Every founder is taught to avoid crowded markets.
Zeno Rocha bet his company on one of the most crowded markets in tech: email.
He started Resend in 2023, and they’re now at 4M users and 100k paying customers.
I asked him what he saw in it.
Every other developer category had been rebuilt. Auth0 led auth until WorkOS and Clerk showed up. Heroku led hosting until Vercel.
But in email, SendGrid, which he loved, was bought by Twilio for $2B and the product decay. The rest got acquired too, and stopped improving.
His bet was care: dark mode, animated icons, details nobody in the category had bothered with. “We’re gonna out-care everyone in this industry.”
Then AI turned email into a hot market again, and what he had to care about changed.
Agents don’t care about the interface, they can’t use it! Resend’s pricing page has a slider, but an agent can’t drag it.
And those had just become his fastest-growing customers.
He rebuilt the product for a customer that can’t see: every page readable as plain text, every action callable without a click.
In the episode, Zeno gets into how out-caring an industry became his strategy, and why incumbents getting acquired is what opens the market
Presented by Ashurst Perkins Coie. Paul Navarro works with some of the best founders in Latin America, many of them guests on the podcast. I always ask my guests who I should interview next, and the only time anyone recommended a lawyer, it was Paul. Glad to have them as a founding sponsor.
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Also in this episode:
[15:00] Why the giants in your category are more vulnerable than they look
[15:55] The advantage of knowing nothing about the market you enter
[24:10] What changes when your fastest-growing customer is an agent
Jumpstart is the immigration service I wish I’d had when I moved to the US. Bianca and Fabiano have helped 1,250+ founders get O-1, L-1 and EB visas with a 98% approval rate, and if it doesn’t come through, they DON’T charge you.
