Marketing Crafted

How Resend Went from a Waitlist to 1M Users | The Marketing Strategy

Z
Resend logo

Zeno Rocha & Bu Kinoshita

Founder, Resend

Follow on X

$375K+

Revenue/mo

Business Type

SaaS

Monetization

Subscription

Founded

2023

Introduction

Another email API shouldn’t win.

The category is old.
The incumbents are huge.
Nobody wakes up wanting to switch their transactional email provider.

And yet.

In three years, Resend went from a side project to over 1,000,000 users, 2,000+ paying customers, and $21.5M raised from top-tier investors.

This is the story of how they did it — and what you can copy.


1. The moment email started to bug them

The story starts with frustration.

Zeno Rocha was CPO at Liferay, shipping products that depended heavily on email.

Zeno Rocha, founder of resend Zeno Rocha, founder of resend.com

He kept hitting the same wall: deliverability issues, messy HTML templates, and tools that felt built for 2010, not 2023.

At the same time, the market was… stale.
SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, SparkPost — most founded around 2009–2010 and later acquired.
Once acquired, they leaned harder into enterprise sales, not into making developers happy.

Zeno saw a gap:

“There isn’t a single developer-first email platform in the market today. We want to change that.”

That line is the whole company in a sentence.

Developer-first.
Modern stack.
Email that feels like product, not plumbing.

That “itch” is important.
Resend wasn’t born from “email is a big market” on a whiteboard.
It came from years of feeling how clunky the existing tools were.


2. The bet

Before there was Resend the company, there was React Email.

In 2022, Zeno and the team started working on a different angle to the problem: email templates.
HTML emails were painful to build and even more painful to keep consistent across Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and friends.

React Email flipped that.

Instead of hand-coding <table> layouts, you write emails using React components. It ships a set of unstyled primitives (Button, Section, Container, etc.) that just work across clients.

They launched React Email as a standalone open-source project in late 2022. No paywall. No credit card. Just a genuinely useful tool for developers.

That move did three things:

  1. Gave before asking
    Zeno is very explicit: the plan was to “first give and then ask later.” React Email solved a painful problem on its own, no Resend account required.

  2. Built the right audience
    The people using React Email were developer teams sending serious email.
    Exactly the customers they’d later want for Resend.

  3. Created an owned distribution channel
    Every GitHub star, every npm install, every tutorial was quietly warming up the future Resend user base.
    By 2025, React Email was doing over 920,000 weekly npm downloads and had more than 17,000 GitHub stars.

Most founders start with “launch product, then try to get attention.”
Resend started with “launch open source, earn attention, then introduce product into that stream.”


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