Why I Care So Much About Email

I didn’t arrive at email marketing through theory, trends, or consulting decks.

My passion for email began the moment I watched a hard-earned customer relationship get shut off without a second thought.

My passion for email didn’t begin with marketing. It began the moment a hard-earned customer relationship was shut off without a second thought.

I spent 22 years building Fusion Nutrition. Bootstrapped from day one and shaped through direct relationships with customers. Like most founder-led businesses, it wasn’t perfect, but it worked because we stayed close to the people who trusted us.

One of the most important ways we did that was through our email newsletter, The Muscle Times.

By the time I exited the business, we had more than 20,000 engaged subscribers. These were not passive names in a database. They were customers and advocates who opened, clicked, replied, and bought. Email was our most reliable digital asset. It drove revenue, surfaced feedback, and gave us a clear signal of what actually mattered to our audience.

During the transition after the sale, a new president stepped in. One of his first decisions was to shut the newsletter down.

There was no discussion. 

No performance review. 

No assessment of value.

It was simply deemed unnecessary. Outdated. Not because it wasn’t working, but because it didn’t align with personal preference.

I remember being genuinely perplexed. Not just disappointed, but confused.

What struck me was not the decision itself. It was what the decision revealed.

There was no first-principles thinking behind it. No curiosity about why the channel worked. No respect for the relationship it represented. Just a snap judgment that severed a direct connection we had spent years earning.

That was the moment my relationship with email changed.

Not because it was a marketing channel, but because I saw, in real time, what happens when relationships become expendable, and principle gives way to opinion.

A moment that changed my path

Watching that relationship disappear forced a realization I could not unsee.

If experienced operators can casually shut down a proven, permission-based connection to customers, then the problem is not email. The problem is how little respect we give to the inbox.

That moment is what eventually led me to start Clickaroo.

Not to sell more emails. 

But to help founders and operators protect the few channels they truly own, and to approach email with seriousness and first-principles thinking.

Fusion Nutrition no longer exists today.

Correlation is not causation. Businesses fail for many reasons. But I’ve learned this. When you abandon the channels that foster real relationships, you do not just lose efficiency or reach. You lose your grip on what made the business work.

That experience reshaped how I think about marketing.

Email is not a tactic. It is a relationship. One built slowly, maintained deliberately, and easily damaged when misunderstood.

As a founder, you do not get many truly ownable channels. Email is one of the few.

If you are lucky enough to have that relationship with your customers, protect it.

I learned that lesson the hard way.