TL;DR I thought that once I could send clean HTML emails from Gmail, my outreach workflow was “good enough.” Turns out it wasn’t. What was missing was the most tedious part: follow-ups. The first message is sent. The client hasn’t replied. Two days later I forget. A week later I’m embarrassed to reopen the same thread. On top of that, in my case follow-up messages are the key to email marketing. That’s the point where I decided: if I needed automated follow-ups, I’d try to build my own. Why I Didn’t Just Use a Paid Tool I know there are…