# Designing for Agents — Zeno Rocha, Resend Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Zeno Rocha says email infrastructure for agents must pair reliable deliverability with developer-first, machine-readable product access. - Show: Latent Space - Hosts: [Shawn Wang (swyx)](https://realalpha.app/people/swyx/) & [Alessio Fanelli](https://realalpha.app/people/alessio-fanelli/) - Guest: [Zeno Rocha](https://realalpha.app/people/zeno-rocha/) is cofounder and CEO of Resend. - Published: Nov 10, 2026 - Length: 1 h 26 m ## The best minutes - [7:01](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=421) [Email delivery depends on pacing and reputation](https://realalpha.app/s/email-delivery-depends-on-pacing-and-reputation/) (5 min) - [38:02](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2282) [An MCP should cover the whole product](https://realalpha.app/s/an-mcp-should-cover-the-whole-product/) (6 min) - [58:26](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3506) [Markdown pages can correct AI pricing answers](https://realalpha.app/s/markdown-pages-can-correct-ai-pricing-answers/) (7 min) ## Also worth watching - [32:23](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1943) [SES's low price can hide the surrounding infrastructure cost](https://realalpha.app/s/sess-low-price-can-hide-the-surrounding-infrastructure-cost/) (4 min) - [13:24](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=804) [Shared tracking domains expose senders to a neighbor's abuse](https://realalpha.app/s/shared-tracking-domains-expose-senders-to-a-neighbors-abuse/) (3 min) - [17:19](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1039) [Support replies became documentation before they reached customers](https://realalpha.app/s/support-replies-became-documentation-before-they-reached/) (2 min) - [19:55](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1195) [Domain Connect turns DNS setup into an OAuth-style flow](https://realalpha.app/s/domain-connect-turns-dns-setup-into-an-oauth-style-flow/) (3 min) - [23:51](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1431) [React Email gave Resend a path from templates to sending](https://realalpha.app/s/react-email-gave-resend-a-path-from-templates-to-sending/) (3 min) Skip the company metrics and origin story, the legacy-provider comparison, the product-surface tour, and the family and category-naming close. ## Full analysis: Zeno Rocha says Resend’s MCP has 80-something tools - Resend’s MCP grew to 80-something tools, Rocha said. - His usage report lacks unique users, completed tasks, or revenue attribution. - Teams should measure successful workflows and verify machine-readable product facts. Its 7 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/#analysis), free with an account: - [38:46](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2326) Agent activity is visible, but attribution remains missing - [41:49](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2509) Official MCPs can make access part of buying - [43:35](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2615) Resend is adding tools, but full coverage stays hard - [1:01:17](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3677) Markdown corrects answers, but discovery remains unproven - [1:06:26](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3986) Recommendations depend on signals Resend cannot isolate - [1:14:03](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4443) Enterprise access demands more than connector support - [8:53](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=533) Email delivery still limits automated sending ## Summary Zeno Rocha is Resend’s cofounder and CEO. He says he started as a frontend developer, created Dracula and React Email, and built Resend to make email infrastructure better for developers. Rocha argues email infrastructure is difficult because providers throttle bursts based on engagement and reputation, so senders need paced queues, IP and domain management, and abuse controls. He says Resend competes through developer-focused tooling, React Email, and interfaces for APIs, MCP, CLI, and SDKs, while agents are becoming a distribution channel that rewards official integrations and machine-readable product information. He describes using Markdown pages and FAQs to correct model errors on pricing, while noting that recency and organic mentions can affect recommendations. Rocha also discusses building Resend’s own sending infrastructure, adapting the product for enterprise use cases, and prioritizing his family; the hosts close by discussing category creation. ### Minute by minute - [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=0) **Resend grew around developer needs.** Rocha says Resend powers 4.3 million users, has crossed 120,000 paid customers, and is a $10 million ARR company. He traces the business to a developer-focused email service: as a frontend developer, he saw existing providers serving marketers more than developers and wanted a Stripe-like experience. - [5:34](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=334) **Agents are a new discovery channel.** The hosts describe a coding model repeatedly recommending Resend even after one host had configured Cloudflare email. Rocha says he has focused on making Resend a top recommendation as software discovery shifts toward agents; a host cites recommendations more than 60% of the time. - [7:01](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=421) **Deliverability depends on sending patterns.** When a sender queues 100,000 emails, Gmail throttles large bursts and watches engagement, Rocha says. Resend spaces batches, sends first to engaged recipients, manages IP pools, and adjusts pace to a sender’s history. He says consistent sending is safer than sudden blasts, a pattern common among abusers. - [13:24](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=804) **Open tracking is unreliable.** Rocha says open rates are unreliable because tracking pixels may load before recipients see messages, including through privacy features and filtering. Click tracking can also hurt when a shared tracking domain is blacklisted because of an abusive customer. Resend trusts new senders initially but blocks accounts quickly when bounce or complaint signals show problems. - [17:35](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1055) **Support should prevent repeat problems.** Rocha says support evolved from founder-only replies to documented answers: at one stage, staff could answer tickets only with a help-page link, pushing the team to build reusable documentation. DNS setup remains a common obstacle for users unfamiliar with records such as CNAME or TXT. He points to Domain Connect as a button-based alternative where supported. - [23:51](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1431) **Open source created a product funnel.** Rocha says React Email offered open-source templates and guides for other mail providers, helping developers create templates before choosing a platform to send them. He recalls a Mailgun founder saying 90% of R&D went to fighting abuse. Resend’s NPM SDK downloads passed SendGrid’s and later reached more than double, though SendGrid still sends more email. - [31:57](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1917) **Resend is moving down the stack.** Rocha says Resend initially used Amazon SES, but its low sending cost can hide extra services and work: SNS for events, CloudWatch for logs, SQS for queues, and separate webhook development. Resend is now building closer to the infrastructure layer, including IP pools and throughput controls, to improve performance and give users more delivery visibility. - [37:51](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2271) **Agents need complete official integrations.** Rocha says he wants a formless product, with an API and integrations that let users work from different agent environments. MCP usage grew at least 2x month over month and reached 1.2 million calls by the end of August, he says. Resend expanded its MCP from fewer than roughly 20 tools at launch to more than 80, adding OAuth and role-based access for remote use. - [46:29](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2789) **CLI and SDKs widen access.** Rocha says Resend offers CLI workflows and human-written SDKs across languages, even when usage is small, to give users a good experience in their chosen language and serve people with limited devices or internet access. Job candidates can apply through the CLI or API, and Rocha says CLI applicants stand out because they take extra steps. - [50:24](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3024) **Email is becoming agent-readable.** Rocha says Resend’s editor supports multiplayer work and accommodates teams that want visual templates as well as source-controlled templates. He is developing APIs for agents to create and manage many inboxes, including reading, marking messages unread, and labeling them. He says at least 60% of the email on Resend goes to Gmail, and teams can separate subdomains to protect sending reputations. - [58:26](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3506) **Machine-readable pages improve accuracy.** Rocha says Resend added FAQs, llms.txt files, and Markdown versions of its docs and marketing pages to answer common questions in formats models can read. After a model misrepresented Resend’s pricing, he added a Markdown version of the pricing page and says the model got the numbers right a few days later. He also describes spelling out comparison data because agents may not execute JavaScript widgets. - [1:05:58](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3958) **Recency can shape recommendations.** Rocha says he observed recency bias in Opus 4.5 and found newer tools appeared more often in recommendations. He argues that organic discussion in more places can help a product get recommended. He and the hosts discuss tracking tools, experiments, and the difficulty of getting actionable advice from AEO analytics products. - [1:12:10](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4330) **Enterprise needs a different product.** Rocha says Resend is cautiously starting an enterprise sales motion, with one account executive so far, to protect its remote-first culture. He argues enterprise customers need more than SSO, SCIM, and audit logs because their product needs differ from those of $20 users. He also says contact-based marketing email pricing can break as AI companies grow, and that marketing sends require paced batches and domain-specific limits. - [1:16:47](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4607) **Growth and family require tradeoffs.** Rocha says he is spending more time in Brazil as his family expects a second child. He says he would rather build a $10 million ARR company and stay close to his daughter than reach $100 million ARR while losing that relationship. In the closing discussion, the hosts argue that category creation requires a short, clear name for a market; Rocha says doing that is difficult. ## Transcript Latent Space, hosted by Shawn Wang (swyx) and Alessio Fanelli, with Zeno Rocha. From the transcript Latent Space publishes with the episode. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=0) 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 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. There was a Japanese gang that recently came. They, they brought like maybe twenty thousand domains at Resend. Like, those are twenty thousand different TLDs registered in different domain registrars, and we are a ten million AR company. [0:38](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=38) I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're a hundred million dollar company and my daughter doesn't wanna play with me, is not interested in me, and we're, we're not that close. So we are-- we're building the infrastructure and going, like, down to the metal now. But it's a big project. Like, we've been working for months now, and we're gonna announce something soon about that. [upbeat music] Okay, we're in the studio with Zino Rocha. Rocha? Rocha. Rocha from Resend. Uh, you and I go back to your VS Code theme days- Yes. [laughs]... when you're just an indie hacker. Yeah. [1:13](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=73) And I was like, "Man, uh, I don't know what this guy does, but everything he does has taste." And then now you made, built an email infrastructure platform. Uh, anyway, welcome. You undersell just a indie hacker. [laughs] Top twenty most active GitHub under twenty twenty, '22. [laughs] Nice. Right. Very, very active open source stuff. Yeah, yeah. What's your typical how do you introduce yourself these days? Yeah, I think I just focus on my recent career. For the longest time, uh, even today when I say like, "Oh, I created Dracula," people know Dracula more than Resend, but, uh- Still. Yeah, but it's been nice. [1:46](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=106) 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. [2:35](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=155) 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... [3:12](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=192) 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. [3:52](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=232) 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. [4:28](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=268) 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. [5:09](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=309) [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. [5:38](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=338) 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. [6:15](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=375) 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. [6:50](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=410) 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. Some people would just, you know, "Okay, I can use Twilio, I can use SendGrid, I can use you guys." Yeah. But what goes into making a tool to just mass send emails? What do people not think about? Yeah. There's just a lot of different things you can do because landing on the inbox, especially when you're doing high volume, is different from, like, when you're scaling just, like, an, a-an app where you throw GPU at the problem, or you just scale more vertically or horizontally, whatever it is. [7:32](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=452) With email, you gotta respect the rules of the game, and how Gmail behaves is differently from Outlook and differently from Yahoo Mail, and it's an industry that is fascinating because it's so old school and it relies a lot on, on contacts. But what we found early on was like, okay, we ha- we knew nothing about this world, and so, and, and coming from this perspective, like extremely naive, was the best thing that ever happened. Uh, like, honestly, like, it was the best thing because, like, there's no preconception of what is right, what is wrong. So for them, for example, every single app, you go and then first thing you see is, like, this form that you gotta fill out about, like, how many emails we're gonna send, what's the volume, what are you trying to do? [8:18](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=498) And then you go through a human verification process. Two days later they accept you or, or deny you. Most of the times they're gonna deny you. And I was like, "This doesn't make any sense," right? [chuckles] Like, why are we blocking people? So I know I'm gonna remove that friction completely, and the friction will be on us. We're gonna figure that out. Of course, now four years, three years in, in-into this business, I get it why they do that. [laughs] There's just so much fraud and phishing and abuse across the board. I don't talk too much publicly about that, but we build, like, all sorts of crazy systems internally for that. [8:53](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=533) But to your question, like, how you architect that, like for example, when you're sending an email to 100,000 people, if you just throw 100,000 emails, uh, like, to Gmail, what Gmail will do is they're gonna throttle the emails because it's way too much, and they, they wanna see the engagement. So what you do is, like, they see, like, okay, are people opening the emails? Are people archiving, deleting right away or, or not interacting? Okay, depending on those initial, uh, interactions, then what I'm gonna do with the rest of the emails will dictate that, that beginning. So there are clever things you can do where 100,000 people put the most engaged audience members in the beginning of that queue. You have to put that in a queue. [9:37](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=577) You, you need to-- It's an art and a science where you gotta space out each batch. [chuckles] So, and space out between the different providers too, and yeah, now we're, like, buying different IP blocks. You gotta look at the history of the IP blocks, distributed folks into different IP pools, and then balance the IP pools over time. So it's a whole crazy infrastructure game. How automated can that be or is there a lot of human judgment still? Yeah. It's a lot of automation, for sure. Yeah. Uh, and I think over time we learned that, okay, this is how fast we can send for new customers. Of course, if you're sending more, then maybe you can send faster, but there's a, a, a throttle that we have to do to protect you as a sender. [10:27](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=627) So, like, what Gmail and all these players will wanna see is, like, a graph that is consistently sending more and more, versus what most people do, which is, like, you send once to a big audience, and then you never send again. And then it's empty, and then boom, uh, you send it again. One, uh, once a week? Twice a week? Yeah. And those are patterns that an abuser will have, right? Mm. [10:49](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=649) **Zeno Rocha:** So the whole way of thinking about email marketing and, and email in general is you, you need to do exactly what an abuser wouldn't do. It's the opposite of that. So what, what's a, a abuser do? They buy a domain. [11:03](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=663) We have now... Like, there was a Japanese gang that recently came. They, they brought, like, maybe 20,000 domains at recent. Like, those are 20,000 different TLDs registered in different domain registrars, and we look for every single factor there. So they, they come in, it's a domain that was bought two days ago, so- Mm... very new domains, they, they get bad reputation. Then you, you look at the website, is it returning 200 or basic things like that. Some people don't even set that up or they do, like, a lookalike domain. So they're like, "Oh, maybe I'll do another domain for code outreach." That's terrible because it's, it looks like you're phishing, right? Like, because you're, you're using a domain that looks, like, the same. [11:48](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=708) So all these little things, and they just do s- they send a lot of emails all at once, and then they never send again. So you kinda gotta reverse engineer how phishing works and, and build a platform [chuckles] that does exactly opposite of that. Do you have a list somewhere, or do you recommend people go to some well-known lists? 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. [12:27](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=747) 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. [13:08](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=788) 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? There's no tracking. 'Cause you can't embed the, the image. That's right. So you don't have open rates. Yeah. How do you know you have deliverability if you don't have open rates? Yeah, this is very interesting because the, the industry, there are two ways of tracking, right? You have open tracking and click tracking. [13:44](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=824) Open tracking, what it does, it, it includes a one-by-one GIF, uh, image, a transparent image, and then if that image is loaded, then you detect that as opened. The problem with that is that all the changes that Apple did recently in terms of, uh, transparency and, and data privacy, like they read the emails before it lands if they're doing the summaries and all those kinds of things. So like the open rate as a metric, as a whole, isn't really a- as reliable as it used to be because all these spam filters are, are checking that before. So then you rely on click tracking. Now, click tracking can also be, uh, difficult because you want the URLs to match the sending domain. You also want the images' URLs to match the sending domain. That's another pattern that an abuser will do. [14:38](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=878) They would host images somewhere else, point links somewhere else, and then they are sending from these domains. Yeah. I, I feel like I have, uh, used email services that would rewrite, like for the link tracking, right, they would rewrite to their own domain. Yeah. You're saying that's bad. That's bad because what hap- We did that too at first. Yeah. And then- I thought that's normal. Yeah, but what's bad is when... [14:59](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=899) **Zeno Rocha:** and you have a noisy neighbor problem too, where if one of the customers using that click tracking is an abuser and sends a bunch of phishing, that domain might get listed on a blacklist, and then it takes maybe days or weeks to get out of the blacklist. [15:15](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=915) Then you're screwed as a business. Is that not pretty common? Like, you make it very easy- Yeah... to just sign up, free tier, send a bunch- Yeah... of em- I would assume you have a lot of spam, a lot of phishing- Yeah... but you're able to avoid, and this is why? Yeah, I think what, what was different to me, and then this is more like a philosophy, right? So I saw the, those other products and the way they behaved, and I felt like, okay, it's almost like if you are born in a society where you first go to prison, and then you have to spend like eighteen years in prison. You gotta prove that you are a good citizen, and then you get out of prison, and now you can do the things you wanna do. [15:53](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=953) I always, always felt like, no, I wanna live in a society where I'm born free, and if I make a mistake, then I m- I might be punished just a little bit, or if I do something like really bad, a bad punishment, right? So that's how I feel about that too. Like, you come in, we trust you by default. Of course, again, a, a naive way of thinking, but you know what? We're gonna trust you by default versus make the whole platform worse for everyone because of those bad, uh, actors, right? So we trust you by default, but then what we do differently from others is like at the very first moment, ev- like when we notice something is off, like by looking at the bounce rates, complaint rates, all the feedback we get from mailbox providers, then we block you, like, very quickly, and then we chat with you. [16:38](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=998) We try to understand. And most of the time, it's just misuse. It's not abuse. So we learned that we need to differentiate. Skill issue. Yeah. [laughs] It's a skill issue. Exactly. It's a skill issue. 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. [17:17](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1037) 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... 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](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1074) 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. 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..." [18:33](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1113) **Zeno Rocha:** 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. [18:45](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1125) 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? 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. 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. [19:29](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1169) 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. 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. I think right now is much better. The... There are few things where, man, there's, there's so much friction. DNS, oh my gosh. Like that's- It's always DNS. [laughs] Oh, it's always DNS, right? [20:11](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1211) Like the majority of the questions we get today is just like people not able to set that up. And it's fascinating because we're serving a new audience, right? It's an audience that doesn't even know how to troubleshoot. Like I remember, uh, last year when Lovable came and Bolt and V0, I could tell these are different users. The-- Like they don't know when they have a problem, they are stuck. They don't know how to go past that. And with DNS, that was always the case of like, yeah, they just simply don't know what is a CNAME, what is an A record, TXT, where do I put those things? So they, they would paste- Yeah... [20:49](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1249) the wrong value or silly things. By the way, right now I use computer use like Codex or CloudCode, uh, and it just completely manages my DNS records. It's great. [laughs] It's beautiful, right? It debugs it, it like digs, you know, and tries all the DNS stuff. Yeah. Like I don't have to worry about it. [laughs] Yeah. One, one thing that we did, like I found this super obscure protocol that like very few people in the industry were like investing on. It's called Domain Connect. And it's super interesting, by the way. And it's something that started like from some domain providers and it- Oh. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like the OAuth for domains, right? Exactly that. I... Yeah. This is like Cloudflare oriented? Yeah. [21:30](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1290) So some people have, like Cloudflare is there. Ver- Then we, we convinced Vercel to be there as well, and we started like getting more people. So you have the, the two sides, right? The DNS providers, the service providers. Uh, we are the service providers, for example, and then the DNS providers are implementing. But it's a crazy, crazy industry. Like GoDaddy charges like just a lot of money for that. It's so weird. Like Ionos, it took us, like the, uh, first one, it took us like months to get after that person to- Yeah. [22:05](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1325) **Zeno Rocha:** Like no one really maintains the protocol and things like that, but it's beautiful, like having a protocol that you can just do an OAuth for domains is- Yeah, yeah... amazing. [22:14](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1334) So, so for listeners, if you're not familiar, if you haven't tried it, something like that, uh, it's literally like you do use Plaid or use like OAuth. Mm-hmm. You j- only click buttons. You don't type in anything. Mm-hmm. You-- There's nothing to get wrong. You basically just like sign in as long as you trust this thing called Domain Connect, which- Yeah... you have confirmed that it is legit. Mm-hmm. Then like it's trusted. I, I literally, I, I used it for the first time like two weeks ago. I was like, "What is this? I've never seen this before." [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it's really cool. [22:38](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1358) 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. [23:16](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1396) 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? [23:55](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1435) You had-- You made React Email the year before. Yeah. So you did dip your toes in open work. Yeah. Um, and then came the company. Yeah, React Email is our Next.js, right? So we wanted like an open source channel for top of the funnel, and I remember doing some things very intentionally. If you go to the docs, for example, you'll find there are docs about How do you set this up with SendGrid and MailChimp and Mailgun? I wrote every single one of those docs over there. Mm. Um, and I just wanted like, okay, this is for everyone, and we're trying to redefine how this is. And it was a strategy of like, we're gonna give, give, give, and then we ask. Uh, and if people are- Is, uh, Gary Vee? [24:40](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1480) **Zeno Rocha:** Yeah. And, and if, if people are, like, building the, like, the email template using React, like, now they'll need a platform to send it. Where do they do that? Here's Resend. [24:51](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1491) So it was a, like, a storytelling kind of way of approaching the market. Like, we're gonna fix the first part of the, the journey, which is building the template, and then once you have the template, now that that problem is fixed, you need a platform to send it. Here's the platform. But, uh, did you have the idea for Resend when you started React Email, or was it a side project that- Yeah... then became a company? We started Resend, and as we were building Resend, I was, like, doing a lot of user research, and people were saying like, "Oh, the pain of writing the template. I get the f- the Figma file from my designer. [25:24](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1524) It, it sucks. Like, it's HTML tables and, and everything." They would cut the images, right? Yeah. Oh my gosh. And [laughs] Uh-huh. It's, it's in there. Because there's nothing. And then there's, like, a special syntax of HTML that only works on email. Yeah. Right? It, it's a mess. Or, or CSS. Yeah. It, it's all inline CSS. Yeah. Inline CSS. Well, yeah. That's right. And then, like, for Outlook, you have, like, some special comments, and then you gotta... It's such a mess. It's like a- Yeah... it's a mess. Um. And so, like, I-- to me, the reason that React- Mm-hmm... works is that it is- Mm-hmm... basically a compiler. Yes. It's like, it's like, well, somebody writes this once, and then as long as you fit the API, it's going to work everywhere. Yeah. [26:00](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1560) And you can import your tokens from Tailwind. Now you have a, a type definition with TypeScript. So no more, "Hey," empty comma, you know, like, on your emails. Yeah. Like, you can actually have, like, a string validation or whatever you want. Yeah. I think one of the initial people that pushed back on React Email was like- Mm-hmm... "Well, you're not actually using React. There's no state." Yeah. And, like, React [laughs] is supposed to be, uh, views as a function of state. Yeah. Uh, but so it's, it's mostly JSX is templating? Yes. Or is there actually, like, animations? Is there interactivity? No. Expanding, like accordions? No. Nothing, nothing like that. Okay. There's-- So you cannot ship JavaScript on an email. So then what you do is, yeah, w- we basically use- But CSS-... [26:39](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1599) 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. [27:14](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1634) 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... [28:01](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1681) 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? [28:35](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1715) 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. [29:07](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1747) 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. [29:49](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1789) 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. [30:31](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1831) 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? [31:15](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1875) 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. [31:52](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1912) 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. [32:20](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1940) 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. Uh, what do you take from them, and then what do you-- what should people know to stay away from them? We started with SES too. Uh, we knew that, okay, if we're gonna be innovating here, I wanted to innovate on the DX layer, uh, because I felt like that was the underserved, uh, space. So let me have SDKs for every single language. I remember with Serverless, we highlighted service because, like, no one had, like, guides on how to send an email with Lambda or something. So there's just this underserved space in, in DX. [32:59](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1979) So we started with, like, the most high-level layer, and that, that served us really well. Was able to, like, scale because we were using SES behind the scenes. [33:09](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=1989) **Zeno Rocha:** Turns out there's just a lot of limitations when it comes to the way you structure domains, and they have this concept of configuration sets, and the hidden cost if you're going with SES is that, okay, you might be paying only 5K, for example, but now you need SNS for the events. [33:29](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2009) So you need, like, all the feedback from bounces, complaints, open clicks, uh, all that. And now, so you get the events. Great. Now you need CloudWatch for the logs. Now you need a queue because it's gonna be a lot of events, so now you add SQS, and now that you have SQS, y- so you start, like, adding all these different layers. Oh, you want webhooks? Okay, now you gotta build another thing. So if you go with SES, it's a great platform. It, it's fine, but you're gonna notice, like, your footprint will be much bigger than you would imagine very quickly because you need all the apparatus, uh, around it. Yeah. [34:07](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2047) Um, I would say, you know, uh, another YC startup that came up in the mail area is AgentMail. Yep. And then they, they-- I talked to the guy as well, and he was like, "Yeah, we are not gonna-- we're gonna build on top of SES and not [laughs] really compete with them." Yeah, but for us, it's changing that now. So we are-- we're building the infrastructure and going, like, down to the metal now. And for us, it, it, it feels like we got to the point where now this makes sense to innovate on the, the most basic layer, and now we can get better throughputs, better deliverability if we just focus on that. [34:39](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2079) Uh, but it's a big project. Like, we've been working for months now, and we're gonna announce something soon about that route. What, what is the hardest thing to... Is it, like, uh, trusted IPs? Yeah. Is it compute and data centers, or what, what is the blocker? Yeah, definitely IPs. You're buying, like, a whole IP block, and then now you're managing the IP pools yourself. That, that's one. And then you're almost doing, like, traffic control, uh, and you're controlling the throughput into each mailbox provider, and then you need the relationships with the providers. But then, like, once you have that established, that infrastructure, now you have way more control into what you can s- give to users. So one of the-- my biggest things were, like, observability, you know? [35:25](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2125) Like, that as a engineer, I, I wanna see exactly what's happening, and I've always felt like in this space there wasn't enough information. Like, once-- when an email goes out, is it really delivered? Is it really on the spam folder? Is it in the promotional tab? Like, I never know. Like, you just trust that the email goes out, and then you always hear from some user like, "Oh, I didn't get the email." I'm like, "What?" Like, "What happened?" So there's that empty space between those things, and the more we're close to the metal, the more we have in terms of data that we can surface for, for users. [35:59](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2159) 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. [36:29](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2189) 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? [37:01](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2221) 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. [37:41](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2261) 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. Yeah, everyone was saying MCP was dead, right, a couple months ago. Like, yeah, the only thing that matters is the CLI. [38:14](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2294) **Zeno Rocha:** What I've noticed is that I stopped paying attention to w-what-what's in, what's out, and I, I really think about these problems as like, "Okay, how do I want my product to be?" Well, I want my product to be formless. Whatever they wanna do with the product, it should be possible. So that, that's why we've always been API first. [38:35](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2315) Uh, you know, I had no idea how much this would help us down the line, but I knew, yeah, like if-- I will never be able to cover all the use cases, so let me just give the API. You do whatever you want. And with the MCP, it's just fascinating, like every month, like at least two X growth. And now in August, these numbers are even more. This was before the end of August. I think it was one point two million by the time it ended. But, um, yeah, like p-people are starting to work from Cloud Desktop or, uh, Codex. And if work starts from there, then you need those integrations, right? It's just super important. I just wanna clarify as well. Sure. Uh, so you know, you, you showed us sort of like the month-by-month numbers on the MCP thing. Mm-hmm. [39:19](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2359) It picked up from like, let's say fifty percent month-to-month growth, which is already super high. Mm-hmm. Then it starts to double basically every month. Mm-hmm. Did you do investment into MCP, or you just had an MCP, and it just, after some time, it gets picked up? Well, the, the fun fact about that, our very first MCP was built by Yoko from a16z, our investor. [laughs] Oh, wow, value add. Yeah, right. [laughs] Brilliant. So she, she built the, the open source version. It was a remo-- uh, a local MCP. And, and then it started to grow like, like crazy. And I was like, "Man, why are people using-- It's, like, so hard to set up MCP." This was, uh, last year. And then- Yoko. [laughs] Yeah, exactly. [39:59](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2399) And so she built that, uh, and then I just asked her, "Hey, can you transfer to our org?" It was like, just like an engineer building something. And it was nice to see after the traction it was getting. But to do the MCP right, to do the remote one, we had to go back and revisit our entire permissions model because we needed OAuth. And then we were like, "Okay, now we have a blocker. Let's build OAuth." So then we build OAuth, and it's like, okay, RBAC, let's look at that. Like, let, let's look at how users, uh, have access to each one of the resources. So it was a whole journey to build OAuth, and then after we had OAuth, okay, now we have the remote MCP, and then it's distribution. So then, okay, now we have the remote MCP. Okay, great, great, great. [40:45](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2445) Observability is in place. Great, great. Okay. All the Datadog dashboards. Okay. Now all in, let's talk to everyone, and that was hard too. Like, uh, it's not as easy-- I wish I had all your connections. Uh, it's not as easy to- You, you can talk to me. Yeah. [laughs] You're just supposed to talk to me. Uh, but, like, talking to the labs and trying to get into, like, the, the official stores and plugin marketplace and stuff like that. So do you think that actually matters? Oh, for sure. Yeah. So I, I think sometimes, like- Mm-hmm... I've been on the other side where I try so hard to get these partnerships, we launch it, and then nothing. Oh, man. Right? So- Mm-hmm. [laughs] Which one matters? [41:22](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2482) So as a consumer, I make decisions now based on, do I have the access to that data or not? So as a, as a buyer of B2B software, if I go to the cloud connectors and I don't see the company listed there- Mm... with an official MCP, like for-- We had this. Like we had a pl-- We were using Plausible and PostHog. Plausible had an MCP built by Sentry. I don't care. If the Plausible doesn't maintain that and that's not official, I c- I don't-- I cannot trust that as much. Even though I love the Sentry team and I trust that team, but I need the owner of the software to own this piece of integration too. Oh my God. [42:02](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2522) And I made the call like, "No, we are getting rid of Plausible, and we're just gonna use, uh, PostHog here because I have the MCP there." And I did that as a, as a B2C consumer too. I'm like into running, and then I'm like, "Oh, let me..." Like Strava, Strava has an MCP. I can, like, access my runs, so I use Strava because of that. So, uh, and if there's like, "Oh no, we have an MCP, but you have to connect like this," like the XMCP, for example. I have to do, like the, the local one. It's just so frustrating. It works on the desktop client, not on my phone. Like Like, to me, it's just... Yeah, if it's not there, I don't use it. Apart from, okay, it is officially maintained by the vendor or whatever- Mm-hmm... [42:45](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2565) what makes a good MCP versus a so-so MCP? Even for hours, as I, as I interact with that, there were ti-- I always-- Like, it's always collapsed, right? The, the tool calls, I'm always opening and trying to understand, like, what did it do? And just a couple days ago, like, there was one call where it couldn't put everything on the contacts for some reason, and then I'm like, "No, this shouldn't happen." Like, how much data are we sending? Maybe we're sending way too much data to the client. So that's something that I noticed. Like, the amount of tools, this was a bigger concern earlier. Like, oh, if you have way too many tools, it get confused. [43:22](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2602) I don't see that as much anymore. Uh, and in fact, we're just adding more to the MCP. Oh. Like, we had, like, maybe, I don't know, twenty tools when we launched, or even less than that. Now we have, like, eighty-something tools. What the fuck? [laughs] Yeah. And, like, I'm adding more and more. Like, the, the long tail of tool-- uh, of, like, the, the footprint. That's what I've noticed. Like, you can do, like, only ninety percent of what your dashboard does- Uh-huh... and that's one way of doing it, or you can do one hundred. Getting to one hundred percent coverage of what your dashboard can do is actually very, very difficult. 'Cause now you're doing usage, billing, team invites, account provisioning, deletion. [44:08](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2648) Should that be exposed as an API or not? Like, it's, it's really hard. Like, it's a- Yeah... it's a difficult problem. 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. [44:46](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2686) 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? [45:31](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2731) 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. [46:04](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2764) 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. [46:46](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2806) 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. [47:23](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2843) 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. [47:58](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2878) [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. [48:34](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2914) 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? [49:27](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=2967) 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? [50:11](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3011) 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? [51:02](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3062) [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. [51:41](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3101) 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? [52:17](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3137) [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. [52:57](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3177) 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. [53:37](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3217) 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. [54:14](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3254) 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. [55:00](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3300) 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. [55:36](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3336) 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. [56:15](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3375) 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-... [56:51](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3411) 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... [57:26](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3446) 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. [57:57](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3477) 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... [58:31](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3511) obviously, organically you, you pop up. You didn't do anything special for AEO. Mm-hmm. What did you do for AEO? [laughs] Uh- I would say we were not the leaders because we, coming up, like in twenty twenty-three, like very few people knew about Resend, and we were like so behind. Twilio, Postmark, Mailgun, those companies invested in SEO for ten plus years. So for us to get ranked for anything was like almost like it, it was a uphill battle. Like so, so difficult. So then what we did was like, okay, let's focus on the docs for sure. And the docs, it was very intentional about like, okay, if we're doing a docs on, it has long tail again. [59:14](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3554) Uh, like, oh, here's the docs on, uh, not just Python, like how you set it up with Django. Yeah. How to blah with blah. Exactly. How to blah with blah. Right. Super short articles focused on- This is traditional SEO. Traditional SEO, uh, nothing fancy there. And then when models started to come, then I was like, okay, maybe I gotta change the content of the page. Because if people are asking questions, then I need to, like, create content that is in action and answer, uh, ask and answer type of format. So a lot of FAQs. Now, almost every page- [laughs]... at Resend has an FAQ. Yeah. You know? Like you, I'll go to pricing page or like, yeah, uh, of course pricing, uh, almost always has an FAQ. Yeah, this is pretty standard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [59:57](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3597) But like you do FAQs in like all sorts of- Security. Yeah. I think maybe security also ha- yeah. [laughs] So like you see it's like a pattern, uh, of like all pages have that because that's how people are asking, "Is Resend SOC 2 compliant?" And then just have the answer right there. And then, okay, now we have those things in, okay, now we gotta do llms.txt. So we added llms.txt on our docs, thankfully because of Mentlfy that we use, great product, and we're like, "Okay, how we take this to the marketing site too?" So then llms.txt for every marketing page. Same with the docs hatch mark- uh, markdown versions of the docs. I'm gonna do markdown versions of every single page on the website, on the marketing website. [1:00:43](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3643) And that's- Using, uh, content sniffing or you just append like.md? Yeah, just append. You, you do append. Uh, so if you go to the s- yeah- Security.md... the security page- Yeah....md, it will work. Yeah. But also if you do content negotiation with that page, uh, it will render on that page, like the markdown version without going to the- Yeah. Which for listeners, this is one of those things I'm not sure it matters. Mm-hmm. I'm really not sure. [laughs] Yeah. I mean, you're winning really well, so... Yeah. I think what-- One example that changed, uh, and, and maybe it doesn't help with distribution, but helps with accuracy. Mm-hmm. [1:01:17](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3677) So go to the pricing page. I remember this was like a random Sunday, and I j- I was just like doing competitor analysis, and I was just asking like, "Okay, if you send one point two million emails using Resend, and you do that with X and Y and Z competitor, who is the, the cheapest and who, who is the most expensive?" And it got completely wrong. Mm. It got the Resend one like so bad, and it, it actually said like very bad things about us. Like, "Oh, Resend's pricing is very obscure." I was like, "What the fuck?" Like, it's not obscure at all. Uh, so it was like super frustrating. Oh, so you made a calculator? Yeah. I see. So the, the problem was, you know, agents don't really, uh, drag a JavaScript widget. Okay. [1:02:03](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3723) So then what I did was the, the.md version of this page- [laughs] Uh, which has a tremendous amount of, uh, access, by the way. Like now, like- I see you get analytics on this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Mm. Not through the, the, the regular analytics spots too, because like w-we cannot track that, uh, that- Yeah, it's the server side. Yeah... so then like we gotta go to Datadog to figure that out. Oh, okay. [1:02:28](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3748) **Zeno Rocha:** And man, it was really crazy. Like, uh, and then I made that change. I pushed that, and then I asked again like a few days later, and then it got the numbers right. I see. [1:02:37](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3757) So I'm like, "Okay, this already- It's a good way to live update and fix stuff in your search entry. Exactly. And, and this is what matters, right? Like, okay, accuracy- But it does mean that you don't have a single source of truth. Like you have to update the MD, and then you also have to update the- That sucks completely. [laughs] But again, if, if I wanted the- Come on... the happy path and the easy path, like I wouldn't be doing email. [laughs] So, uh, but, but I'm like that's the price of like- Well, you know, if you're good at React, you can write a custom renderer that like- [laughs]... yeah, you know. You know how to do this. Yeah. What else? [1:03:07](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3787) We talked baselines basically have FAQ everywhere, basic SEO stuff. Comparison pages. Us versus SendGrid, us versus, uh, Mailchimp. Although our page could be much better. G-go to- Uh, yeah. No, this is not there. I mean, I'm sure you have it somewhere in some footer or something or whatever. Yeah. Just do /migrate. Uh, I can, can give you some- Ah, okay. By the way, four oh four pages, I always think we should guess. Oh, interesting. You know, take the slug. Mm. Yeah. Nearest neighbors. Oh, yeah. [laughs] Okay. I mean, I think there's a side of- In case you ever break, ever break a URL, like it just auto-fix itself, right? Yeah. [1:03:41](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3821) You don't, you don't, don't just serve the four oh four. My intention with those is like, "Oh, let me try to do something that's not exactly like a comparison page." Comparison page. Yeah. But I don't think, uh, it was a great idea because it, uh, our competitors actually built the comparison pages, and they get recommended more than ours. Yeah. But what we try to do, like if you go to Postmark, for example, is like, okay, let's demonstrate f-first like, hey, you, if you wanna migrate, here's a code converter. Uh- Insert example. Yeah. So if you just put any co-code block there. Ooh. And then- [laughs] Why? Why? [laughs] Why, dude? Why? [laughs] Well, that's what we do. That's what we do. [laughs] This is so extra. [1:04:25](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3865) Ev-- There's a cube on the landing page. Everything's extra. The cube is [laughs] two years. But like the, the adoption is one that I pushed this last weekend. Um- Okay... like now we have a graph that compares like our adoption, uh, with every different, uh, competitor. And you, you see one thing, like again, this was a lesson that I learned with the pricing page. JavaScript widgets, they're not gonna be executed, so I spell out the same data in text so that, uh, LLMs can actually read that thing. Uh, so [laughs] yeah. I think they're getting somewhat better. 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. [1:05:14](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3914) 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-... [1:05:51](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3951) 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. [1:06:39](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=3999) 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. [1:07:21](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4041) 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. [1:08:01](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4081) 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? [1:08:40](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4120) 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. [1:09:19](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4159) 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. [1:10:00](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4200) 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... [1:10:36](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4236) 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. [1:11:06](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4266) 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... [1:11:43](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4303) 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]... [1:12:15](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4335) 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. [1:12:52](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4372) 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. [1:13:32](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4412) '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. [1:14:12](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4452) 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. [1:14:46](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4486) 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. [1:15:21](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4521) 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. [1:15:57](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4557) 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. [1:16:32](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4592) 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. [1:17:02](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4622) 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. [1:17:46](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4666) 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. [1:18:25](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4705) 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." [1:19:09](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4749) 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. [1:20:02](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4802) 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. [1:20:36](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4836) 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. [1:21:32](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4892) 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. [1:22:15](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4935) 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. [1:22:44](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=4964) 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. [1:23:22](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=5002) 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. [1:23:55](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=5035) 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. [1:24:35](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=5075) 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... [1:25:13](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=5113) 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. [1:25:44](https://realalpha.app/v/bdIoODXsu8k/?t=5144) [upbeat music]