Email SMTP server recommendations?

We want to send biweekly emails + user registration emails, etc. for our web startup. Any other startups have experience in what kind of smtp service to use (if any), or set up our own email server? It seems that even if the SPF settings are correct, there is a problem of other popular email services (gmail, hotmail, etc.) recognizing our emails as spam, and we want to get away from that. Any feedback will be welcome.