How Resend Went from a Waitlist to 1M Users - Marketing Crafted

The category is old. ... Nobody wakes up wanting to switch their transactional email provider. ... The story starts with frustration. Zeno Rocha was CPO at Liferay, shipping products that depended heavily on email. *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. ... > “There isn’t a single developer-first email platform in the market today. We want to change that.” ... 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. … That move did three things: ... 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** ... 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.”