40 days in, 62 paying customers, and a small win I wanted to share

The last 40 days building FranklyMail have been a roller coaster. We're at 62 paying subscribers, with over 150 domains added and more than 1,000 mailboxes created. Those probably aren't huge numbers to a lot of people here, but they make me really happy. Some days I feel good about where this is going. Other days I second-guess pretty much everything. Having people actually use something I built still feels a little unreal.

I've spent almost $0 on marketing (tried desperate couple hundred bucks to see they don't bring anything). I've just been talking to people on Reddit and X, mostly in communities where email hosting was already part of the conversation. People have pointed out confusing stuff, told me what was missing, and sometimes been pretty blunt about what they didn't like. I've implemented roughly 60% of the feedback I've gotten so far. A lot of what's in the product now came out of those conversations.

I was my own first customer. I needed email hosting for my own projects, so that's where FranklyMail started. Using it myself keeps giving me things I want to fix, too.

The latest one is something we called Agentic Inbox. I wanted to find an email or get a reply started from the assistant I was already using, without going back and forth with my inbox.

It connects your mailbox to Claude or ChatGPT, so you can ask it to find a message, catch you up on a thread, or draft a reply. You still review the actual email in your browser and approve it before anything gets sent. I wanted the help, but I also wanted to read what was going out under my name.

By day two, more than 10 people had started using it. I'd built this around something I wanted for my own work, so seeing other people give it a try made me pretty damn happy. I don't know how many will keep using it yet, but it felt good.

And if any of those first 62 customers are in here, I'd love to hear how it's been going for you. What's working, what's annoying, what you wish it did. Feel free to share it here, even if it's something I need to hear rather than something I'd like to hear. Those conversations have already shaped so much of what I've built.

Anyway, after a few rough days, this was a good one. Wanted to share it with people who probably know the feeling.