Built a cold email tool where you keep your own sending reputation. Solo founder, still figuring out distribution.

I built EmailQo because of a problem I kept hitting with the cold email tools I used before. My sender reputation lived inside someone else's shared infrastructure. If another customer on the same platform got flagged for spam, my deliverability took the hit too, and I had no way to see it coming or fix it.

So I built something that connects to your own Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, or AWS SES account and sends through it directly. Your reputation is yours, not shared with other users. It handles sequencing, warmup, and pre-send checks (SPF, DKIM, DMARC validation, spam trigger scanning, blacklist monitoring) on top of infrastructure you control.

I built and run this completely solo. Product, code, support, marketing, all of it. [If accurate: no funding, bootstrapped from day one.]

The part I haven't figured out: getting people to find it.

I can build the product. Getting it in front of the people who need it is a different problem, and I'm still early on that part. My domain authority is low and organic search traffic is close to nothing right now. Most of what I get is direct or referral, not search.

I know the standard playbook: content, backlinks, comparison pages, free tools that earn links. I'm working through it. But I'd rather hear from people who've actually been through the early months for a dev-adjacent tool with a small budget and no existing audience than guess my way through it on my own.

If you've done this: what actually worked for you in the first few months? Not the generic checklist, the one or two things that genuinely moved something when nobody knew you existed yet.

EmailQo if you want to see what I'm building.