots of marketing focused products where the teams often have more business/sales/marketing people than actual engineers. In Silicon Valley they automate these things, in Atlanta they throw more bodies at it.
This seems to be the thing people ignore, as the Tampa region has a fairly bustling tech scene, and due to proximity with SOCOM at MacDill AFB, more seem to be coming all the time. You could say, "Wow look at all this tech activity, 100 head engineering offices are opening and such-and-such acquisition was so huge, blah blah" but, this is all strictly within the scope of people who are local. I've never met anyone from the Valley area who has come into Tampa and said, "Holy shit you guys are like a tiny Silicon Valley!" -- though sometimes they are somewhat surprised to find out companies like Chase, AmEx, or Neilsen have large engineering offices here.
There's intentionally nothing like Silicon Valley because the Valley has a literal firehose of the most brilliant engineers constantly flowing into it. When Atlanta, or Tampa, ends up with a brilliant engineer with vision and drive, it's mostly out of luck or coincidence.
Speaking as a native Atlantan who moved to California 4 years for a job in the tech industry: I don't miss it and I wouldn't want to move back, even to leverage a better cost of living. I miss the weather, the environment, the people, the food - but I certainly don't miss the crime. Everyone I knew had some kind of violent crime encounter after living in Atlanta and it wasn't until I moved to the amazing calm of San Francisco / Santa Monica / West L.A. that I realized there are some cities where it isn't a constant companion.
"Murder Kroger" has that nickname for a reason, and the fact that so many Atlantans are used to it is quite telling.
Earning $200k most places is pretty nice, but most sources show that in Atlanta almost no one is making that much. The average is less than half that. For most of us, moving to Atlanta would probably coincide with a sharp pay cut. If that wasn't the case, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
You would take a pay cut and there are many in Atlanta who would still complain that you are making too much and be thinking about how they could move your job to a low cost country. I've had conversations with startups "leaders" in Atlanta where they have expressed this sentiment.
You are all over this thread shitting on everything Atlanta. Sounds like you just didn't get hired at a place you like and are bitter. That place made the right choice.
According to this CNN Money calculator you would only need to make $114k here to match a 200k salary on SF. Even less if you didn't want to live downtown. The housing costs are listed at 75% less than SF!
Glassdoor isn't a good reference. For one, the list you linked to looks like a bunch of consultants salaries which is usually lower than average for entry level positions.
I'm only a few years out of school and almost at the 72k level with much room to grow in salary at my current job and grade level.
Those cost of living things never make sense to me. Housing isn't the only cost in our lives. When I want to buy a car, computer, cell phone, or vacation, they cost exactly the same whether I live in California or Georgia (ok, sales tax will vary slightly, but that's it). Whenever I've done the math on moving to a cheaper area, it has not worked - even with cheaper housing, the vastly lower wages leave me with materially less money to spend on the other stuff that's not cheaper.
You gotta compare apples to apples. I'd rather not have the majority of my paycheck go to housing. I'd rather buy than rent and I don't see that happening anywhere I've looked in Cali.
For the amount of profit I would have made off of merely buying a house and holding for a few years if I had stayed in the Bay Area, I would be able to buy most of the houses I'd consider with just cash. You really can't get that kind of ludicrous cash making opportunity if 1. your ceiling on pay in your profession is capped firmly leaving you insufficient investment capital 2. your local economy is not booming with lots of investors to drive up asset prices. Nobody's going to buy a middle class house in rural North Carolina and leave within 6 years with $350k+ residual profit, but that's fairly common for those I know in the Bay Area and NYC that bought before 2010.
Whether these things are sustainable is one thing, but NYC and SF have always been expensive areas to live and at the same time among the best chances to grow a career in most fields. Otherwise, there'd be little growth in cities. It's not like the millions of people in urban areas are all stupid or too young to think about families and renting v. buying.
I used to work for a company based in Conyers, GA, and would hang out in Atlanta when I traveled there. It is a great city. However, there is a huge cultural shift outside of Atlanta for people used to Silicon Valley or NYC, because the rest of Georgia is definitely... different.
You say this as if it isn't true for NYC or SV either. I think the bubble is bigger in those places and makes it easier to plug your ears and turn the eye in NYC or SV. Ever been to Yonkers? Inside San Jose?
I think it is different in the way that most big cities are when compared to other parts of their states. San Fran and East California might be one of the better examples. Marietta is very similar Merced; Athens is similar to Berkeley. I don't think Atlanta is very different in that regard. (From Athens, longtime Atlanta resident - spent a lot of time in Cali, lots of family out in Sacramento/Berkeley)
I was just in Calistoga (near Napa) and I saw houses with Trump signs, so yeah there definitely tends to be a city vs rural shift in politics even in states like CA.
But seriously the city to country gradient is pretty steep outside Atl. However I doubt if rural Georgia is all that different from rural upstate New York. I know people who grew up in both and it sounds about the same. You can just get there faster in Georgia.
I always see posts like this on HN. Whether its Portland, NYC, Chicago, Philly, Atlanta, Austin, etc etc etc. Why do people feel like they need to "convince" others else to move to the place they live or that the startup scene is "more real" than they currently believe?
Why can't it just be a friendly "looking out for others" type of thing? I definitely feel like there is a sense of camaraderie in the online communities that I frequent. I just took it as a tip to fellow HackerNews readers and engineers that Atlanta is a great opportunity for people in the tech industry. Why does there need to be any ulterior motive than that?
It's a reaction to being told countless times that the only way to "make it for reals" is to uproot your life and move to the SF area. Which is an incredibly common occurrence for those of us not in the valley.
I live in SF (from Phoenix, AZ), but I agree, I don't think a particular locality really matters. The Internet has made remote development possible for most startups. In fact, if Kernel.org (Linux) was considered a startup, it's a project founded by people not from a single city.
I understand to some degree the reasons startup people want people within 20 miles of them. But if somebody is happy living in Anchorage, AK, why should I convince this person to move where I am, as long as GH issues are being punched out?
That said, I love SF, motorcycling to Marin, and I don't think I'll move anywhere else for the distant future.
This is common with Atlanta (and I'm sure other cities). It is a big marketing town. Coke for example, which mastered the ability to sell overpriced sugar water, was started there. The old over-stating things....if you say it enough, maybe you and everyone else will believe it.
Tech people are lucky enough to have a choice where to work. Cheap rent and low cost of living are not enough to attract talent.. There always has to be a "something cool" on a city to be attractive.
The problem is that Atlanta's built environment is literally the textbook example of tastelessness and inefficiency. "City" is a loose term for a centerless amalgamation of car-centric sprawl.
As learned from relatives living there, Altanta's long-term water situation kinda frightens me. Their aquifer (aka Lake Lanier) can't sustain the anticipated population, and it looks like fights are brewing with downstream parties like Florida, who also have legal share of that water.
I used to live in Atlanta. It felt like the city had so much potential for tech but just wasn't there yet. There were so many smart and driven people at Georgia Tech and other places. And there seemed to be a business community that would be capable of supporting those people but those two communities hadn't figured out how to deal with each other yet. This was in 2011. I would love for Atlanta to become a real hub and would gladly move back if given a chance.
Ah, ATV. I know a lot of tech people in town who will not touch that place with a 10 foot pole. Might partially be because it is in Buckhead which is a very pretentious neighborhood. Lots of men buttoned up shirts, suits, women in pencil skirts, people getting cosmetic surgery etc. and everything is about image. ATV has a similar vibe, and if you look at who gets the majority of the press it's not the tech people, it's the marketing and business ones.
Hell the non-tech founder of it said at one point that Ruby is really easy and with a small amount of training a founder should have the skills necessary to create a startup. That is not someone who values tech or the skills that go into it. So if your an engineer why would you go somewhere where there is a good chance that a marketing/business type will take the credit for your work and ideas, probably try to take more of your equity than they would in Silicon Valley? And with all of that Atlanta companies do not have exits that are even close to what we see in the valley.
In truth, you could make much the same argument about most cities that aren't SF, NYC or Seattle. No one city is going to be the next SV. What we're seeing is a national transition away from the suburbs and back into large metro areas. The first cities had a leg up due to being the epicenters of various industries but everyone else is catching up.
I agree. It's funny/interesting to me how everyone everywhere has been holding up their local food scene as a special point of pride recently, when just about every city in America in 2016 is teeming with dozens of good local restaurants, microbreweries, coffee roasters, etc.
Absolutely not, and don't believe anyone who says otherwise. While I don't doubt that it is technically possible to get by in Atlanta without a car, your quality of life will be affected severely.
Yeah, but especially if you plan it right. Over the last 6-8 years the bicycle infrastructure has blossomed, but only on pretty specific routes. If you both live and work along those routes, it is really easy (except for taxis and trucks shamelessly parking in the bike lane).
That said, I don't live on one of those routes and don't really encounter much trouble cycling or boosted boarding on the roads.
I had a car that I pretty much never used when I lived downtown. It was broken into and I didn't notice for a week. The only thing they stole was a 12-pack of Coca Cola, which is the most Atlanta thing ever.
When I moved just a little further out the car was absolutely needed.
Yes if you live and work downtown but you'll be at a disadvantage. Atlanta is very much a car city especially if you have or want kids and want to live outside the city.
I'm actually looking at moving to ATL soon for personal reasons (read GF). What are some of these tech companies with satellite offices there? I tried doing a search for up and coming startups and outside of a few names like Square and Mailchimp wasn't finding much
If you want to work for a startup, check out companies in the Atlanta Tech Village directory. Most of them are pretty small, but every few months a company hits the 40-person mark and move out. Terminus and IO Education moved out pretty recently.
http://atlantatechvillage.com/membership/current-villagers/
If you're looking for a larger company, Salesforce Pardot and Cox have a huge presence here. NCR is moving their headquarters to Midtown.
I agree. I live here for the past 6 years. Tons of opportunities. Beyond mailchimp, pindrop and other famous startups you have VMWare, IBM, Oracle, Square, Amazon and Microsoft and even Google hiring for the local offices here. For the commute comment, I live in the suburbs (Alpharetta) and just take the park and ride to Buckhead.
Great housing prices (still), great schools, very low crime, and cool things to do. Wouldn't move to SF or NY even if they quadruple my salary.
How's the political climate? It doesn't look so great from my initial Googling: Georgia is one of the states suing over the transgender bathroom issue. Per Wikipedia Georgia doesn't include sexual orientation in their laws against employer discrimination. Anything else folks from SF might be concerned about?
Atlanta has the 3rd largest LGBT population behind SF/Seattle and is pretty diverse in general. It's the other parts of Georgia that can seem backwards. Same goes for North Carolina. A person from SF would feel at home in Asheville or Raleigh despite everything going on in the news.
Cobb County (immediately west of the city) also (a) is unwilling to contribute to MARTA, (b) has a terrible traffic problem, (c) is currently burning money to build an overpass over 30 miles of existing interstate to solve the problem forever (see: http://www.ajc.com/news/local/mile-reversible-toll-lane-what... ), & (d) refuses to even consider rail.
From wikipedia [1] Atlanta has the 3rd largest percentage, but it's 11th for total population. Admittedly those figures are for 2005, but I wouldn't expect Atlanta to make up that much on the top 3 in the last 10 years?
California is also one of the states being sued [0]. You obviously don't know much about Atlanta but seem to know a lot about Georgia by browsing wkikipedia. Our LGBT community is one of the largest in the US.
California probably has more backwards people than Georgia fighting against stuff like this.
Does shutting down nonsense posts really require perfect civility in the reply?
It's the same pattern I see often here... made up story incoming. The original person who spouts nonsense is never hold to account, especially if what they're saying fits with the status quo.
Person1: Trump is literally a lizard person!
> Person2: You're an idiot, and here are some facts that show he's not.
> > Person3: Whoa whoa, you're probably right but be civil!
If you want to see aggressive comments check out Reddit or YouTube.
It was not my intention. The parent did a quick Wikipedia search and came to the conclusion all of Georgia hates LGBT, better not move there. It's offensive to me as a native.
Atlanta is very different from the rest of the state. The city has people with pretty diverse views on things and is incredibly accepting when it comes to social issues.
I have no doubt. I am in Chicago and recently found out about http://www.sockfancy.com and if they are crushing it I'm sure that the rest of the scene is doing well!
Is the article implying that Atlanta is special? I feel like if you intend to start a (non-localized) business, anywhere is better than SF, and the lower the cost of living the better.
Hot in the summer, mostly pleasant the rest of the year. It snows every other year or so, but doesn't stick, generally. There are short spring and fall seasons, but they do exist.
Between 7 and 11 rain days per month. We actually get more rain than Seattle, but on fewer days.
Any complaints of "bad weather" generally equate to "it's too hot" or "I don't like it". For general human living, it's quite moderate.
Hot, dry, humid, in varying quantities during the warm season. Occasional bouts of days-long rain when the remnants of tropical storm systems come ashore.
State of Georgia mandates 0 day paid maternity leave. Was quite shocking for me in this day and age - having moved from London.
Also although I like Atlanta, the casual racism comment is not unfounded. For example, we have bunch of white only elementary schools and then we have some with black majority ones. Also putting my son through this system convinced me schools like to keep this segregation.
>For example, we have bunch of white only elementary schools and then we have some with black majority ones. Also putting my son through this system convinced me schools like to keep this segregation.
Does London not have school districts? If you have a neighborhood that is predominantly black then that's going to be represented in school demographics. I believe that's how it works everywhere in US.
>In fact, it’s possible to create a huge tech company without taking venture capital, and without spending far beyond your means. It’s possible, in other words, to start a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship careening out of control.
The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a bootstrapped business as "good" and (via his prosaic examples of restaurants and dog walking) dismissing the VC-backed businesses as "bad."
It should be obvious that the opposite can be true: a bootstrapped business can also be dysfunctional and a VC-backed firm can be disciplined with its money.
Bootstrapping is great strategy especially if you're company that doesn't benefit from "network effects" such as Mailchimp/Sendgrid. You acquire customers one at a time and offer a good enough value proposition for them to subscribe or pay. A lot of SaaS/enterprise companies and lifestyle businesses can grow that way.
Venture capital is really helpful when you need to deliberately grow exponentially faster than bootstrapping will allow because you're trying to build a giant footprint for the network effects. Snapchat is a good example of this. It wouldn't make sense to try to sell the Snapchat app on App store for $4.99 each so it can be cashflow positive and pay for programmer salaries. The first users of their apps were teens in high school and they can't just purchase an app like that without their parents' permission. If Snapchat charged money for the app, they wouldn't even know that teens were the leading edge of that trend. In that case, you need to wisely use vc funding to pay the bills while you grow the audience. Hopefully, Snapchat will end up profitable like Facebook instead of losing money like Twitter.
If you're a "network effects" startup that insists on bootstrapping as the only funding, you will be beat by the competitors that are willing to live with $0 revenue for a few years while their equity financing allowed them to build their user base faster.
another way you could look at it is "here's what's good about doing it this way" w/out necessarily dismissing VC's as "bad".
as a founder you do have a choice of the kind of business you start. I think he just points out that debt-driven is not the only way to grow a successful company.
But it then bears the question that if the so called "network effect" companies has any real value (that is to generate profit in the future) or are manifestations of a bubble?
That means they have value for the VCs (usually in the form of "exits", ie, selling to other investors), but the question was whether they'll produce profits (and consequent dividends).
You're mixing up long term probabilities with short term variance and uncertainty. People can make very big bad choices and not see the consequences for years, because not everything unfolds rapidly.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
I have met absolutely incompetent business owners who just happened to stumble into goldmines and through their own incompetence have locked in customers.
Start looking at software for an unsavoury infrastructure industry and you'll find this stuff abounds. Particularly in industries that were early adopters of computerized databases.
WhatsApp raised "outside funding" of $250k from ex-Yahoo employees before publicly launching the app in November 2009. They then got another $8 million in April 2011 from VC firm Sequoia Capital. However, Jan Koum was already talking to Jim Goetz of Sequoia a year prior to that (Spring 2010) and it took several months of negotiation to close the deal. I don't think people would call Whatsapp a "bootstrapped company".
Whatsapp did charge for the iOS App and also a 99 cent subscription but it's not clear if they were break-even or profitable from November 2009 to April 2011. Since they were a private company, I'm not sure if they have ever disclosed their financial details before the 2014 Facebook acquisition.
WhatsApp actually used pricing as a way to slow their growth and give Jan Koum's team time to scale their infrastructure. He talked about it in startup school a couple of years ago:
>WhatsApp actually used pricing as a way to slow their growth
Yes, I've seen that video. Increasing the price to slow growth is a separate tool from weighing pros/cons of VC money to grow huge. At the time of Sequoia's 2011 investment, WhatsApp was estimated to have ~30 million users. It seems that Jan Koum felt it made more financial sense to get $8 million from Sequoia rather than from his customer base. If JK could raise subscription prices higher ($2? $5?) without his customers complaining to "self-fund" that $8M, that would have been financially better than giving up 10-15% of company ownership to Sequoia. He must have liked the first vc financial deal because he went back to Sequoia again for another $52 million.
If JK is ever on stage again, maybe somebody can ask him why he didn't get that $60 million from his user base. It would be interesting to hear his thought process.
One of the important things about Whatsapp is that they raised only $60M. Comapare that to the the median $285M that the average active unicorn raised. I think it's less a story of billion dollar rounds vs. bootstrapping, and more a case for being efficient with capital.
It's called doing something kinda boring, consistently and doing it well. It's hard to say in software when you really need huge capital if you can start with the following:
1. Some financial understanding of how to invoice, pay taxes and write contracts - the business side
2. Manage people, setting expectations and holding people accountable, while empowering them to be successful in there job as clearly defined when hired
3. Take action to address the immediate. Reds of the customer while always keeping an eye on the longer term needs - always be available and responsive to needs of the customer - email, phone, chat
4. Have a solid foundation in the technical aspects of what you are building and operating
If you have these 4 things and a product that is a good fit in an emerging market than raising capital is probably not necessarily needed because you have the resources and skills to make it happen. I think probably a 5th requirement is you have enough personal capital to pay for your living expenses until the business is making enough money. Also avoid hiring until you can pay for double the salary of the first hire... this way if you are wrong you have some padding and it's proved you can work through hard times. I remember thinking before our first hire that this was way too much stress and it would be so much easier when we have more people. Now at 16 employees, it's an order of magnitude harder but I'm much more prepared than I was back then. The children analogy is good I think. When you first have a child you think this is going to be hard but they grow with you and so it's not so bad it's even kind of fun
“MailChimp’s path was circuitous, and it came without the glory of enormous funding rounds.”
It’s time to retire the idea that raising money equals “glory.” It’s not a measure of business success as much as it is a measure of founders being able to convince rich people to back them. As we know from the "XX is shutting down" stories that regularly grace HN, many if not most tales of massive fundraising success will eventually become business and investment failures. Yet the TechCrunch/Fortune/BI coverage angles—pushed relentlessly by the investment community and hired PR people—almost always emphasize the former over the latter.
moz.com is a good example of raising bad money. They had an excellent core product and thus a business worth millions, then raised money to try to take over the world. It turns out they couldn't take over the world, so now all they have is the same core product and business they had prior to raising money, except now they also have dozens of millions of dollars of VC preference in the event of an acquisition.
I've toyed with the numbers in my head and I can't make them work; I think they would have been much better off not raising any money.
Depends on what you mean by 'making it' as a startup - is it the revenue growth? burn rate? profit growth? Number of users? Number of employees? A SF office? How well funded you are?
It's hard to grow a business without going the conventional SV route and getting VC funding. Unless you have a revolutionary product, the bigger competition will likely stomp over you unless you have resources to grow your team and product and marketing. Or if you are comfortable with a small market share but a profitable one.
Not saying it is impossible, but just hard. I know a few SaaS out there like Roninapp and Reamaze that like Mailchimp are not VC funded and are growing well and are run by a small but effective team, but the question is would startups like these benefit from funding and be in a better position with regards to growth and user base than without vc funding?
More often than not when startups receive funding they move away from satisfying the customers to making investors happy. As the company starts to hire, get a nice office, increase spend on things like office perks, ads, marketing etc while it might contribute to growth it doesnt necessarily work well for the end user. You go from lean to bloat more often than not. I guess that depends on how you manage resources but it isnt exactly easy with investors breathing down your neck
I have a company that is bootstrapped and while there are well funded competitors out there, i'm perfectly fine with my startup running lean and being profitable, albeit slowly. At least I am my own boss and I answer to myself, and that in my world is 'making it'.
> Unless you have a revolutionary product, the bigger competition will likely stomp over you unless you have resources to grow your team and product and marketing. Or if you are comfortable with a small market share but a profitable one.
Case in point, me. I started FreeRADIUS in 1999. Started making money in 2007. Incorporated in 2008. I now have multiple offices, multiple employees, and good growth. No investment. No debt.
The "bigger competition" in my case are AMdocs (previously Bridgewater), Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel. I compete by offering a technically superior product, at a lower price point.
I do zero marketing. Zero sales people. Pretty much zero RFPs. My customers call me, and ask to buy my product.
I have a small market share by revenue, but a huge market share by installations. My guess is that the total number of FreeRADIUS installs is 10x that of all corporate installs combined.
> More often than not when startups receive funding they move away from satisfying the customers to making investors happy.
Exactly. My pitch is simple: We make you happy. You need customization? We do customization. You need to integrate with a 10 year-old system? No problem, we do that. We're about expertise, and keeping the money in our pockets, instead of doing gimmicky "enterprise" stuff.
A counterpoint is one of our competitors. Their product relies on an "enterprise grade" DB. Which means that for every dollar they make on a sale, the DB company makes ten.
Uh... if that money is available, why leave it on the table? Drop an open source database in (yes, it would have worked. They need the marketing label, not the technical capabilities). Give the customer a 50% discount. Your cut goes from $1 to $6, and the customers price goes from $11 to $6. Everyone is happy.
Nope. They couldn't make it big, so they got bought. And the new owner flogs the crap out of the product, "end of life" the product every 2 years, and forcing expensive upgrades. Which means that their customers call me.
Totally agree with this. We started Reamaze back in 2012 and have never needed an injection of money nor wanted it. We focus on our core customers and deliver a curated experience we all love as a community. We have good growth and our team is extremely happy all the time since we're building what we know to be important long term, not what others think is profitable in the short term.
The software is Open Source, and 100% GPL. We do custom installations and support. Load-balancing, fail-over, replication, high performance, new features, etc.
Speaking of building a business on inbound sales leads, i'd love to chat with you about some potential work. My email is in my profile, let me know if there's a better way to contact you than through the freeradius website.
I have made that same "enterprise grade DB" argument at numerous places. Telcos just love Oracle salesdudes, even if that's less true than it used to be. Congratulations on your success.
It is unfortunate, and it remains to be seen if they will remain profitable, or just go on an endless run of losses and increasing debt. Some say 'making it' is IPOing, even if not profitable and laden with a mountain of debt. As some would argue, why spend your own money if you can spend someone else's?
I do like the question on whether Mailchimp would be a lot more successful had it taken on more funding and debt.
I'm curious if there's interesting data, information, or anecdotes about bootstrapped, well-intentioned, well-executed startups being utterly floored by VC-funded competitors. Particularly if the "average" or most common reason behind a bootstrapped failure diverges significantly from the 'common sense' reason, i.e., "bootstrapped startup couldn't move fast enough/expand quick enough/hire great talent because bootstrapped startup didn't have the money".
In the particular case of MailChimp, their main competitor (AFAIK), Campaign Monitor, decided to raise VC funding after about a decade of slow grind a la MailChimp.
They hired a CEO with experience in 5 other VC funded startups (and with burning cash) and moved into the most amazing penthouse, the last two floors of a giant tower in the heart of Sydney with a 360 degree view on the harbour and ocean and city, and a great kitchen with full time chefs, and of course a marble-covered lift lobby.
Constant Contact was another competitor, providing basically the same service, they recently sold for a billion dollars while MailChimp grew alongside them. If the market is big enough, it can support multiple companies.
They target totally different markets. Constant Contact is a superior product for the less technically literate crowd. The hacker news crowd probably isn't their target customer. I think live support is their key differentiator.
I don't have any such anecdote, but I can't even think up a hypothetical, either. If said bootstrapped company was both "well-executed" and didn't fail because it "didn't have the money," what kind of reasons would you be thinking about?
Losing to a competitor would mean you're not failing because you didn't find a market need. So you would screw up managing it, or by not spending to market/hire/add capacity fast enough. The only other reasons I can think up seem idiosyncratic (maybe well-funded competitor got regulatory approval or a big partnership from a VC intro?).
Yeah. I'm a big fan of MailChimp, but this is a clear case of survivorship bias. We have a ton of detailed reporting (CrunchBase, edgar.gov, startup accelerators, Mattermark, etc) on VC backed companies but very little on non VC. How do you get a detailed list of bootstrapped companies? Even if you did have a comprehensive list (Sec of State in each state), how are you going to differentiate amongst tech startup, lifestyle business, traditional new business, and service business? Angelist has some info, but it is a platform for fundraising.
It is survivorship bias, and yet it isn't. I think you'd find a lot of these stories would read the same -- while engaging in some other business activity (consulting, sales, etc.) a potentially profitable business opportunity was observed, and gradually it became the primary focus. If there isn't an opportunity observed, or if it doesn't become the primary focus there is no startup and no story.
I don't have the source, but I read that having VC cash to burn was partly responsible for YouTube's success. They did things like iPod giveaways and hired tons of designers to quickly iterate on the site.
They had many competitors that were earlier to market, but ultimately lost out to YouTube.
Edit: here's the source[0]:
> Youtube acquired traction over it's competitors by their funding strategy, product strategy (growth rate) and a liberal interpretation of the DMCA. As illustrated and extensively researched by Mr Jaffari,, YouTube tried many tactics to gain differentiation over it's competitors. In the end, YouTube's growth hack was the only metric that mattered, conversion of viral buzz into users.
> When YouTube debuted it was already late to the party with numerous competitors growing quickly. The company copied and experimented with the interfaces of it's rivals to establish a baseline. Then they applied liberal amounts of Venture Capital to organize a star development team that would iterate product faster than it's rivals. Finally they adhered very loosely to the DMCA laws leveraging primarily copyrighted content to build viewership against more generally viewable Flash player technology.
…
> The first and largest strategic advantage for YouTube was their investors, Sequoia Capital. Other Start-Ups were already in this space with more traffic, but with a major investment the sector had validity. This created coveted Bay Area buzz, while larger more established start-ups were largely ignored being outside of the echo chamber. For example VideoEgg.com (Who chose to move to the bay), Break.com (Then Big-Boys.com), Revver.com (Also LA Based), StupidVideos.com and Vidiac.com/StreetFire.net (Atlanta Based).
> On top of the buzz Youtube leveraged VC investment to land a major blow to it's rivals. They went Ad-Free. It took YouTube over 12 months to pass Vidiac's traffic but with an interface clean of ads and a cost no object design team, YouTube's competitors could not iterate on designs quick enough. The development staff would see a feature on other sites, copy it, improve it, release it. An example of this behavior is the Flash embed video players that could be placed in MySpace that was already being employed by other services. Youtube let their competitors figure out the hard problems such as UX flow, user requirements, feasibility, copied it and spent more. With better funding of development, servers, bandwidth Youtube offered their users better site performance and quicker adoption of technology. For example an early metric of success was the acquisition of content contributors. Expensive encoding solutions could process an uploaded video into a streamable format but sometimes this process could take hours and the users had to wait for their video to be ready. YouTube could buy more encoders and cut this time down to 15 minutes offering bloggers quicker video to market times. Using Flash over QuickTime and Windows Media, embed code was more universally able to deliver a consistent if inferior video experience. Inferior until the delivery of Flash 8 when the On2 CODEC was introduced giving Flash full screen and high quality videos.
So far in our space call tracking - we are competing quiet well vs all VC backed companies and I believe we are doing the opposite- holding our ground and in many cases out performing them. The only thing they have on us is more sales and marketing
I don't think it matters as much as you suspect that one company is bootstrapped and the other is VC-funded. I'm sure you can find dozens of examples of VC-funded companies being floored by other VC-funded companies.
And then somehow they managed to totally disregard their customers' needs and screw everyone with the Mandrill changeover. Seriously, has everyone forgotten that fiasco?
Agreed - what a nightmare. We spent thousands a month and got under 2 months notice that we needed to switch providers. What a nightmare, and it was so shockingly disappointing coming from a beloved company like MailChimp.
My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers. It is a very secretive company about most things related to way of business, so I can only speculate and from what I heard around town, but most of the customers there were not good sustainable fits.
I've had extremely negative experiences in their customer support, but also extremely positive experiences through their community engagement as I'm local to them.
Mandrill had over $1,000,000/mo in -paying- customers. We got no more time to transition off them than the free users did.
Switching e-mail providers is not something you can do overnight if you send large volumes (large volume does not mean spam: I send purchase receipts, contact forms, notifications, password resets -- transactional mail not ads). Even if you have a team of coders that can drop everything to start integrating alternatives, you need time to warm up your new IP space at a new provider, or your mail ends up in spam folders.
MailChimp screwed a lot of customers, and customers' customers when they gave only 60 days notice.
> My understanding of that is that the term customer shouldn't apply to free tier heroku spammers.
But they fucked over more than the free tier. We (work) had 15 clients that all had accounts that we managed for them. We probably spent upwards of $1200/mo on emails through those accounts.
We only got ~50 days of notice that we had to change over to another provider before we would get cut off.
We weren't free tier spammers either and we paid them a good amount of money for Mandrill. They changed their TOS to make it not possible to send out bulk mailings without using their managed and much more expensive MailChimp service. We are not spammers, we are a non-profit that sends digest emails of our content to those who specifically subscribe and confirm. We also have our own mailing system so we do not need the features MailChimp provides, we just need well instrumented SMTP.
We then switched to Amazon SES but still have a bitter feeling about MailChimp and will move our services that are using the full MailChimp product. Some of the change was indeed to control spammers, but when you are forcing over enterprises sending 100's of thousands of emails without complaint, that starts crossing the line where you want to better monetize your product. Giving your customers 60 days to engineer a different solution after they invested in your product is not good business.
So you are defending them (at least in the first sentence)from your speculation based on what you heard around town, that customers were simply not sustainable fits... Wouldn't it make sense they not offer a service package that is unsustainable in the first place? The clients myself and many others put on Mandrill were certainly not free tier anything, and they still offer the service, just under he Mailchimp name. (point being it can't be too unsustainable if they still offer it)
Customers I know who were ultimately stuck by being heavily integrated in the Mandrill API still suffered issues and downtime with the flawed account migration process. Just about every paying (and non paying) Mandrill customer got screwed in one way or another.
I don't see why this is a surprise. From my observation, there are typically two types of startups out there.
1. Startup with a clear revenue model created by generating tangible value for businesses.
2. Startup without a clear revenue model that is doing something interesting and will probably be acquired if successful.
The first is a successful business like MailChimp that can grow itself from it's own revenues and doesn't need funding. The second is the type of business that needs funding because they are essentially investing in building technology to sell to a larger company OR are building a large pool of users to sell to a larger company.
Interestingly in the marketing space (in particular, email-based marketing), all the tools I gravitate towards have been bootstrapped rather than funded:
Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip (altho lead pages bought it, and is actively funding it's growth), curated.co (I'm not 100% sure on Curated - is that funded?), Edgar
These types of apps can actively and easily translate into $$ for businesses, so it's no wonder they can bootstrap rather than take on funds - individuals and businesses are willing to pay to make money!
They were a startup when the company began but are now an established company. They didn't transition from startup to normal company by taking VC funds and optimizing for growth, rather they went the route that most businesses take. That's what different/interesting about them when compared to most SV tech startups nowadays.
We really need this contrarian view of startup creation. In a way, having a few millions in profits can't be called a lifestyle business, your business can't scale more and you are happy with what you created and control. Also, only the process to get initially funded is very time consuming (e.g. look at the kickstarter videos).
As a regular user of all the main email marketing services:
I feel Mailchimp is missing the boat by focusing entirely on email and not offering a way to contact customers via:
1. In-app messages
2. SMS
3. Push notifications
It's also difficult / impossible to set up advanced automation sequences with it. For example, if Customer X does Y on your site, direct them to another branch with a different sequence.
Of course, their main target customers are small businesses so they may not need these advanced features but these customers would benefit tremendously from being able to for example text certain messages to customers instead of only being able to email them.
Another example of a company that has grown quite large without using venture funding is Zoho.com - based out of Chennai, India. They are even larger than Mailchimp in terms of revenues - clocking over $1 Billion and with over 3000 employees.
(Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :)
We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.
I think such a story is difficult now unless its a niche small market. Lets say someone start a company and stumble-upon a massive market but decides to grow slow financed by revenue. The problem is others are going to copy the idea and grow fast with VC money and crush the original company. May be possible in the next downturn when VC money dries up
Glory to the company but shame to modern internet — you have to use one of few "email providers" instead of just installing Postfix otherwise all your emails go to spam folder.
If you can continue growth and profitability without taking outside investors, great for you and I recommend it. The reality is, a lot of times founders are faced with the problem of funding/paying bills and are left with no other option than to take VC money. If you go down that route, just make sure that everyone on-board has the interests of your users in mind.
The article seems to acknowledge Silicon Valley is good and prolific at startups to the point of metonymy. SV is the standard way, and so you get descriptions like "Un-Silicon Valley Way" instead of say the "Atlanta Way" (another startup from Atlanta called Coca-Cola appears to be doing OK too ;))
But why does this article have this tinged negativity toward SV? Why not just highlight MailChimp's success without the jab on VCs? Clearly both VC or bootstrapping approaches can work for a company (though both approaches fail in the majority of cases and journalism is in love with survivorship bias).
I'm not in SV, but it's obviously the place important innovation has/is/will be coming from (and some crap too). Innovation and growth is needed and should be encouraged in this economy.
Just frustrating to see big journalism knock SV for no reason.
Better story: "Chimps and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make it as a Primate".
What a lot of people miss (including the author) is the time factor. Yes you can bootstrap a business and grow things organically once you have found decent product/market fit. The problem is that it will just take a much longer time until you reach certain milestones than with a VC-based approach.
"There is perhaps no better example of this other way than MailChimp, a 16-year-old Atlanta-based company that makes marketing software for small businesses."
This just kind of proves the point. If you have a company with great product/market fit and lots of VC in the bank you would either reach their numbers much quicker or have higher numbers after 16 years of operation.
According to that definition, you're wrong: Mailchimp doesn't fulfill the first condition. In my experience, Mailchimps interface puts heavy emphasis on having opt-in proof for the addresses you use, having to include unsubscribe links and sender's postal addresses etc. Yes, they don't technically enforce it, but how could they do that without also preventing legitimate use cases like importing addresses from a competitor's service?
If they gave you enough info to opt out effectively, people would do it. Also, then people could check up on them, checking the list of claimed "opt ins" for spam trap addresses. Giving the user that access would allow users to definitively catch spammers and mailing services in lies, and could lead to prosecutions under the CAN-SPAM act.
No. After a transaction is complete, any further communication from the seller is spam. MailChimp treats a previous transaction as a license to spam. MailChimp says they're in the "email marketing" business and writes about "campaigns". That's spam.
I'm looking to write a powershell script for creating lists and updating subscribers for mailchimp api v3. However, Im kind of lost. I only found old code samples. http://poshcode.org/3479http://poshcode.org/3351
Does anyone know any new code samples for mailchimp v3 api for powershell.
Mailchimp is a company that provides lots of unsolicited commercial emails. In other words, spam. You can dress it up and call it "marketing software for small businesses" but that doesn't change the essential fact: Mailchamp is a spammer. Is it any surprise that spamming is profitable?
I've received hundreds of Mailchimp emails. Not once did I sign up for any of those lists.
Does Mailchimp make it easy to unsubscribe? Sure. But that doesn't change the fact that they are spammers, and that if you want to send spam with some semi-plausible deniability that you're a spammer, Mailchimp is probably a good choice.
Of course, this story, like nearly all "business news" stories, is very likely the work of a highly paid public relations agency. That is one more reason that the word "spam" does not appear in this story.
I've got to disagree with you. I'd say MailChimp has elevated the perception of email marketing.
MailChimp has pretty strict standards when it comes to sending emails. If you send emails to a list that has a 20 percent or more bounce or unsubscribe rate, they'll freeze your account.
Other providers let you upload a CSV with emails and blast out campaign after campaign to purchased lists without repercussions.
I agree that MailChimp offers a legitimate service (sending subscriber newsletters and such) but also agree with GP that 90% of the email that I get via MailChimp I would call spam.
You know what? It's funny, because I have just realized that I do have
a spam detection rule about MailChimp. Until now I have thought it was kind of
software one runs to send out their spam, kid of like Perl or Python module
for SMTP. I have just learned that it is a service and it allows me, spam
victim, to unsubscribe. No fsckin' way I'll ever do that.
> If you send emails to a list that has a 20 percent or more bounce or unsubscribe rate, they'll freeze your account.
Without giving you a chance to do anything to correct that? What if it is a genuine case of non- spam? e.g. 100% signed up, soon after, 20% decide this list is not for them. Sometimes that might happen.
When you unsubscribe from a Mailchimp email, they ask the recipient why they are unsubscribing. If the recipient marks "I never subscribed" or "this email is spam," the threshold is probably much lower than 20 percent. The software tries to decide if your emails were malicious.
If your account is locked, then you have to call MailChimp and explain that your intentions weren't malicious and that you won't send anything else to those emails from your account.
I had a small email list that I had not sent anything in about a year and had my account locked after sending a campaign. People just forgot they were on the list, because it had been so long. Their support team unlocked it and suggested that I send an email at least every 6 months.
Anectdotal, but a non-profit volunteer org that I work with (http://cramba.org) had someone scrape all the contact emails from the site and sign them up for some mailings from a cycling tour company (http://kickassroadtrips.com/), sent via Mailchimp.
I directly reported this to Mailchimp itself, and based on both the response I got from Mailchimp and the angry response from the company owner I got a great feeling that Mailchimp took the abuse report quite seriously.
My experience is the exact opposite, I've received hundreds of MailChimp emails, and I HAVE signed up for every single one of them.
I have no doubt that some people do use MailChimp to send spam, but it seems to me that the majority of MC's customers are just sending to legit lists.
I don't think I've gotten any wholly unsolicited emails via Mailchimp or similar services. I still usually file them as spam because I hate that links they contain are obfuscated redirects -- for tracking purposes, but I'm much less agitated about that than the removal of link functionality -- I like seeing where I might click is likely to land me before clicking. If I happen to forget/not notice and mindlessly click on a link in an email, uBlock Origin helpfully blocks most such tracking links.
Providing tools for small-businesses ultimately means you're providing easy-access to people with few barriers
I think places like MailChimp are pretty easy to abuse for that reason. Compare that to an enterprise service provider where I need to commit to tons of upfront money in order to access the service and I need to manage my own reputation of my sending domain.
Even if you signed up for the mailing list in the first place? It's only spam if you never signed up for it in the first instance. If you sign up and then want to leave the list because the emails aren't relevant any more or too regular then that's just bad email marketing, not spam.
I have never signed up for a mailing list[1], e.g. gone to a "sign up for my newsletter" page and clicked "I would like to subscribe to your newsletter".
I've been signed up for them implicitly after making a purchase, etc., but I consider this spam and flag it as such.
Fair enough, that is spam in that case. Your initial comment didn't specify that you have never signed up for a mailing list (except for open source software, which is a mailing list) which I think puts you in the minority of people.
OSS mailing lists shouldn't be considered the same thing because I can send mail to them, and anyone else can as well. They are discussion forums carried out via email.
Mailing lists in the Mailchimp sense are just unwanted advertising in what I view as a communication medium - the equivalent of IRS scammer robocalls.
My "ive-done-nothing to-any-settings" email prevents me from spam in my IN box. So I suppose I never get any MC email.
Edit. Spam does not bother me any more. I only open email when I expect something. The only "interruptable" technology for me is a text. I have to look at it in my mind.
We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenominal.
You can comfortably live in the city with a roommate and pay only $500-600 rent. Just outside the city, you can get a 1200 sqft apartment for $700.
Our music scene is amazing, and the local food is fantastic.
I try to convince my friends in SF to come out here and give Atlanta a look, but nobody bites. I think this city is an incredible opportunity, especially for an early stage startup that wants to focus on growth prior to investment. The talent is here, the city is amazing, and the rent isn't absurd.