GoDaddy has acquired MailChimp competitor Mad Mimi. The company intends to further expand the web hosting provider’s product suite aimed at small businesses, while giving GoDaddy a potentially market-changing email service.
Until now, according to Steven Aldrich, GoDaddy’s SVP of Business Applications, the company offered an older product called “Easy Email Marketing.” That will be replaced with the Mad Mimi technology. Aldrich also noted that in addition to the email tech boost, Mad Mimi was chosen for its great customer service expertise.
Mad Mimi founder Gary Levitt, once a part-time jazz musician and part-time busboy, “happened on the idea after first trying to build a web app for musicians like himself who wanted to offer an online press kit,” according to the story at TechCrunch. “He raised a whopping $7,000 from his father-in-law to hire developers, but says the project “crashed and burned” as he began to realize there was no way to build his app for that amount.”
Levitt eventually abandoned his idea in favor of an email service.
“I was always having a hard time finding an email service that was good for me because I was a musician,” explains Levitt. “Up to that point in 2008, all email services were identical. They were all doing templates…if you didn’t like a template you had to switch it,” Levitt explained.
For Mad Mimi, Levitt “decided to use content blocks which would allow for better customization.”
“I focused on total, basic simplicity, because that’s all I could afford,” says Levitt.
Levitt says that joining GoDaddy made sense, as it was the “most logical partner in the world” and the two shared the same customer base.
Mad Mimi’s distributed team will now join GoDaddy (but not relocate), and the Mad Mimi technology will be offered to the larger company’s 12 million users sometime next year.
