What's next after 100,000 users

Since launching publicly ten months ago, we crossed 100,000 verified users on Resend. Our open source project is already at 12,181 stars on GitHub and 209,339 weekly downloads on npm.

Resend is powering millions of emails sent every month with a small team of six people, and this is only the beginning.

Here's a quick recap of our journey so far and what's next.

How we got here

Every idea has a story, and ours started in August 2022.

Aug 2022: Reimagining email

Bu and I were using multiple tools for email at both our full-time jobs and side projects, but they all felt outdated, slow, and built for marketers, not developers.

We also had to deal with emails landing in the spam folder and felt the pain of building a beautiful email template that would work the same in every email client.

So, we started playing with the idea of building the “Stripe of Email”.

Sep 2022: First customer

Once we had a working MVP, we shared it with a friend who was working at another startup. He liked it and started using it in production. We sent him a $10 payment link as a way to validate if the product was really good or not.

To our surprise, he paid (!), which gave us the confidence to apply to Y Combinator.

Dec 2022: Open source launch

We launched react.email because we were frustrated by how difficult it was to build modern email templates that worked well across all email clients.

This project caught the attention of a lot of people, and it became clear that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Jan 2023: Hello world

Resend was incorporated in January 2023, and we shared the news online.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and the announcement tweet alone had more than 1M views.

This was also the month Jonni joined our founding team as Operations Manager.

Apr 2023: $3m seed round

Once we finished Y Combinator, we raised a $3m seed round (see full list of investors).

We also had our first team gathering in Lisbon, Portugal.

Jun 2023: Public launch

After operating behind a waitlist, we finally opened the product to everyone.

Dec 2023: 1,000 paying customers

We celebrated 1,000 paying customers as we closed the first year of Resend as a company.

Jan 2024: Looking “Forward”

We organized our second launch week, and this time, we called it Resend Forward.

This marked the launch of marketing emails and turned Resend into a multi-product company.

Apr 2024: First 100,000 users

After ten months since launching Resend publicly, we reached 100,000 users.

Where are we going

If we do our job correctly, Resend will become one of the best ways for humans to communicate.

Deeper into the tech stack.

When looking at the feature requests that our users bring up, there are still a lot of gaps that our product doesn't fill.

We want Resend to be the de facto email solution for developers, and that means we need to keep improving our API, libraries, and components.

Users should be able not only to send emails but also to receive them, and we're working on a feature that will allow them to do just that.

Stellar deliverability.

Deliverability is a team sport. There's only so much you can do as an email provider and services like Resend are only as good as their senders.

Our plan is to embed some of the lessons learned about deliverability into the product and create a series of educational content that will help users improve the quality of their email lists and the content they send.

Support as a feature.

Many companies see their support team as a cost center. For them it's just a group of people that handles issues and complaints, or as an expensive add-on to drive revenue.

We feel the opposite. We know that great support is a core part of what makes Resend valuable. We know that phenomenal support not only helps us retain customers, but also helps us grow with word of mouth.

That's why we will continue to push the limits by decreasing tickets with stellar docs and AI chat trained with our data, as well as improve response/resolutions times with internal tooling and automations.

It's not just about email.

Resend is not an email company, it's a communications company.

When we were brainstorming the name of the company, we wanted to make sure that it was broad enough to encompass more than just email.

We're starting with email as a niche to focus on, but the ultimate goal is to expand into other communication channels, such as SMS, Whatsapp, push notification, and more.

This is a multi-year journey, but we're excited about the possibilities.

I'm looking forward to sharing every step of the way with you all.

P.S: We’re hiring.