MailChimp shut us down for informing the public about Blockchain.. #FailChimp
By: The Public Key
Tags: MailChimp, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Bitcoin

What do you do when one of your key vendors that you rely on to connect you with your subscriber-base impulsively decides to shut you down? That’s the predicament we at the Key found ourselves last month when Mailchimp, or perhaps now “Failchimp,” indefinitely suspended our account without a real reason.

As the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest crypto-focused newsletter, our work centers around raising awareness to subscribers of free-to-discounted events, job openings, as well as newsworthy snippets. Of course, our subscribers were quickly disgruntled when they realized they were no longer receiving their weekly newsletters.

And it’s because Mailchimp shut us out of our account with no recourse — falsely accusing us of promoting ICOs (initial coin offerings). This incident is part of a much larger, deleterious trend of online marketing platforms making blanket judgements of crypto-related initiatives as nefarious activities.

Those of us in the blockchain space need to stand up and show these companies that we are not scams that should be shunned. What makes the blockchain space so important is exactly what makes the larger tech space important; innovation. And, right now, Mailchimp is hard at work in thwarting community-focused initiatives like the Key from raising awareness of such innovations to the masses.

What happened?

We originally decided to use Mailchimp as our main messaging platform for our weekly newsletters due to their ubiquity in the wider tech space and the ease of sending out emails. We found that these two reasons compensated for the platform’s awful user interface (UI), though that’s another story.

We heard stories about ICOs and the like getting shut out of their accounts by Mailchimp, but we assumed we were fine since we never sought to promote any ICO. Rather, we focus our brand entirely on raising awareness about key trends, events, and innovations in the blockchain space. Our value prop centers on the insights we provide our users so they can make their own informed decisions about exchanging cryptocurrencies. In fact, in a tweet last year, Mailchimp said our use case was kosher by their standards. So we thought we were just fine.

It appears that assumption was naive in retrospect. As we headed into the holidays, we received this email on December 3:

Mailchimp’s algorithm somehow determined that we were a crypto business and hence a scam, even though we had been successfully using Mailchimp for almost a year. No worries, we thought, it was just a misunderstanding. However, it was very hard to see the actual reason for them shutting us down.

We appealed the message and emailed them back asking for more information on the matter. A week goes by and no response. We follow up on December 9th, and we finally hear back the next day:

By Mailchimp’s own words, their automated system for finding entities that sought to us the service to shill ICOs on their platform had actually lumped us in with their main targets.

Thinking we could just email their support team proved futile. Other than sending an email reply to the ticket, there was no phone number to reach out to, no way to contact Mailchimp for a resolution. A month-and-a-half later, after multiple follow ups from our end, they still have not responded to us. They have not even given us a chance to upgrade our account, thinking that they’d just want us to upgrade so they could make some money and get a response. However, our account is still locked. Moreover, switching services wasn’t going to be that easy for usgiven that our UI designer developed a special on-brand template that only works on the Mailchimp platform.

Being shut out of Mailchimp adversely affected our business, as we obviously can’t reach our readers. We have been essentially prohibited from actually functioning as a business due to a decision of a random algorithm which apparently isn’t monitored, as they have not even responded to us. Not to mention, we lost our ability to deliver value to our loyal partners, like Node, who we signed a strategic partnership with that month — ultimately losing out on serious revenue.

We now have to resort to a third-rate-email platform with even more limiting formatting options until we decide on which platform to stick with permanently and redevelop our template, which will ultimately cost time and money.

As we put the crypto boom days of 2017 behind us, and we are in this long bear market, crypto will get more “boring” as the scams die out, and the real blockchain businesses grow.

As our industry continues to develop, there will be more demand for products like Mailchimp, who will have to make a decision: Do we want to cut out all of this potential business, just because it has a certain reputation? Or do we want a scorched earth policy that will also weed out real, legitimate entrepreneurs?

Until we get a resolution to our case, we are viewing Mailchimp as #FailChimp, and ask that you join us and make a stand for the crypto space!