I've always wanted to have my own product. But there were so many barriers to getting started:

How do you design a web app?
Where do you run it?
How do you find customers?

Then I found Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan. It had a lot of good ideas, but one stood out:

Million Dollar Weekend

Don't build anything until you validate the market.

And the way you validate it? You get someone to pay for it before the product even exists.

It's easy for people to say, "Oh, I like your idea. I'd buy it when it's ready." That doesn't mean anything. Someone has to actually pay. You have to see money hit your account to know you're solving a real problem.

Around that time, I was setting up my own custom email domain. And I realized this is way harder than it should be.

SPF. DKIM. DMARC.

Acronyms most people don't know, and if you get even one thing slightly wrong, your emails won't get delivered.

I had an idea and pitched it to some folks in the promotional products space.

Nothing.

No bites.

So I changed the approach. Instead of pitching the idea, I looked at their actual email domain setups. And it was clear they needed help.

I reached out again.

This time, one person replied. Someone from Scottsdale, Arizona. Not a friend. Not family. Someone I had never talked to before.

"I am interested."

We had a short call. I told him the truth: I didn't really have a product. Just a couple of scripts I had written to analyze my own DMARC reports.

He said he still wanted to be the first customer.

So I made the offer I had learned from the book:

Pay $99 for a year, and you get a front-row seat to the product as I build it. You can influence what I'm building.

I sent him a Stripe payment link.

He paid.

And that's how RefineEmail was born.