Stop Making info@yourcompany.com Your First Email

At the early stages of your business you are a nobody. You are not a brand. Nobody trusts a brand that doesn't exist yet. They trust a person.

So why is the first thing every new founder does after buying their domain creating info@theircompany.com? It feels like the professional move. Like now you're official. Now you're a real business. But all you've done is hide the one thing that actually gets people to reply to you. Your name.

The Real Conversation That Made Me Write This

I was helping a client set up emails for his team the other day. Four people, small operation, early stage. His first instinct? Create an operations@ inbox and have everyone use that.

I told him no. Use your actual name. Make it mike@yourcompany.com, not operations@yourcompany.com. He pushed back a little, said it looks more legit with a department name. I told him the opposite is true. When you're early stage and sending cold emails or reaching out to potential partners, a personal name gets way more replies. He went with it.

That small decision is going to save him dozens of ignored emails down the line and he doesn't even know it yet.

Why info@ Kills Your Response Rate

Think about your own inbox for a second. You get an email from info@somerandomstartup.com. What do you do? You skip it. It looks automated. It looks like a blast. It feels like nobody specific is behind it. It could be a contact form redirect for all you know.

Now you get an email from sarah@somerandomstartup.com. Different feeling right? There's a person there. Someone you could actually have a conversation with. Someone who might actually read your reply.

That's the whole game when you're early stage. You're not Salesforce. You're not HubSpot. You don't have brand recognition that makes people open your emails regardless. All you have is the fact that you're a real person building something, and that's actually your biggest advantage. The info@ email throws that away for zero benefit.

When Generic Emails Actually Make Sense

I'm not saying never create an info@ or support@ or operations@ inbox. There's a time and place for them. Once you have a team, once you have customers who need a support channel, once you have enough volume that you need shared inboxes with routing, go for it.

But that's not day one. Day one you need replies. You need conversations. You need people to feel like they're talking to the founder, because they are.

The Fix Takes 30 Seconds

When you set up your domain email, make your first account yourname@yourcompany.com. Use that for everything. Outreach, investor emails, customer conversations, all of it. People want to talk to people, not inboxes.

You can always add the generic inboxes later when your team grows and you actually need them. But your name as the sender is something a big company can never compete with. Don't give up that advantage before you even start.