What email address should a founder use?

A founder's personal address should be their first name at the company domain. The company's public door is hello@. Those two, plus one address for money, are enough until the first hire.

Picture three emails leaving a new company on the same morning. One goes to a customer, one to an investor, one to a supplier. None of the three people opens the message first. Each of them looks at the From line, and the From line is two things: a display name and an address.

The display name is yours to set, and it should be your full name, not the company name. People reply to people. The address is what tells them whether the company is real. anna@keller.studio says there is a domain, someone registered it, and someone set up mail on it. kellerstudio2026@gmail.com says none of that, and it also tells a spam filter that a free webmail account is writing to a business address about money.

Investors notice it more than anyone. A deck from a domain address gets read as a company; the same deck from a personal Gmail gets read as a project. That is unfair, and it is also how it works.

At a company of one to ten people, first name only is the right format. It is short, it is easy to say on the phone, and nobody will ever have the same first name as you until the company is much bigger. anna@ beats anna.keller@ because the domain already carries the surname's job: it says which company.

first.last@ is the format of companies with hundreds of staff, where two people called Anna is a certainty. Starting there makes a five-person company sound like it is pretending to be larger, and it doubles the typing for everyone who writes to you. If you are sure you will reach that size, you can add first.last@ as an alias later; mail hosts let one mailbox answer to several addresses, so nothing has to be renamed.

Initials (ak@) are fine for a solo consultant whose clients already know them. For a startup they are a small puzzle for every new contact. Skip them.

One rule for all three: lower case, no numbers, no underscores. An address with a number in it reads as the second attempt at a name that was taken, which on your own domain can never happen.

hello@ belongs anywhere strangers will write to the company before they know anyone in it: the website footer, the contact page, the app store listing, the email signature's "general enquiries" line, and the signup form's reply-to. It is a door, and a door should not have your name on it, because you will not be the one answering it forever.

The practical reason matters more than the branding one. When hello@ is a separate address from day one, handing it to the first hire is a login change, not a migration of your inbox. When it was your personal address all along, every customer who ever wrote in has your name in their contacts, and the hire inherits none of it.

The same applies to support@, which you should create the day the first paying customer arrives, and to the addresses that will receive money mail. Our piece on how many email accounts a startup needs goes through the full list and which of them should be mailboxes rather than aliases.

Your name. The address on your signature, your LinkedIn, your calendar invites and your investor emails. This is a real mailbox with its own password, and it is the one you add to your phone.

hello@. On the website and anywhere the public meets the company. Make it a mailbox rather than a forward to your personal address: a forward means replies go out from anna@ and the customer learns the wrong address. On a flat-rate host a second mailbox costs nothing, so there is no reason to economise here.

billing@. The address you give your bank, Stripe, your accountant and every supplier that sends invoices. Money mail is the mail you can least afford to lose in a busy personal inbox, and it is the mail an accountant will one day need to search without reading your personal correspondence. It can start as an alias that delivers into your mailbox, and become its own mailbox the day someone else handles the books.

Create all three the same afternoon you connect the domain. Each takes under a minute on any host, and the hard part, the DNS records, is done once for the domain, not once per address.

The temptation is to forward the new company address into the Gmail you already read, and reply from there. Resist it for two reasons. Replies sent from a Gmail account on behalf of a domain address pass through Google's servers, so some recipients see "via gmail.com" and some spam filters score the mismatch. And when the company grows, or is sold, or has to answer a legal request, the company's mail is tangled through a personal account that nobody can hand over.

Keep the company mailbox as a second account in the same mail app instead. Apple Mail, Outlook and the Gmail app all show two accounts side by side, with one combined inbox if you want it. You read everything in one place; the mail itself stays where it belongs.