Invest in email infrastructure early—it's your primary customer communication channel
For audience-driven businesses, email infrastructure deserves significant budget even in early stages. Reliable email delivery, list management, and analytics are critical for building and maintaining customer relationships. Cheap or free email tools often have deliverability issues that silently kill your growth.
When to use
When building a business where email is a primary customer touchpoint (newsletters, onboarding sequences, product updates, support). Especially important if you're building an email list as a core asset.
Don't do this
Using the cheapest email solution or free tiers, then discovering emails go to spam or you can't scale beyond a certain list size.
1 Founder Who Did This
Spent $150/month on Mailgun and Elastic Email to reliably email 20,000 contacts—identified email as 'the most important part of my stack'