In 2012, I was part of the team that took Eloqua public on the NASDAQ and later acquired by Oracle, where it became the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. At that time, companies like Marketo, HubSpot, ExactTarget, and others were also building cloud-hosted marketing automation tools for easy email sending and segmentation. Meanwhile, a new generation of cloud-hosted Message Transfer Agents like SendGrid, Mailgun, and SparkPost emerged, targeting developers with REST APIs to send emails programmatically. Despite these advances, I was frustrated by the effort required to implement email infrastructure in my startups' customer communication, as marketing automation solutions were designed for marketers, not product teams. This led me to realize that a gap existed between the capabilities of cloud-hosted MTAs and the needs of software development teams, prompting me to build Courier, which aims to make it easy to support reaching customers on their preferred channel without custom infrastructure.