Designing for Agents — Zeno Rocha, Resend

Like, there's a... Uh, yeah, it's changing. [laughs] Yeah. What was the impetus for, I guess, picking email? You know, I think, uh, you know, uh, people always have, like, obviously React email and all those things. Yeah. [sighs] I just don't know if I would have made it a company, you know? Yeah. If, if I knew, like, how hard email is, I, I probably wouldn't start the company either. Uh- Yeah. Were, were you a primarily JavaScript front-end- Totally... CSS dev- I was a front-end guy. No infra, right? No email background. The HTML5 guy- Right... you know? And I think what was interesting and what drew me to it is like I just look at all the tools, uh, around that, and I've used all of them before, the MailGuns, the MailChimps, the SendGrids of the world, and I've always felt like, man, there should be something where, um, there's just some- someone should care about this space.

That's, that, that's how I felt. Like, you have all these players. It's a massive market, a lot of competitors, but no one that cares about the developer persona. Maybe they care about the marketer, the product manager or whatever, but not for the developer. So I started just building around that premise of like, if this was the, the Stripe of email, how would that look like? Um, and yeah, the, like I had no idea or knew nothing about email. Like I was a user of email, but I have never built like an email pipeline and, and all that- Yeah... infrastructure before. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, typically if you ask me, like Postmark was still a thing. Yeah. But like, uh, and then, and then obviously SendGrid and all these folks- Mm-hmm...

all these guys, and they're still around, but like, uh, they're not, uh, maybe as innovative as someone who's like a new YC startup, like trying to, try to make it. Yeah. Um, just to, just upfront- Mm-hmm... I like to let people brag a bit. Mm-hmm. And you-- Like for people who never heard of Resend, what are like- Yeah... the, the ways that you talk about, like the most impressive numbers, the logos, anything? Yeah. So Resend now is powering four point three million users as of this morning. Uh, we have all sorts of customers like, uh, Warner Brothers, HBO, so customers that are really big and have all sorts of demands, but also a lot of indie hackers and folks who are just building a website, building their own application.

And yeah, we just crossed a hundred and twenty thousand paid customers and yeah. Like the endless logo wall. [laughs] Oh my God. Yeah, the big logo wall. Do you think this is effective? Yeah. You wanted the flex. There you, there you go. You know what? Like in the beginning, I felt like I just need to have some sort of social proof. Uh-huh. [laughs] And then in the end I was like, "You know what? This is actually pretty cool." And I, I, I honestly, like, I found companies like Warner Brothers just like on a random Saturday. Uh, I was just-- This was before AI, so I, I'll go to my database, I'm like, "Oh, let me see who can I put on the website?" And I just... I did the, the most naive thing you can do.

Like, let me look at the domains- Yeah... and let me just filter by dot coms and filter by the small ones. And there was this domain, WBD, Warner Brothers Discovery. I didn't know. What is wbd.com? [laughs] And I was like, "Oh, no. Warner Brothers is using us." So yeah, I j- I, I just love fe-featuring customers and yeah. [laughs] Pretty good. Specifically for listeners- Mm-hmm... one of the reasons I reached out for this interview, one, you know, I'm, uh, I, I should declare upfront, I'm, I am an angel. Mm-hmm. Uh, when you sent me the memo, it was- Mm-hmm... super simple. You were like, "Look, uh, MailChimp has exited. Postmark has exited. SendGrid is under Twilio. Who is doing this?" Yeah. And I was like, "Okay, yeah. Seems, seems right." [laughs] Yeah.

[laughs] No, honestly, like in terms of like the, the pitches I get- Mm-hmm... I've invested in about like thirty-plus companies. Mm-hmm. That was like one of the most straightforward things ever. [laughs] Oh. [laughs] And then, uh, secondly, I, yeah, I don't like to add API keys. Yeah. Right? Like I like to have everything on one platform, one AP- one API key, copy everything. So- Yeah... uh, Cloudflare has built-in email. Yep. And I had a project, and I set up my Cloudflare email domain- Mm-hmm... DNS, all that junk, uh, D- Yep... DKIM- Yeah... what have you, right? I don't know all the alphabet soup of stuff. Yeah.

And I already had this set up, and then I was like, "Okay, well, I wanna add another sort of email thing." Mm-hmm. Bloody model s- said, "You must add Resend." [laughs] And I'm like, "Who the fuck is telling me this, uh, Resend, that like, you know, even already I, I have a Cloudflare email set up, and it's just still recommending it." It's on the, on the screen now. This is him praising- Yeah. [laughs]... and like, "I don't need Resend, but you want me to keep adding Resend." Yeah. So okay, who did you bribe in OpenAI and Anthropic to get Resend on there? [laughs] Oh, man, I, I wish there was someone to bribe because, yeah, I would definitely be paying them. [laughs]But I do personally spend a lot of time on, on that topic.

Like, that's something that I feel like every generation, that-that's why I was so interested to build this thing in the first place. Yeah. Like, every generation, you have those tools that define that moment, right? We remember the Heroku days. I mean, Netlify Purcell. You know? Yeah. And, and so to me it was like, yeah, there's room for a new generation, and this new generation is not gonna be distributed in the same places that it was before. So since the beginning I was, like, very focused on, okay, we, we gotta be number one when someone asks about that. Yeah. You're very number one, CloudCode recommending 60% plus of the time.

I think it'll be fun to see the playbook, how do you, how do you win that? Um, I do wanna get back into, okay, so you said you had no idea why email, how to start email. Yeah. I think a lot of people actually don't understand what goes into making a service like this, right? Yeah. Uh, you might 'cause you've set it up.

Yeah, what I've learned is, again, another thing I didn't know, email is the type of world where it requires a lot of education, but people are not interested in learning, right? Like, the platform should do all those things for them. So we added, like, insights inside the product, so people can just apply the insights.

So we look at sending patterns, and now with AI, it's pretty cool too, like we have link checkers and spell checkers, like all these checkers in, uh, before you send. So yeah, it's a mix of you're teaching your audience, but at the same time, the product needs to do the teaching. And the more you can bake in the, the best practices, the better. So one example too, when you send an email, you can send an HTML version and a plain text version. Very early on, we were like, "You know what? Like this-- The whole world is changing. There are way more agents than, than before. Let's just generate, auto-generate the, the plain text version, uh, of each email." We can extract from the HTML, the markdown, and then just send that.

So we start sending that automatically, and that increased deliverability a ton. You know, it's so much easier for spam filters to just look at the content directly without having to parse that. Uh, so those things that we are like, "Oh, no, let's bake into that product," and most people don't do that, but we're like, "Oh, that... This makes sense." But with plain text, there's no tracking, right?

I, I think we learned we have skill issues too- Yeah... that we wouldn't have expected. Yeah, we learned. Yeah, email is so important, and it's so dirty, and it's so secretive, and it's- Yeah... just such a-- I almost just want you to, like, just tell us everything [laughs] we don't know. I will say, you have a, you have a fun page. Literally, your philosophy, as you called it. I got lost just reading around this. And then there's, like, a cool-- You have a pledge that you will make email safer. Mm-hmm. Like, if you're interested in this stuff, you know, you, you have quite a bit up here. Yeah.

Um, okay. So, uh, actually, uh, I do want to... There's this, there's a how we scale support there. Uh-huh. Uh, I think that's-- this is, uh...

So I want to keep Resend that way, but it took us many iterations to- Yeah... to get to a- How much of this is like, okay, it's a domain people don't know a lot about. There are actually unique questions that need human support versus, you know, Command K with just- Mm-hmm... you have docs, you have a model. Mm-hmm. The customer service bots exist, right? Yeah.

One of the things that I'm trying to figure out as well is how you like start this company. Like you said, you, you, you tried to get in touch with the Ionos guy. Yeah. I'm like, I wouldn't dare to start Resend without knowing, like, like having like some guy on the inside at Gmail. Uh-huh. Even now it's like, okay, can we vibe code our own email thing? Yeah. C- clearly, no, but that, that's- Mm-hmm... that's even with tools today. You did this years ago. Like I've- Yeah... you know, you want people at domain, right? It's like you need the guy, right? Yeah. But you need to pick up the phone, right? I don't know. [laughs] Yeah. There were many times that we had to pick up the phone. It, it's fascinating. Like it's an industry that relies on relationship a lot.

Uh, and we didn't have those relationships, so we hired for a f- few key roles, like deliverability roles, folks that have been at Postmark- Mm-hmm... since the beginning or fifteen years ago at MailChimp, and then we leveraged that network. Uh, but yeah, it's pretty crazy. But w- what's interesting now, of course, I didn't know that when I started. Like I could never predict what was gonna happen. You didn't, you didn't do the research? [laughs] Yeah, no. Like I could never predict like, okay, what AI was gonna do and all that, right? But I think we are in a space where, man, I'm glad we chose infrastructure. I'm glad we're infrastructure as a service and not a just, yeah, software as a service. You, you had a little bit, right?

the templating... is Turing complete if you [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] Okay. So cool. Um, I actually do want to- Yeah... like, continue on this- Mm-hmm... email path. Uh-huh. But I see so many names I used to know. I was just kinda, uh, wondering if you can indulge us a bit and just go- Mm-hmm... through, like, some of these names. Like- Yeah... what you learned from them, if you have any, like, cool stories. If just, just anything, you know? Man, so much. Yeah. So much. Uh, I remember the very first year of Resend, I was like, "I gotta meet the founder of Mailgun," because I was still a user of Mailgun. And I talked to Ev.

Um, he's, he built, uh, oh my gosh, what is it? Blogger? Medium? Um, no. It's a sep- it's a different product. Um, but anyways, like, he, um, it's a security product, uh, that, that he's building now. And I remember talking to him. I was like: Man, why'd you sell so quickly your company? What was the thing? And he told me like: Oh yeah, 90% of our R&D was just to fight abusers. So it was a- Mm. "It's a terrible business. Like, you shouldn't go there." And I was like, uh, like, I don't wanna live in that world at all. Uh, so I was very worried about that. Uh, and it was a big lesson for me of like, okay, we gotta automate this thing. Like, there's no way we're just gonna build, like, a massive org, uh, for...

We do have a lot of people interested in safety now, but it's not like that's gonna be our core business. No, we're gonna-- we have to be pushing the industry forward. But that was one. And SendGrid has always been my favorite out of those ones, and always been the behemoth, like, the, the biggest, the... It's like, oh my gosh, how are we ever gonna beat SendGrid? It's im- just impossible. And then earlier this year, we crossed a number of, uh, downloads from SendGrid, and I was like, "That's insane." And now we're more than double. So i-in terms of unique users, or what's the c- what's the number?

NPM downloads- NPM downloads... of the SDK. Uh- Is, is that the best metric out there? [laughs] Yeah. Like, it, I think there, there's something about that metric in terms of adoption, but then if you look at how many emails they send, it's obviously much more than us- Yeah... because they have, like, the big enterprise customers they add and- Yeah... that kind of thing. I think one thing that's surprising- Mm-hmm... is the whole point of the Twilio-SendGrid acquisition is that I now n- you are no longer an email service. You're a- Mm... communications platform. Mm-hmm. Right? You, you integrate across everything.

Uh, it's not, it's not just about cross-sell. It is about I can reach you across multiple channels, something like that. Yeah. Or that you have the size. You know, Twilio's like, I don't know what the size is now. Let's call, let's call it $13, $15 billion company. Uh-huh. Uh, you should have all the relationships, all the talent, all these, all these, all these things, right? So, uh, how do you compete with that? [laughs] Yeah. Man, I, I admire Twilio so much. They kinda invented DevRel or, or, or like- Yeah, ask your developer... you know, ask your developer. Like, and now when I, I, I, I, I go past that 101 billboard and I see a customer AI or whatever, I'm pissed. I'm like, "Why?" Like, you neglected the thing that g-got you there.

Um, and I think, uh, now, like, Jeff is not there anymore. The CFO is- He bought The Onion. Yeah. [laughs] That's right. [laughs] That's right. So I feel like they're just sleeping on it. And first they did that with SendGrid, and they're doing that with SMS too. And yeah. But I, I think my, my lesson here is I'm trying to figure out the economics of scale of this industry, right? Yeah. Like, clearly, you know, let's, let's call it they're 100 times larger than you when you s- Mm-hmm... when you just got started, right? Yep. Um, how come they cannot use their size to just win? Right. Yeah So, so in, in, in other words, maybe, maybe there is no s- benefits to scale. Yeah. Maybe you just, you know, uh, you just make a better product and you can slowly- For sure... get there.

And I, I've always, uh, thought about too, like, why did Twilio acquire SendGrid and not the other way around? Uh- Uh, Twilio was bigger. I mean, SMS- Yeah... is, is big. But like, i- if email and communication is a commodity, like SMS, your margins are even- It's worse... slimmer. Yeah, even worse. I know. So- Have, have you looked into SMS? Yeah, for sure. [laughs] Recent SMS? I think one day. Ooh. Yeah. I think one day. Yeah. What are the channels that matter? Email, SMS, what else? WhatsApp- WhatsApp... is big in, in many different countries. Oh, WhatsApp is free, right? You, you don't pay anything. Yeah, but then you g- you gotta go through Meta, and now, uh, business messages are gonna be charged. Uh, so- Hmm... there, there is some friction there, uh, for sure. Phone calls?

Phone calls is a good one. Uh, I'm, I'm less interested- I don't know if it's a good one Yeah. I never take any robo calls, right? Yeah, that's true. So- I'm less interested about that too. What I care is, like, what are the things that makes me able to connect with my audience? Like, that's what I ultimately care. Like, I don't care about email. DMs. Yeah, DMs. It's one. [laughs] It's hard because you cannot, like, DM a big crowd, like, but Slack maybe is one, right? As you- Oh, yeah, Slack. Mm-hmm... like, I have so many Slack connects, uh, and I need to share the news about, like, this one new feature that we built. Yeah. Pylon? I don't, don't know if you guys use Pylon. Yeah, yeah, Pylon.

Uh, I think they kinda innovated this, like, Slack support thing. Yeah. But you can obviously trivially- Mm-hmm... build your own. Mm-hmm. Um, okay, and then I think the other one I wanna touch on is AWS SES. Yeah. Um, so my connection to this is, uh, I learned to code with freeCodeCamp. Nice. With Quincy Larson and everything. Yeah. Uh, they have, like, five million subscribers on their newsletter- Yeah... sent through Amazon SES for, like, $5,000 a month. Mm-hmm. Which is cheap. Cheap. It's pretty cheap. I don't know how-- I don't know what you would cost. [laughs] Yeah. Mm-hmm. More than that.

Um, so, so basically, like, uh, to me it's just, like, the low-cost player, right? Yeah. That is... I mean, it's Amazon. Mm-hmm. It's like they're, they're super established.

So I'm really excited. It's, like, the, the flagship, uh, change that we're making now to- I mean, you're becoming-- It's, it's really interesting for all, like, DX-type businesses. You start at, like, a thin layer, like a React email. Mm-hmm. And then it's like, "Okay, well, we'll build on other people's infra." And then once you get sized, then you can actually build your own infra, right? Yeah. Are you doing anything differently because now you own everything? Yeah. I think what we're doing is, um- And by the way, obviously your dashboards are beautiful. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] It's funny, man.

Everyone I talk to now, like all the customers are like, "Oh, I never opened the dashboard," but we can talk about that later. Uh, but it's interesting, like I spent so much time trying to make the dashboard beautiful, and now people don't go there. It's kind of frustrating, but I get it. But yeah, we're just trying to approach that with the same naive mentality, uh, that we approached all the other problems, and we're like, "Okay, this shouldn't be this way." So you're challenging the most basic things of like, this shouldn't be this way. The P99 shouldn't take this long. How we can make it faster?

Okay, n- so that's one of the things we're doing now, like focus very, very deep into performance. And we have always been like a Node.js shop, and we have like just TypeScript everywhere. And most recently, like in the sending path, we no longer use a JavaScript. We have Go there, and we're changing other parts to be more, more performant in, in other ways. Yeah. 'Cause now languages don't matter. Exactly, right? It's just so cheap to, yeah, like pick a problem, and yeah, you can rewrite the whole thing in whatever- Yeah... the fast language is. I'm, like, running Rust projects, and I've never-- I don't really know Rust. Mm-hmm. Like I know, like some theoretical things about Rust, but- Mm-hmm... I've never really bothered to learn it. Mm-hmm.

I, I feel like we are not really covering the recent product surface area. Yeah. [laughs] Uh, maybe you wanna go. No, no, I mean, you know, there's-- everything we've talked about, which is why it's hard, what all you're solving, and then there's also just send emails from CLI, Super Agent forward. [laughs] You have some takes on this. I think the other day you tweeted like MCP is so back, right? Like- Yeah. [laughs]... over a million MCP calls. Like- [laughs]... what's the, what's the AI side of email? Yeah.

In, in fact, uh, you know, there-- you are one of the few LeanSpace guests I can, I can ever talk about this with. Mm-hmm. I think this is one of the mistakes of Next.js. Oh, really? Because Next.js and server components and, uh, Pages API or Apps, Apps API- Mm-hmm... um, they make it easy for you to basically bind data to your page. Okay. So you never expose the public API. Yeah. So by default, the thing that is performance and they encourage you to do, you will not have an API, right? That's so true. Then you have to just do, like, separate code paths or whatever. Yeah.

In fact, you should just always have, like, completely headless back-end, and then your front-end just happens to be one of many clients that connects to your back-end. Yeah, we started with, uh, our API on Next. I remember that. First of all, the bill was just so high that we were like, "There's no way we can pay for this." So then we moved to a traditional node server, uh, server for whatever you call it. And, and then, like, our dashboard was always, like, a private API consuming the same thing. We had to duplicate a lot of code. It was a mess, right? Um, now it's so much better. Everything on a monorepo, you can reuse stuff. But yeah, like, by default, ideally, those frameworks, like, just gives us those components, right?

We had to build a public API separately from that, and it sucks to maintain both. Yeah. Okay, and then one more thing about just, just on the MC-MCP front. Mm-hmm. So, uh, you know, so you are eight- you've got eighty tools in there. You're growing more tools. You are very counter-consensus compared to Cloudflare, which only has two tools. Mm-hmm. Just search and execute or something like that. Mm-hmm. So far you haven't felt that issue- Mm... but, uh, what, what would make you change your mind, right? Like you, you-- It seems like numbers are going up, but do you actually know? Do you, do you talk to your customers and say they are like, "Oh my God, this is like the best MCP on earth?" Or like... Mm-hmm.

I do try to get a lot of feedback on that, and then the way, uh, the way I like to build products is I gotta use the product my, on, on my own, right? Yeah. So if I'm... Like the investor updates that I sent you yesterday, that was built using the MCP, you know. It was like fetching data from one place, from another place, and then, uh- You're making me feel bad now. [laughs] Don't do all this and don't use MCP now, basically, is what I'm hearing. Man. Well, I mean, I guess the other thing is also, like, you do have CLI, you do have regular SDK. Like- Yeah... are those also just going crazy? Is everything just from a lot of growth or...? Yeah. The CLI is definitely growing, but not as much as the MCP. But I have a lot of fun with the CLI too.

Like, if you go to our Careers page, I'm actually proud of this because I, I built it on a weekend or something. But if you go to any job there, and you, you try to apply for a job, and you have those who go down now, you have three ways of applying. You can apply via CLI. [laughs] You can apply via CLI or API. So you can just log in and it, it has an interactive mode. Or- [laughs]... we have skills baked in into the CLI, and you can just ask Claude, like apply for a product designer role at Resend. [laughs] Okay. So you're very- Feels like you are filling yourself with slop, especially in careers.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think maybe that's also the people you want, right? Totally. I actually have a filter. If the source is the CLI- The CLI... I look differently- Mm.... because I know- Someone went through... people are going the extra mile, like setting that up like, "Oh, no, I gotta download this thing, and I have to authenticate, and then I have to go through that flow." But guess what? Like, people who go through that, they always tell me like, "Man, I've never applied for a job using a CLI before." So even if they are not accepted, like there's just something like it's just a different experience than other job applications. Yeah. Even API, applying for- Yeah... one job through API. [laughs] Exactly.

[laughs] I mean, it's, you know, the same thing as the CLI. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, so, so I think one of the things that I'm trying to figure out as well is like product philosophy, right? Like you, you are, you're clearly just like you're just max everywhere, right? Mm-hmm. Every SDK, every language, every- Mm-hmm... uh, surface area. Obviously easier with agents. Mm-hmm. But I think some other founders that I would know would say, "Hey, this doesn't matter. Give that to Greenhouse or Ashby." Yep. It's your job applica- You're not gonna differentiate like this, right? Yeah. You clearly have a very different philosophy of you care about everything, even though you know s- probably some of this stuff is just wasted.

The way I see it is, um- I'm trying to optimize not only for, um, the privileged users, like the users who a- who have the greatest Wi-Fi, the MacBooks that are here in SF or in New York, right? All these people at the margins that are in other countries with a terrible Wi-Fi- You mean Brazil... Brazil. Growing up, that, that's how it was for me. A terrible Windows computer and [chuckles] terrible internet access. So that's why we have the free tier. We, we don't have the free tier because of the, you know, like, there's a, there's a reason behind it. When we, we have all the SDKs, so I'm maxing on the SDKs. Man, building the.NET SDK, do you think that was fun? Like, and we looked into- Stainless... Stainless, Fern, what's the third one?

Uh, but like we look at all these companies, right? We didn't like what was generated, so every one of those SDKs is humanly generated. The Java one, the Rust, all those ones, right? And I, I do that because I feel like, yeah, if you're using a product, you should have the best experience in that language that you're using. Oh, but there's only 500 people out of the 4 million. I care about those four- 400 people. Wow. [laughs] You know? Why not, you know? Why not is you have 4 million users. Yeah. That's why not. [laughs] There's a lot of stuff to do, but- Yeah... it's, it's good to have that opinionated side- Mm-hmm... towards building this, right? Any other product surface area stuff that we should cover?

Uh, you covered CLI, you covered templates, covered MCP, um- I think it's good to get a high-level perspective from you of how much of this is very traditional. You even have dashboards, templates to manually write emails. You have programmatic. You also have the full agent pilled. Like, where do you see it going? How do you think about building this for a pretty fast-changing world, right? Yeah. There's definitely still a component of email moving out of this single-player mode and going more into multiplayer. Uh, we even built our editor like this. It's multiplayer. It fix all the conflicts if you have two or three people. We actually run, if-- Uh, I have a private Resend account with all the teams, and, uh, we run all of our all-hands, uh, there. So i- the all-hands is pretty much you go there, it's a huge- You make an email?

[chuckles] It's an email, and we send the email together at the end of the all-hands. [laughs] It's super fun. And you have, like- Oh, yeah... twenty people in the same document. I see, I see, I see. This is so relatable. I, I feel like 99% of people have not thought about multiplayer email, right? But- Yes... you have a lot. [chuckles] Yeah. And it, it was really fun. Man, that editor alone, it's so freaking hard to maintain that thing, but I love it. I love that we have the UI- Yeah... for people who need the UI. Like, some teams hate to have the email template pushed into their source code, then they just wanna build a visual editor, a, a template, give to the marketing team, and just call the ID.

I ju- I don't care about the template. I just wanna call the ID with variables, and I'm, I'm done. Uh, other teams, they, they do, they do like, "No, I wanna commit. I wanna have source control over this and own this piece of thing." So I try to tailor to those different audiences and, uh, and build a product that feels that we care, uh, which is not the feeling I get elsewhere. Yeah. By the way, what does the Resend team use to read email? Uh, Superhuman or- Yeah. Oh, man, that... Have you seen the last Superhuman update, uh, this mor- I, I, I haven't- Oh, you, you were busy with, uh, other launches too, right?

[laughs] Uh, yeah, and, and for, for listeners, we are recording this on the day of the Astro launch- Yeah... which I was pulled into, and, like- Uh-huh... I am not sleeping. [laughs] But, uh, uh, no, what's wrong with it? They just updated the UI a little bit. Yeah. The, there's just, um, a sentiment of like, oh, this is going to the direction of every other acquisition goes, right? Like, now you're fitting a brand that has other interests. Grammarly and other things. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. This is just email. I, and I, I do want to keep up to date on email tech- Mm-hmm... in general. Uh- Yeah... you're, you're on the sending side. Other people on the reading and receiving side. Yes. Uh, and then I think, uh, you know, increasingly, I would say agents reading my email, right? Yeah.

Like, uh, I actually don't read most of my email. I have Poke and two humans helping me [chuckles] with my email. Nice. I love that. [laughs] Um, Poke is pretty good. I, I-- Honestly, like Instinct now super hot, $2.5 billion company with- Wow. [laughs]... no rev- no revenue. [laughs] Um, and, like, it's just, like, people trying to read email with agents. Yeah. The-- we are definitely looking to that space. That's another thing that I'm spending a lot of my time, like how you can programmatically create dozens of inboxes and then how are those inboxes- Yeah... accessed by agents. Because you, you create, you, uh, enable rec-receiving email. Yes. What is it called? Inbound? Inbound, yeah. Email, um- So now we're going another abstraction.

Inbound is, like, the most basic abstraction. Okay. Now we're going one step further and being like, oh, you need a hundred inboxes for any reason, and here are the APIs that you need on top of that, right? So you need a read API mark as unread. You need star API labeling. I see. I see. Uh, so we're gonna be launching a, a product around that soon. Yeah. But again, it's all API-driven 'cause that's the, the- Fully. Yeah... because I, uh, I, I would say the comparable stuff that I've been looking at is Missive. Yep. And there's other, like, uh, Help Scout? Yes. Or, you know- Like a shared inbox- Yeah... type of product, right? Yeah, Front.

Front. Front. Yeah, so hopefully this can be, uh, a version of that. Uh- Okay... I, I can share with you. There's a feature flag for you if you wanna [chuckles] try that out. Yeah. I, I'm, I'm very interested in email tech. Uh, okay. And, and then to me, uh, and then I, I... Again, I'm just, like, asking all these questions. Yeah. What percent of your email goes to a G Suite or, you know, like, what's the market share, right? Like Google versus Outlook- Yeah... versus Apple versus Hotmail. Yeah. I don't have the numbers top of my head, but the vast majority, like at least sixty per- sixty percent Gmail, and then you have, like, maybe the, the big three after, like the Outlook, the, the Yahoo mails of the world right after, and then you have a long tail of, like- Apple is not that big.

Apple is big. Yeah. Yeah. But... And especially with the, the privacy thing that they did now, um, it's harder- You cannot sign up to an Apple ID. What? Sorry? Yeah, like Apple auto-generates an email address for you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you are signing up for- Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I use that. I use that. Yeah. Is that a problem for you guys? They're more strict in terms of what can get into those inboxes. Uh, so sometimes as a domain owner, we actually have like an in-product wizard to help you, like, register with Apple so that you can get your emails delivered there. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. I, I understand.

Obviously, this is your job, right? The whole thing is deliverability. If you don't have deliverability, you don't have a business. Exactly. Right? Yep. That's, that's, that's kind of the- Yeah... uh, what they do. We can have the most beautiful Rubik's cube [laughs] in the website. [laughs] The most co- like coolest handbook ever. If it's down- Yeah... it's all for naught. And how correlated are they, are they, right? Like, if you get banned or downri- down ranked or p- uh, put in promotions tab in Google- Mm-hmm... does that transfer over to the other guys or are they very decentralized? Thankfully now, like in the beginning of the email industry, it was very IP based, and if one IP pool was damaged, like now you, you are getting the, the consequences of that.

Now there's a lot of reputation associated with the domain. Mm-hmm. So then what people do is, uh, you create different subdomains depending on what type of emails you're sending. Like one subdomain for transactional emails that you know that maybe doesn't have click and open tracking, and then you have another domain for your marketing emails, and those subdomains help segregate the reputation of, uh, whatever the stuff you manage. So would it be like transactions.resend.com or- Yeah, updates, notifications, whatever you wanna use it. Uh- And do I have more dots if I want, like a.b.c.resend.com? You could do- Or-...

but we just see, like, uh, doing, I don't know, five subdomains is like, yeah, not, not really practical. But, like, people do, uh, yeah, like some special ones. Like, uh, we do that at Resend for our own emails. Like, marketing has a different stream than the transactional ones. Yeah. And yeah, even the, the investor one has a different-- Like I, I use confidential.resend.com to send those [laughs] emails. I didn't even know you could... Yeah. Yeah. And that, that is a good advice. It's a good practice. So before it was very IP based. Yeah. Now it's very domain based. Um, you know, I ha-- Okay, I, I have- Uh-huh...

received so many bad advice. I had to buy a separate... So 'cause we use ai.engineer- Yeah... and latent.space. These are all like weird- Uh-huh... TLDs and nobody- That's right... nobody recognizes, right? Yeah. So I was told to get dot coms for everything, and then maybe that improves deliverability. The problem with that is that now, like let's say, let's take Coca-Cola, right? Coca-Cola has a domain. Now you're Coca-Cola, and you're like, "Oh yeah, let's buy another domain that looks like our domain." But- It looks like phishing. It looks exactly like phishing. So the chances- But is this-... of damage is way worse.

Uh- Is this still a thing when you're buying the dot com? Like I would get it- Yeah... the other way, right? You're latentspace.com. I buy latent.space. Yeah. Looks like phishing, right? Yeah. But the dot com still? Man, you would be surprised. Like, there's just, like the, the things I see on a day-to-day basis [laughs] is like crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is like dot com is worth it. It's- Yeah. Yeah. That's all the sort of, uh, business of email. Obviously some part of it is you just got started before ChatGPT. Yeah. And then you were a leading player that people liked, and then- Mm-hmm...

I see a lot of agentic use. Okay, load, load website, click on image, interpret image. Well, it's slower, but- Yeah. But with computer use- Yeah... they are getting much better. I agree.

But if you're fetching information and you're just comparing stuff, they don't, they don't do that, right? I think they're starting to go more towards computer use. Oh, okay. I've been doing a lot of compare this and this, and the browse of website is pretty computer use, I think. Mm. Okay. Yeah. I noticed that you don't have like, uh, you know, cl- another classic AEO tactic is like, here's how to connect our thing with QuadCode. Here's how to connect our thing with Codex. Oh, yeah. It's all AI page. Oh, okay. Yeah. We do it as a separate AI page. Okay. Both, both MMI. Like, uh, there are some things that are interesting, like if you go to the legal page, so resend.com/legal, any one of these like, oh- Uh-...

you summarize or ask to explain, uh- Complexity. I see. That's just an external link. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I again, not sure that matters. Mm. But I get- You mentioned a lot about recency for AEO- Mm-hmm... compared to traditional SEO, so- Yeah, that was my l- the, the thing that I was super, uh, curious about, uh, in the beginning. Like there was no reason for any of the models to recommend us because we're so behind in SEO. We, we don't have the typical glossary page or whatever like, or articles that are so generic that we're just like SEO heavy. And I was trying to uncover like what, what is that? And I could totally tell like, uh, at least with Opus four point five, there was a recency bias in terms of the, the technology and where they were fetching data.

I know recently like, uh, they said like maybe Replit is not necessarily, um, something that people suggest anymore. But definitely like newer tools, uh, they started popping more, and Resend was one of those. And because there was a lot of I don't know, organic content about the tool, then we will be getting recommended more. So the advice here is just, like, try to get as more people in, in more places to talk about the product as possible, because it definitely influences. Obviously, I think that is a, a class of it. I guess, did you ever engage SEO consultants, AEO consultants? Are they useful? Are they a waste of money? Like- We never really did that... you seem like you're just doing everything yourself. [laughs] Yeah.

I think you were the, you were the AEO king. Yeah. [laughs] 2024 tweet of, "Let's talk about AI SEO." [laughter] I think you were one of the first ones to, to pick it up, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think people, generally, the state of things-- We-- 'Cause we did an AEO or GEO episode at the time- Okay... around this stuff, and most people were like, "Just do what normal SEO does- Mm-hmm... and don't block AI chatbots." I think, and then most, most tools like Profound at, at the time, they would just, like, track your mentions and then, you know, let you do experiments and all those things. All those things are par for the course and normal. I, I'm just trying to-- Obviously, everyone-- Like, people are pinging me 'cause I'm also doing A-AEO experiments- Hmm... on, like, what to do. Hmm.

I have an unfair advantage 'cause I'm a content business. Yeah. So obviously I pump out content, whereas you actually have a product. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] I mean, I guess- But so I think, yeah... how important is it to you to... Like, you're very winning, but how much do you keep a track of how well are docs used? How often are we recommended compared to competitors? Like... Man, I feel it's so crucial. Because before we-- If we want-- If we're, like, a little bit unsure about which tool to use, we would ask Google, and then it would get you, like, those comparison pages, or it would get you, like, the first three responses, and now you just get the one response out of the gate, right?

If you're asking, "Which tool should I use?" And yeah, people just wanna go with the, the one that is the most frictionless. And- Yeah. Which I think free tier is very important. And, um, I think, uh, Michael Grinich from WorkOS is trying to promote this idea of, uh, off MD, right? I don't know if you've- Yes... probably seen this. So, so, uh, the idea that you-- It's very similar to Netlify as well, where you don't need an account to, to do the basic action. So it's like unauthenticated usage of your product- Yeah... which is very dangerous, obviously, because it's prone to abuse, but, uh, it is the, the easiest. Like, no sign-up. Yeah. That's the thing that I'm, I'm try- Yeah. I, I'm debating doing that or not.

Do we need a provisioning API? And I keep going back and forth, uh, on this. Like, okay, call this API- Provisioning and claims, right? Is the- Yeah. Okay. Provisioning and claims. But then free tier... Yeah. Like, I don't know if it's something about our industry, but there's just- Yeah, you just have abuse. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit- Just have a lot of abuse. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I, I mean, I, I think those are the, the main tactics. I, I think the other thing that, uh, I would just tell listeners to think about is literally hook your clanker up to your analytics and your- Mm-hmm... code base. Right? Like, you need to, like, fully complete the loop and then, like, au- basically auto research. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, like, this site, like... So what I have now is my cycle.

I have both Latin- I have a Latent Space CMO agent, and I have a AIE CMO agent. Nice. Right? And they spawn other agents. Or they, their, their job is to, like, research ideas, keep track of things that we've tried. Well, and then I sign off on, like, things that we wanna experiment. We ha- we have an experiment window. We go and do the experiments. Oh, really? And then those are other agents that then moni- th- are monitored by them. Uh, so, uh, I would say that's, like, kind of, like, the auto research loop for doing this stuff. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think then you also need to give it tools. So, like, I sign off Ahrefs, I sign off for data for SEO. Oh, yeah. And then, uh, most recently, I made my own AEO tracker- Nice...

uh, which, which you, which you can make. Yep. Um, and then, yeah, you just wanna make the number go up. Yeah. [laughter] For sure. And it's like, you, you don't know, right? Like, you're throwing things at the wall. That's why, like... Yeah, the thing on the legal page, does that matter? I have no idea. But I'll, I'll- Yeah... keep throwing things at the wall and seeing what works. I think, like, uh, Reddit doesn't matter. Yeah. Hacker News. You used to be big- Mm-hmm... on Hacker News. Yeah. Now, not as... [laughs] Yeah. Not anymore. Twitter doesn't matter as much. Yeah. It's weird. Like, right, like- It's so crazy. Do you have a tracker? No.

Like, we use all of those Profounds of the world. Uh, there are other products. So we, we tried them all. Like, people ask me, like, "Oh, should I use, uh, Gauge or, or Profound or this other one?" I'm like, "Yeah, we have four subscriptions." [chuckles] You know? Like, that, that's what it takes now. Like, you, you gotta see w-which one works best. What I miss from those tools is, like, give me the action, and I think that the problem, they don't, they don't give you, like, what to do because they're also trying to figure out what, what needs to happen, right? Like, oh, write an article- Yeah... on Wikipedia. Like, yeah. Yeah. I would say, like, the old school SEO tools like Moz and all those kinds- Yeah...

they, they would actually have more, more opinionation around these things. Mm-hmm. Right now, the AEO tools mostly, uh, from what I hear, again, I'm not an expert, we should probably talk to Profound- Mm-hmm... is that they, they just are reporting tools, right? Yeah. Like, they're analytics reporting tools, and, uh, that's, that's fine. Yeah. It's, it's a big business. Exactly. Ahrefs is a Singapore business, and apparently- Yeah... they do, like, I don't know, three hundred million dollars. [laughs] Yeah. Totally. Uh-huh. The other parts of your business, like, we're gonna talk about, like, the parenting side- Mm-hmm... the personal side. Mm-hmm. I just really want to be like, okay, you, you seem very chill. You got, you have- [laughs]...

fifty people remote all around the world. You are w-worrying about MCP. You're worrying about AEO. That cannot be the way you're closing all these big customers, right? [laughs] Like, where's your fancy sales guy with the steak dinner and the golf course? We're just starting that motion. Yeah. Uh, and I think we are, uh, very lucky that we're able to go this far without having that motion. I've worked at a enterprise-only company in the past, so I knew what does that take. And the steak dinners, like, all the, the apparatus around, like, that sales org, enablement. There's all these things that, that are needed.

I knew that, okay, when it-- when the time is right, we're gonna have to turn on that key. But I've been very cautious about doing that at recent, like, in different layers instead of just, like- At 20. I'm very-- Maybe it's because we are remote, but I think we are very protective about the culture. Like, let's make sure we don't damage the culture at once. So no, let, let's try to figure out people who fit. So we just have one AE now, and it's been helping. It's been, yeah, go-going super well. Yeah. Good enough. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] I, I would say, I think, you know, once you have, like, you, you know, you double your ARR because of, like- Mm-hmm... a couple deals, you're like, "Okay," like, "this is a good sign." [laughs] Yeah. Mm-hmm.

'Cause people wanna pay you more- Yeah... for things that, uh, you're like, "Okay, well, you know, uh, I have, like, the agreement with you. I have, like, your software on my premises or in my VPC," whatever, right? Yeah. Um, so. For sure. Yeah. And it... What, what I'm learning too is, like, you're building a different product, so that's what, how you need to see. It's not only I'm building a different machine internally as a company. As I'm designing the company, I'm designing, okay, which department, who sits where, how each person is, is better equipped to do their job. No, like, for enterprise, it's actually a different product. Hmm. Like, what do they care is very different from what $20 users care.

And if I just add, you know, WorkOS and SSO and, and SCIM and audit logs, it's not gonna be enough. So it's, it's not just putting those items on the, on the pricing page. Um, so it's a journey for sure. Any other things you wanna reflect on the, the journey before we go into the, the personal side? No, I think, yeah- Um-... we covered a lot as well. Oh, oh, okay, then I'll talk a little bit- Mm-hmm... about my use case, right? Uh-huh. Like, I'm a content creator. Nice. Right? Your, the bulk of your business I assume is transactional email. I- That's right... I probably could look it up, but anyway. That's right.

You have marketing emails. You have inbound emails. I'm sure, I'm sure that's, like, sort of less outside of the business. Mm-hmm. I pay Substack something like $10,000 a year- Uh-huh... to send my emails, and that seems too high. Yeah. So I think, like, why, why is marketing email versus transactional email so different? It's a great question. Um- 'Cause your business model is also different, right? If you could- It is. It is. And, like, this actually- And we are more expensive- Yeah... too. Yeah, then I was like, "Uh, I can't do this." [laughs] Yeah, the industry has this pattern of, like, charging per contact.

That's the first thing. So the way they, they try to price is around the value you create in each contact. But now it's crazy. Like, the, the AI companies that we serve, they grow so fast. Like, uh, Mistral users recent, okay? So they're, like, the, the amount of users that they add is just insane, so, like, the business model of contact-based pricing is kind of broken, and we are realizing that and trying to fix that too. But that's how it had always been. And there's something about, like, when you send a transactional email, it's just like, put a message in a queue and get out of the queue.

With marketing email, you're, you're building that engine of, like, batches and intervals between batches, analyzing, increasing the speed, decreasing the speed as the sending is going, maybe blocking. So there- Is there, is there a max rate you should send emails at a time? Yeah, for sure- Oh... per domain- Okay... uh, specifically. Yeah. Okay. So, like, let's say I have, um, 100K emails to send out. Yeah. It should take me 10 minutes? Yeah, and it- Okay... for example, now with the 4.3 million users that we have, it takes more than a day. Oh, then you... Oh, what? No, that's unacceptable. Yeah, for sure.

So then I pay you more to get in a different queue. Yeah. Okay. So you, you have to be, like, always trying to figure out, okay, we need more at the door, so how does that work? Um- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. It's like, uh, rate limits for, let's say token limits. [laughs] Yeah. Uh, exactly. Where's my reset button? Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Yeah. You also, like, you went into YC. You started this company as a young father. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think, like, part of the thing is like, uh, there are a lot of no kids people in, in SF- [laughs]... uh, and I, I think that's part of the consideration.

I think a lot of people are listening who are like, "I can't be a founder." Like, "I have this great idea, but, like, I got, I got a young family." How do you manage? Uh, you gotta preface with you've left SF for- Yeah... kids. Yeah. So this is the recent news, like, I'm spending more time in Brazil now because w- we're expecting our second kid. And I think w- at first, man, it was crazy because, like, I came to SF, my daughter was one year old, and every YC founder around me had no idea, like, uh, yeah, what does it mean to have kids? And- Yeah. What is this reproduction? [laughs] Exactly. [laughs] You don't, you don't even have Series B. Like, what are you doing married? Like... [laughs] Totally. Most of them weren't married at all.

And it, it's crazy how, um... I think it, again, I always try to look at those things. At, at first you, you see them as a, the advantage, like, oh man, all of these guys, they went fr- from like, uh, they came from M- uh, MIT, all these amazing schools. That was not the case for me. Oh, they don't ha- they, they are not married. That's not the case for me. They don't have kids, and that's not the case for me. But still going for that program, I'm like, man, I'm, I just wanna build the best company on this batch, not number four, not number five, like number one out of the 250. Oh, yeah? Uh, which cohort? Winter 2023. Okay.

You realize in the middle of that is that there's no winner in YC, that there's no such thing. Uh... [laughs] Yeah, amount you raise. But, like- I'm, I'm pulling a win- winter '23 now just to see who I know. [laughs] Yeah. And especially what you understand is that, uh- Winter 2023 rats, mm-hmm... it's like an infinitive g- i-infinite game, right? Like those... E-even if you had an amazing batch and you raised the biggest round, it doesn't matter because, like, life goes on, and it continues, and many of the people that I met there, they are not here anymore. Yeah. Co-founder breakups, seven pivots, and they're dead, right? But we are here. So I, I was very much like, "No, no, no."

Where even the domain when we bought recent.com, we're like, "No, it's gonna be an amazing website with an amazing.com. Like, it, it's not gonna be a.io or whatever," right? [laughs] Um, but doing that with kids was so freaking hard, especially because I wanted to enjoy my, my first daughter, and I really thought about this. Like, there was one point during YC, so th-this story, like, translates to what I'm gonna say. I came to this event, and PG was there, so I'm like, "Oh, man, Paul Graham, the father of everything. Uh, God is here," right? So everyone is paying attention to PG, and then he says, "You know what? We always tell you, 'Don't do this thing.' We, we tell you that as partners, and then you end up doing the thing, and then months later you come to us and say, 'Oh, I regret doing this or not doing this.'" So, so he just said that.

So then I came to my partners and I asked, like, "Okay, what are the things that I'm doing now that I shouldn't be doing, that you think it's wrong?" And then one partner, not my main partner, but another partner told me, like, "You just worry too much about design. You care too much about that. If you didn't care about that, you would be much further ahead." Uh, and that hurt me so bad- Hmm... because it was true. Like, my slides when I was, like, pitching, it, it was like, uh, beautiful slides, and he's like, "Doesn't matter." I'm like, "Yeah, n-now I know it doesn't matter." But, like, that hurt really bad, and then a few days later I was reflecting on that.

I'm like, "Yeah, but if I, if I were to build a product, uh, that had, like, this identity and only 1,000 people used, I prefer doing that than having a product with 10,000 people that, uh, it's a product that I don't wanna go, that I don't use myself." So you know what? I'm gonna follow what I believe is right. And I think in this industry, again, going back to the industry, everyone had terrible products. There was not, not enough, like, design infused into them, so I felt that was a differentiator, and we needed a differentiator in a such a crowded market. So I go back to that for my kid too, like, okay, 10 years from now, I have-- I, I'm with my daughter, and my daughter wants to be with me so much, and we, we play all the time, and we are a 10 million AR company.

I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're a $100 million company and my daughter doesn't wanna play with me, is not interested in me, and we're, we're not that close. So that's the decision I made. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong. I have no idea. I go extremely hard. Uh, I have a lot of ambition that's not gonna stop me or, or anything. But, like, setting up those priorities and figuring out for yourself, like, what works for me, I think it was important. So yeah, m-more than ever, like, she's the most important thing for me, and I, I, I prioritize her a lot. How do you balance that with your ambition, right? Like, I also have this in a smaller way.

I don't have kids, but- Hmm... uh, yeah, I have a lot of ambitious things, and I have a family that I should spend time with, and I-- when I spend time with them, I'm not present. I'm looking at my phone. [laughs] Yeah. I'm, I'm, like, saying, like, "Oh, I should be reviewing Astra"- Yeah. [laughs]... you know, GPT-6. Like, it's, it's like, you know- Yeah... AGI. No, it's not, right? Yeah. [laughs] Like... [laughs] Like, but I really feel like I should be working and, you know, and, like- Yeah... at the same time, like, I feel guilty and then-- and so, like, I'm, I'm happy in both areas. [laughs] Totally.

And, and that's how I feel. I feel like I'm a terrible dad. I'm a terrible- [laughs]... uh, husband. I'm a terrible CEO, and, like, you're failing in every single area of your life. I feel that way ex-exactly like that. But every day I try to be a little bit more present, [laughs] you know? It-- and it's, uh, especially when you're working from home, like, man, you leave the, your, your, your office, and then now you, now you're a dad, and then now you're not anymore. Oh, now you gotta be a husband and paying attention to your wife, like, and your, your mind is like, "Oh man, how I do this enterprise?" [laughs] Like, "I gotta close this deal." I feel like I cycle all the time too.

Yeah. We're on the same boat. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Well, never easy, and I think- Totally... like, just naming the thing for your category is important, and people don't really think about category creation enough, I think. Uh, this is something- Hmm. We-weirdly something like that Netlify tried to do and failed with Jamstack, and I think that more people should really actually try to do a category creation because when they're successful, then they own the whole thing. Um, so which, which, which we did for this. Recent, you know, it is the next generation Sandgrid, let's call it, right? Or, like, AI native Sandgrid- Yep... something like that.

I, I think that, uh, you know, and, you know, this is, like, being, me being, like, probably too honest, that is not category creation yet. Yeah. But it is category dominance. You know? Like, you, you own your category. That's good. Mm-hmm. But, like, it is not clear enough yet what is difference. Uh, and so my classic example is another guest that we've had, um, Dharmesh Shah- Uh-huh... from HubSpot. Yeah. Anyone who, uh, wants to think about category creation, go and read up about inbound marketing versus outbound marketing and how they created the category of inbound. The i- the ideal phrase of cate- of category creation is once you've heard the category, the two words that your company represents, you don't want anything else. Hmm. There's no long essay. There's no long manifesto.

There's no talk. There's-- it's just two words, maybe some examples. That's it. Hmm. The, the-- that your audience can take it from there. Hmm. It's very hard. Man, I've seen friends trying to do that, like ZviX, uh, from, uh, it's a webhooks as a service. Yeah. Uh- Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they took my name. [laughs] Yeah. Man. It's just so freaking hard, right? Like- I think they're doing okay, right? Yeah. I don't know if they're still around. There was, like, a, there was a webhooks company, and then there was, like, a anti-webhooks company- Anti-webhooks... where, like, you, you would take, like-- You were like, "We don't do webhooks. We just help you publish a JSON file that you pull," or something like that. Oh, wow. You know? Like- Yeah, yeah...

it, it kind of reverses the, the push versus pull- Uh-huh... the, the, the data flow. Yeah. This is, again, COVID era dev tools. That was the most exciting thing there at the time was... [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] Yep. Yep. Yep. Cool. Well, uh, always a pleasure to catch up, and congrats on all the success. I still, you know, uh, am very curious how much you have dominated your, your category. I think it, you, you just chose it very well, and you executed it very well, and you're managing your family as well, so, uh, lots of respect. Thanks so much. Yeah, it was great chatting with you guys. Thanks a lot.

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