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Latent Space · 2 min · Nov 10, 2026
Support replies became documentation before they reached customers
Zeno Rocha
Resend moved from founder-only support to specialist replies, then required each answer to link to a help article.
In this episode
Full analysis- 7:01Email delivery depends on pacing and reputationPro pick 5 min
- 38:02An MCP should cover the whole product6 min
- 58:26Markdown pages can correct AI pricing answers7 min
- 32:23SES's low price can hide the surrounding infrastructure cost4 min
- 13:24Shared tracking domains expose senders to a neighbor's abuse3 min
- 17:19Support replies became documentation before they reached customers2 min
- 19:55Domain Connect turns DNS setup into an OAuth-style flow3 min
- 23:51React Email gave Resend a path from templates to sending3 min
“you can only respond to a ticket with a link. So you cannot just give the answer right away.”
Zeno Rochaat 18:34 · Latent Space
Takeaways
- Support needed domain expertise and proactive prevention.
- Every ticket reply had to point to a help article.
- Documentation helped keep free access as the user base grew.
About this segment
Resend moved from founder-only support to specialist replies, then required each answer to link to a help article. The policy built reusable answers as the user base grew from one million to four million.
Zeno Rocha is cofounder and CEO of Resend.
Co-founded Resend, an email platform for developers, and launched React Email, open-source components for building email templates.
Shawn Wang (swyx), Host · Co-founder, AI Engineer
Wrote “The Rise of the AI Engineer” and founded Smol AI, maker of AI News.
Alessio Fanelli, Host · Founder, Kernel Labs
Partner at Decibel, backing technical founders who build developer tools.
From “Designing for Agents — Zeno Rocha, Resend”, Nov 10, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
From the transcript Latent Space publishes with the episode.
- 17:23
You, you remind me of another, uh, investment that I had, uh, Jake from Railway. Yeah. 'Cause also another, like, very, very permissive, very developer-oriented, but also you have to scale support. Yeah. Right? Because the moment someone gets blocked, they come to you and say, "Hey," like, you know, "don't keep me off your platform." Yeah. How do you scale support? [laughs] Man, I think we-- I- if support was a, a software, we're probably on major version four or something. Okay. Like, the very first version was, like- You? [laughs] Me. And I was so stressed out.
- 17:54
I'm like, "Dude, I just need someone to be sitting on the chair." Like, it's that simple. I cannot be doing this anymore. And it was like, just anyone, anyone. I don't care. Then you do that. Of course, it doesn't go well because you realize very quickly you need someone that will actually try to prevent the tickets from happening in the first place. So then we went to V2, which was like a new version, like a n- new person that we, that we ended up hiring that was like, "Okay, we're answering the tickets.
- 18:25
They have domain expertise," but they were still, like, not doing the proactive work of like, "No, let's make sure this is documented before we, we talk about..." So one policy that we, we set, it was pretty cool actually, it was like- Sure... you can only respond to a ticket with a link. So you cannot just give the answer right away. Yeah. Mm. You had to stop- Blog or write docs... write a, a, a knowledge base article, write a docs, and then-- So it takes like an hour and a half maybe for you to answer a ticket. But guess what?
- 18:55
Now you're sending that link all over again. Uh, so that was super cool, and it helped us build that knowledge base. But even so, like after that, we-- when we crossed maybe one million users. So we had one million users back in December, and now we have four. So I can't throw people at the problem, but that's just not gonna solve it, right? Like I- I'm just gonna keep staffing and, and that's how it is.
- 19:19
Like, no. So we really have to rethink, like, okay, everything from scratch again. And we wanna keep like that free tier. It's not-- I don't wanna get rid of that free tier. I started as an engineer because I was able to use those free products, right? Like we all-- Like, if it wasn't for Heroku's free tier and all these other products, like we wouldn't be here.