Zeno Rocha had been frustrated by email at every company he'd worked at. As VP of Developer Experience at WorkOS and CPO at Liferay Cloud, he watched teams struggle with the same email problems: ugly HTML templates, unreliable delivery, terrible debugging. Email infrastructure felt stuck in 2005.

The Jab Before the Right Hook

In December 2022, before announcing Resend, Zeno launched React Email — an open-source library for building emails with React components. It was free, genuinely useful, and gave developers a taste of what modern email tooling could look like. This was the "jab" before the "right hook."

On January 4, 2023, Zeno publicly announced he was leaving WorkOS to build Resend. His announcement tweet — from an account with 39K followers — got 999K views and 4,634 likes. He positioned Resend as the "Stripe of email": clean API, great DX, just works.

The Waitlist

Instead of launching immediately, Zeno built a waitlist using Typeform. In 7 weeks: 6,338 signups. He documented every lesson publicly on his blog, including spending $25,000 on the resend.com domain for credibility.

YC and Launch

Resend entered Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch. They launched publicly in June 2023, raised a $3M seed from SV Angel (with angels including Figma's Dylan Field, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, and Supabase's Paul Copplestone), and hit 80,000 developers by 2024. By June 2024: $5M ARR with just 22 people.

• Domain cost: $25,000 (resend.com)
• Announcement tweet: 999K views
• Waitlist: 6,338 signups in 7 weeks
• YC batch: W23
• Users: 80,000 developers (2024)
• $5M ARR with 22 people ($227K revenue per employee)