We built our own email system. Here's what happened.
A few months back, I made a decision that probably sounds crazy to most D2C founders: instead of signing up for Intuit Mailchimp or Mailmodo, we set up our own email infrastructure. Listmonk + AWS SES + EC2. Total cost? Practically zero.
As a technical founder, my brain is wired to build first, optimise later. When we needed email campaigns at DermaQ, my first instinct wasn't to compare tools - it was: "Can we just build this?" So we did.
The setup took a couple of hours following these guides:
Hit one issue during implementation, posted on GitHub, and @knadh himself replied and helped solve it. That's the open source community for you.
The reality check:
- Every single email lands in the Promotions tab
- Analytics are... "basic"
- It's not efficient compared to paid tools
Compare this to Mailmodo or similar platforms where you get deliverability optimisation, beautiful templates, advanced segmentation, detailed analytics. All solved problems.
But here's what we're doing - just tinkering. Seeing how it goes. We're a full stack hair loss clinic, not an email marketing company. We're just experimenting with our own infrastructure. Probably I'm a control freak and want complete control over my stack. Most D2C teams don't touch infrastructure. I genuinely enjoy it. Maybe that's my niche!
Huge appreciation to Kailash Nadh (CTO of Zerodha) for building and open-sourcing Listmonk. I've been following his work for years - his talks, podcasts, everything. Also discovered dont.build after building this, which helps decide when to build vs buy. Wish I'd found it earlier!
The big question: If you've used Listmonk + SES and figured out how to land emails in Primary instead of Promotions - please help a fellow builder out. I might be making a rookie mistake here. Maybe we should just pay for proper tools and focus on growing the business. Would love to hear from people who've been down this path.
Starting a new series: Technical Experiments at a D2C Startup
No expert advice. Just a builder learning in public, making mistakes, and hopefully getting better.