The same year Universal Music ran what's credited as the first mobile marketing campaign — promoting an Island Records single by SMS — small teams elsewhere were quietly building the tools behind a still-scrappy new channel: email. Mailchimp, Eloqua, and ExactTarget all trace their roots to this stretch.
4 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Co-founder, Mailchimp
Was running a web design agency in Atlanta when clients kept asking for an easier way to send marketing email, so he dug up old code and built what became Mailchimp.
That side project, born out of client requests rather than a grand plan, is turning into a genuine product the agency is now offering alongside its design work.
- 02
Co-founder, Mailchimp
Co-founded Mailchimp alongside Chestnut, serving as the company's first developer and support agent.
Handling both the code and the customer support gave him an early, close-up view of what small businesses actually needed from an email tool.
- 03
Co-founder, ExactTarget
Co-founded ExactTarget in late 2000 with Chris Baggott and Peter McCormick, building it into an early player in email and digital marketing software.
ExactTarget's early growth is tracking the broader shift of email from a scrappy new channel into something businesses are starting to treat as real marketing infrastructure.
- 04
Founder, Eloqua
Founded Eloqua, building software that helps sales and marketing teams track and score leads through a sales cycle — an early entry in what's starting to be called marketing automation.
Eloqua's approach to lead scoring and nurture campaigns is drawing attention from other software teams watching where this new category might go.
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