You've got a product to ship, users to onboard, bugs to fix, and approximately zero time to become an email marketing expert. Good news: you don't need to be one. What you need is the absolute minimum email setup that keeps users from falling through the cracks—something you can build in a weekend and iterate on later when you have actual traction to optimize.

This isn't the comprehensive guide. This is the "just get something working" guide for founders who'd rather ship than spend two weeks perfecting their onboarding sequence. We're going to cover the three emails you actually need, give you a weekend timeline to implement them, and explicitly tell you what to skip so you don't get distracted by best practices that don't matter yet.

The Three Emails That Actually Matter

Let's be brutally honest about what "email marketing" means at the MVP stage. It doesn't mean nurture sequences, it doesn't mean newsletters, and it definitely doesn't mean a 12-email drip campaign you saw some growth marketer post on Twitter. At launch, email marketing means exactly three things: making sure people can use your product, welcoming them when they sign up, and reaching out when they ghost you.

That's it. Everything else is optimization for a later stage.

Email 1: The transactional essentials. These aren't marketing emails, but they're the foundation everything else depends on. If your password reset doesn't work or your email verification never arrives, nothing else matters. Your users literally cannot use your product. Before you write a single "marketing" email, make sure these work reliably: password reset, email verification (if you require it), and payment receipts (if you're charging). Test them yourself. Send them to Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo accounts. Check that the links work. This is day-zero infrastructure.

Email 2: The welcome email. When someone signs up, they should get exactly one email that does one thing: tells them what to do first. Not your company story. Not five features to explore. Not links to your blog, docs, community, Twitter, podcast, and investor update. Just the single most important action they should take to get value from your product. Write it like you're texting a friend who just created an account: "Hey, you're in! Here's what to do first: [specific action]. Takes about 2 minutes." That's it. If they do that one thing, they'll figure out the rest.

Email 3: The "are you stuck?" email. If someone signs up and doesn't take that key action within 48-72 hours, reach out. This can be automated, but it should feel personal. Something like: "Hey [name], I noticed you signed up a few days ago but haven't [done the key thing] yet. Totally normal if you've been busy—but if you're stuck or have questions, just reply to this email. I read and respond to everything personally." This email has two jobs: re-engage people who forgot about you, and surface feedback from people who are genuinely confused about your product.

That's your minimum viable email stack. Three emails. One weekend.

Your Weekend Timeline

Here's how to actually ship this in two days. I'm assuming you have access to an email tool (more on that in a moment) and can carve out a few focused hours.

Day	Focus	Time	Deliverable
Saturday AM	Transactional	2-3 hours	Password reset + verification working
Saturday PM	Welcome email	1-2 hours	Welcome email written and automated
Sunday AM	Stuck email	1-2 hours	48-hour follow-up automated
Sunday PM	Testing	1 hour	All three emails tested end-to-end

Saturday morning: Get transactional working. This is the unsexy work, but it's essential. If you're using an auth provider like Auth0, Clerk, or Supabase, they handle password reset out of the box—just customize the template so it doesn't look like a default. If you're rolling your own auth, make sure your reset flow actually works (you'd be surprised how many early products have broken password reset). Same for email verification if you require it. Don't skip the payment receipt if you're charging—Stripe makes this easy, but you still need to verify it's sending.

Saturday afternoon: Write your welcome email. This should take an hour to write, maybe another hour to set up the automation. Open a blank doc and write like you're explaining to a friend what they should do next. Here's a template you can steal and customize:

Subject: You're in—here's what to do first

Hey [name],

You just signed up for [Product], and I'm genuinely excited to have you trying it out.

Here's the one thing to do right now: [specific action with specific outcome]. It takes about [realistic time estimate] and you'll immediately see [specific value they get].

[Link or button to that action]

That's it—no homework beyond that. If you run into questions, just reply to this email. I read everything.

[Your name]

Set this up as an automated email that fires immediately when someone creates an account. Most email tools make this trivial—a simple trigger on user creation, a 0-minute delay, and your email content.

Sunday morning: Build your "stuck" email. This fires only if they haven't completed the key action within 48 hours. You'll need basic conditional logic: if user signed up AND hasn't done [key action], send this email. The email itself should feel like a personal check-in:

Subject: Quick question

Hey [name],

Noticed you signed up for [Product] a couple days ago but haven't [done key action] yet. Totally fine if you've been swamped—we've all been there.

But if you're stuck on something or have a question, just reply to this email. I actually read and respond to these personally, and I'd rather help you get unstuck than wonder if you're having a problem.

If everything's fine and you just haven't gotten around to it, no worries—I'll stop bugging you.

[Your name]

Sunday afternoon: Test everything. Create a new test account. Go through the full flow. Does the welcome email arrive immediately? Does it look good on mobile? Does the link in the welcome email actually take you to the right place? Wait 48 hours (or temporarily adjust your timing to test faster) and verify the "stuck" email fires correctly. Send test emails to a Gmail account, an Outlook account, and if you can, a company email address. Check spam folders.

What to Skip (With Permission)

This is the part most "email marketing" content won't tell you: there's a lot you don't need yet. Here's your explicit permission to skip these things until you have real traction:

Skip the newsletter. You don't need a monthly newsletter when you have 47 users. Newsletters are great for staying top-of-mind with a large audience. At launch, you should be talking to every user individually anyway. Skip it.

Skip the multi-email onboarding sequence. The 7-email "getting started" sequence is an optimization for a later stage. Right now, one good welcome email beats five mediocre ones. You can always add more later when you understand what users actually need.

Skip A/B testing. You don't have the volume to learn anything from A/B tests. At 100 users, a 5% difference in open rates is literally 5 people—not statistically significant, not actionable. Just write something reasonable and move on.

Skip the fancy email design. Plain text emails from the founder often outperform beautifully designed templates anyway. Don't spend hours in Figma designing your email. Write it in plain text or with minimal formatting. Ship it.

Skip send time optimization. "What's the best time to send emails?" is a question for companies with thousands of subscribers. At MVP stage, just send emails during business hours in your primary time zone and move on.

Skip segmentation. You don't need to segment users into personas and send different messaging to each. You barely have users. Send everyone the same welcome email. Later, when you see clear patterns, you can segment.

Skip the preferences center. An elaborate email preference center with toggles for every type of communication is overkill. Include an unsubscribe link (legally required) and a way to reply directly to you. That's enough.

The pattern here is simple: anything that requires volume to optimize or sophistication to build is something you skip at MVP stage. Focus on the three emails that matter, and do those well.

Tool Recommendations (Keep It Simple)

You don't need a $500/month email platform at MVP stage. Here's what actually works:

For most early SaaS products, you want something that handles both transactional and marketing emails in one place, supports basic automation triggers, and won't charge you a fortune at low volume. That narrows the field considerably.

Sequenzy is what we built for exactly this scenario—unified transactional and marketing emails, Stripe integration for SaaS-specific triggers, and pricing that doesn't punish you for being small. I'm biased, but that's the honest recommendation.

Buttondown works well if your needs are even simpler and you want a minimal, developer-friendly tool. Great for newsletters, decent for basic automation, and indie-friendly pricing.

MailerLite is solid if you want more traditional email marketing features without the Mailchimp pricing trap. Good free tier, reasonable paid plans.

Avoid Mailchimp for SaaS unless you enjoy paying 3x what you should and fighting with a UI designed for e-commerce. Avoid HubSpot unless someone's paying you to use it—it's enterprise software that doesn't belong in an MVP. Avoid building your own unless email delivery is genuinely core to your product. The complexity of deliverability, bounce handling, and compliance is not a problem you want to solve during a launch.

For a deeper dive on this decision, check out our choosing an email platform guide which covers what to prioritize at different stages.

The Iteration Plan: What Comes After the Weekend

Once your MVP email setup is working, here's what to actually pay attention to—and when to invest more time.

First month: Watch replies. The most valuable signal at MVP stage isn't open rates or click rates—it's replies. Are people responding to your welcome email? Are they replying to your "stuck" email with questions that reveal confusion in your product? Read every reply personally. This is qualitative data that helps you improve both your emails and your product.

First 50-100 users: Look for patterns. Where are people getting stuck? If everyone ghosts after signup and never takes the key action, that's a product problem, not an email problem. If people take the first action but don't convert, you might need to add one more email that highlights your paid features when they've demonstrated value.

After hitting consistent signups: Consider adding one more email. If you're getting steady signups and your welcome + stuck sequence is working reasonably well, the next email to add is usually a "you're almost there" email when someone approaches the value threshold or trial end. This is when you start thinking about conversion emails. But not before.

Only optimize when you have volume. Once you're getting 200+ signups a month, you might have enough data to experiment with subject lines or timing. Before that, trust your intuition, ship something reasonable, and focus on the product.

The key insight is that your MVP email setup is scaffolding, not a finished system. You're building the minimum structure to keep users from falling through cracks while you figure out product-market fit. The elaborate email journeys come later—much later—when you have enough volume to test hypotheses and enough understanding of your users to personalize intelligently.

The Mindset That Matters

Here's what I wish someone had told me when I was launching my first product: you don't earn the right to sophisticated email marketing until you've earned users who care about receiving your emails. At MVP stage, your job isn't to build the perfect email system—it's to ship something basic that works, talk to users directly, and iterate based on what you learn.

The three-email framework isn't a permanent solution. It's a bridge. It keeps users from forgetting you while you build the product they actually need. And it gives you mental permission to not think about email marketing for a while, so you can focus on the ten other fires you're probably trying to put out right now.

Ship the three emails this weekend. Test them. Move on. Your product needs you more than your email sequences do.

For a more comprehensive roadmap once you're ready to invest more in email, see our first 30 days guide. But that's for later. Right now, your job is to ship something that works—in a weekend.