Competitor 100x larger, yet overtaken in downloads: scale is not a moat
A founder with no email background overtook downloads through product experience, while Twilio—inventor of DevRel—acquired SendGrid but left it dormant.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Once thought beating SendGrid impossible, now doubling his lead
Zeno Rocha recalls early fears SendGrid was ‘impossible’ to beat. This year, Resend's npm downloads surpassed SendGrid—now more than double. Resend serves 4.3M users, just crossed 120k+ paying customers including Warner Brothers and HBO, plus a Japanese group that purchased ~20k domains in one transaction.
— Zeno RochaTrust users first, police behavior after, not before
Most email providers require signup forms and 2-day manual review, rejecting most applications. Zeno rejects this model: instead of imprisoning users for eighteen years before proving they deserve freedom, he flips it. Default trust, then immediately block on hard signals like bounce rates and complaints—since most issues stem from misuse, not abuse.
— Zeno RochaA hundred times larger, yet unable to win with scale
Twilio was 100x Resend's size at the start, yet couldn't crush it through scale. The conversation landed on a judgment: commodity businesses like email have no scale advantage. Product quality is all that matters. Twilio, which invented DevRel, now appears to coast on past laurels, underinvesting in SendGrid and SMS.
From leasing AWS SES to owning the entire sending stack
Resend started on AWS SES, differentiating on developer UX. Now building in-house: acquiring and managing IP pools, establishing carrier relationships, switching email delivery from Node.js to Go for speed. The goal is finer observability—previously the platform couldn't see whether a sent email reached the inbox, spam folder, or promotions tab.
— Zeno RochaOne MCP forced a complete rebuild of permission systems
Resend's first MCP was a local version written part-time by Yoko, an a16z investor. Growth demanded a remote MCP, but that required OAuth and RBAC first. They redesigned the entire account permissions system from scratch, only then moving to distribution and the official plugin marketplace.
— Zeno RochaEighty tools didn't confuse the model; data density did
The industry feared many MCP tools would confuse models; Cloudflare even capped theirs at two. Resend went opposite: ~20 at launch, now 80+. Tool quantity itself hasn't caused confusion. The real issue is single calls returning too much data, losing information. Achieving feature parity with the dashboard—billing, team invites, account deletion—is extremely hard.
— Zeno RochaAI miscalculated pricing, so he copied the price list to markdown
Zeno asked AI to compare Resend against competitors' cost for 1.2M emails—the numbers came back wrong, and the model claimed Resend ‘pricing is opaque’. The problem: AI won't execute JavaScript calculator widgets on the page. Fix: duplicate the numbers as plain text in a markdown version of the same page. Fixed in days, but now maintaining two content sources with no single source of truth.
— Zeno RochaBetter a smaller company his daughter actually wants to spend time with
A YC partner told Zeno his design perfectionism was slowing progress—it stung, but was fair. He clarified his priorities: in ten years, he'd rather have $10M revenue and a daughter who wants to play with him than $100M and a distant relationship. He carried this priority back into parenting decisions.
— Zeno RochaIn their own words · checked verbatim
It's like, oh my gosh, how are we ever gonna beat SendGrid? It's im- just impossible. And then earlier this year, we crossed a number of, uh, downloads from SendGrid, and I was like, "That's insane," and now we're more than double.
Zeno Rocha0:00
I always, always felt like, no, I wanna live in a society where I'm born free, and if I make a mistake, then I m- I might be punished just a little bit, or if I do something like really bad, a bad punishment, right?
Zeno Rocha15:48
Yeah So, so in, in, in other words, maybe, maybe there is no s- benefits to scale. Yeah. Maybe you just, you know, uh, you just make a better product and you can slowly-
Like, we had, like, maybe, I don't know, twenty tools when we launched, or even less than that. Now we have, like, eighty-something tools.
Zeno Rocha43:47
It got the Resend one like so bad, and it, it actually said like very bad things about us. Like, "Oh, Resend's pricing is very obscure." I was like, "What the fuck?" Like, it's not obscure at all.
Zeno Rocha1:01:17
You just worry too much about design. You care too much about that. If you didn't care about that, you would be much further ahead.
Zeno Rocha1:20:02
I'm with my daughter, and my daughter wants to be with me so much, and we, we play all the time, and we are a 10 million AR company. I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're a $100 million company and my daughter doesn't wanna play with me, is not interested in me, and we're, we're not that close.
Zeno Rocha1:21:06
Figures
| Resend user base | 4.3M users | 3:23 |
| MCP monthly calls (through August) | ~1.2M | 39:12 |
| Gmail market share | At least 60% | 54:42 |
| Japanese group single domain purchase | ~20k domains | 10:41 |
Glossary
- MCP / Model Context Protocol
- Protocol enabling AI assistants to directly call application backends and execute operations.
- AEO / AI Answer Engine Optimization
- Optimizing content so large models recommend your product when answering user questions.
- Domain Connect
- OAuth-like protocol allowing one-click DNS configuration via registrar dashboards instead of manual record entry.
- SES / Amazon Simple Email Service
- AWS's foundational email delivery service, used as the base by many email platforms.
- llms.txt
- Site content summary placed in the root directory for models to read, analogous to robots.txt.
How to listen
Founders building developer-first products, engineers concerned with email/sending infrastructure, and marketers experimenting with AEO growth.
Around 31:00, a low-density discussion of SMS, WhatsApp, and phone channels; can be skipped.