Transcript
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnikova: Hello everyone. I’m excited to welcome you at Dev Propulsion Labs, our podcast about the business of developer tools. My name is Victoria Melnikova and I am the head of new business at Evil Martians. I’m very excited to introduce today’s guest Today we have Zeno Rocha, founder and CEO of Resend, email API for developers.
Hi, Zeno.
[00:00:25] Zeno Rocha: Hello. Hi. Hey everyone.
[00:00:27] Victoria Melnikova: How are you today?
[00:00:28] Zeno Rocha: Pretty good. Yeah, really excited to chat with you. I know we’ve been chatting for a while, so it’s happening, so I’m happy to be here.
[00:00:36] Victoria Melnikova: I’m very excited to have this conversation with you for many reasons, and I’ll start with a couple of personal reasons.
Nice. So if. People who know me close, they know that I’m obsessed with Brazil.
[00:00:49] Zeno Rocha: Nice.
[00:00:50] Victoria Melnikova: And in my like LinkedIn bio, it says a Russian and Ipanema girl. I, in university I studied Brazilian, Portuguese. Wow. And I [00:01:00] lived in Rio for a bit. Wow. So I’m like very attached and I’m curious. About your background.
So can you tell me how was it growing up in Brazil and how do you get into coding in Brazil?
[00:01:14] Zeno Rocha: Yeah. I’m originally from a city called Curitiba in the South, which is known for having like more like cold people. There’s a lot of folks that, uh, migrated from Italy and and, and Poland. So we’re more like introverts.
So growing up I was an introvert. And I remember my dad was really big into like, you know, learning English and, and telling how important that was. And my grandpa was also very like, excited about computers when this was like becoming a thing. So I would say like those two things, like just learning English when I was like around 10.
And of course, like growing up in other countries, you know, we’re so influenced by [00:02:00] American culture overall. So listening to musics in English or, or playing video games in English, watching movies and and all that. And then those two things were just so crucial when I look back and think like, okay, what are the two pillar things that put me in a good situation to be where I am right now?
Without those two things, I wouldn’t be here. So I started to just like, play games, just like a, any other kid on my computer and, and got really excited about that. But yeah, I kept just climbing the map. So I was born in Cchi, but then I lived in Rio for six or seven years, which is just incredible. Right in the beginning I used to hate Rio, uh, actually because the culture was so different from mine that I, I had a hard time adjusting, but now I, I really appreciate it.
And then lived in on the Northeast and then went to LA and as f, but we’ll, we’ll go for that journey together. But yeah, it’s been [00:03:00] really cool to yeah, experience those different cultures and at every point I feel like you are grabbing a little bit of that culture to yourself. So now I feel like I’m, I’m from everywhere.
[00:03:13] Victoria Melnikova: Do you feel like you’re more extroverted now or Yeah. You have to be,
[00:03:18] Zeno Rocha: yeah, sometimes, right. I feel like as a founder, I truly believe I have to spend time like working on my founder brand along with the company brand. So I truly believe that people buy from people, not from companies. I was just, uh, having breakfast with Roy from clearly, you know, so it doesn’t matter if you.
You are pro a pro or against him, but it’s undeniable that ha he has like a founder persona, just like Guillermo and so many other founders, uh, that we know within dev tools and so on. So I care a lot about that and sometimes I have to put on that extrovert clothing, which is not something I’m used to. I prefer to be on my [00:04:00] computer, just coding and, and, yeah.
[00:04:03] Victoria Melnikova: That’s so interesting. So as I was researching you and Risan for the, for the episode. I, of course came across your handbook and your handbook is kind of like so powerful and so concise and it’s like in, in the system of it, there is so much strength. And even when you talk about the brand of recent, you have three adjectives that describe recent.
I’m not gonna quote them, but when we talk about your personal brand, can you also like boil it down to three adjectives?
[00:04:36] Zeno Rocha: Wow, that’s really hard because yeah, I feel like I, I try not to overthink my personal brand as much or like have like, oh, here’s my full strategy. You know? I just try to be myself because that’s how I feel like people are, are drowned to, uh, folks that are, they try not to impersonate or, or, or be someone else.
So I just try to be [00:05:00] as organic as possible. But yeah, I just like nerding about. Dev tools and developer experience that, that’s a subject i I like a lot. I love design as well. So when you combine those, those things and with the handbook I. I’m glad you called it out because I remember when I first had the idea to write that handbook, I’m like, yeah, this is not something new.
Like there are many companies that, that have handbooks, uh, that are publicly available, but we are very early on in the journey of recent. We were still like a year and a half, and it was a team of like 10 people. So why do you need a handbook when you haven’t found PMF? You? You have like 10 people. Like you, you can share the culture.
Just by itself. Right. But I knew that for us to scale, we would need that. So it took us months to get to that initial version, uh, of like 30 something articles. And I remember midway for that process, I was like, wow, this was such a [00:06:00] mistake. Like, it’s just taking so long, like, because it’s hard, like engineers don’t wanna write, uh, things down and, and it’s hard to compile.
Uh, it, it’s easy to write something very long. Writing something that feels simple, objective, that’s hard. It takes a lot of editing on top of the writing. But how that thing played out was like, now I’m, I’m so grateful because people that sometimes don’t know us, or candidates that are interviewing, they reference the handbook and they self-select as well.
That helps with customers too. Customers self-select. They feel like, oh wow, these guys care about quality, they care about excellence. Okay? I care about that too. I feel like we’re living in a world where we associate ourselves with brands that we aspire to. So if you care about quality, you’re probably gonna be using linear and notion and raycast, right?
Uh, so that’s how we try to position, uh, the brand as well.
[00:06:59] Victoria Melnikova: That’s [00:07:00] very interesting. How big is your team now?
[00:07:02] Zeno Rocha: Almost 30. Around 30 people. 30, yeah.
[00:07:04] Victoria Melnikova: What are the functions that you rely on heavily today? What is the most, ‘cause you’re now series A, you are growing, right? Yes, yes. What are some functions that are kind of new to you and you rely on heavily today?
[00:07:18] Zeno Rocha: I think, uh, for us, hiring, uh, engineers and designers came out naturally. Then and generalists. That was something we, we will always be looking for. But then we started to notice like, oh, we actually need support people. And I’ve worked with support people in the past, but like identifying what greatness looks like in support people.
That’s a different skill. Now we we’re hiring for data scientists, uh, to handle all of our anti-abuse systems because email is fooled with bad actors, right? So. Now we are just having to learn like, who are these people? What do they care? Like why would someone, you know, [00:08:00] sit all day doing SQL queries like that doesn’t come natural for us.
So you just have to like arm yourself with like folks that you can rely and ask questions and then meet people like we learn throughout the hiring process. So we open a row as we interview. Like for this one in particular, we open as a data analyst. Now we’re like, Hmm, maybe it’s not really a data analyst that we’re looking.
Maybe it’s a data scientist and there are differences between them. So it’s one of the, the challenges of being a founder, you’re hiring for roles that you’ve never worked at. We just hired a chief of staff, so that was another one. Like, what does that mean? You know, like the, how do we keep that person happy and motivated?
What are their values? How does that match our values? So everyone at recent has engineer on their job title. Even today, like all the supporting folks are customer success engineers. All the designers are design engineers. So that engineering [00:09:00] mindset is something we try to foster, but as we grow, you know, uh, yeah.
There are so many challenges to, to scale a company.
[00:09:09] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s stay here for a second. You mentioned the security aspect, and just recently, I think early October, right? You announced that you’re investing 3 million into the security of email, basically. Was this decision kind of like a pressure from the market that you felt, because email is so crowded with, I don’t know, spam and phishing and all kinds of things?
Or was it just kind of like part of of an excellent developer experience?
[00:09:35] Zeno Rocha: That’s something I, I started to realize because when you think about developer experience, you might just look into the interface that developers are, are handling. So you might think only about the SDK or the design of the API and the endpoints and how does that interact with the rest or the docs.
So your mind goes to those places. And for us, a key [00:10:00] insight when we started recent was that recent was a developer tool. As we went by, we’re like, oh no. Whenever we had a downtime, people will like freak out and we realized like, oh no, maybe we’re not a dev tools. Maybe we are an infrastructure company.
And the way you operate for those two things are very differently. I think it was that realization that we have as we’re building and for me. What developer experience means started to become something much broader. So it’s not only the the surface layer that developer’s interacting, but you know, I can have the, the most beautiful website in the world, the most beautiful SDK, so ergonomic auto pagination when you’re listing things.
But if the app is down. It, it’s all for nothing, right? Uh, same with security. I can have the most beautiful, the most amazing product, but if folks are struggling with with that and we’re leaking data or whatever, then it’s not a good experience. And it also [00:11:00] comes down to your values as a human, right? So a personal story I remember.
You know, we fight spammers every single day, and now we’re fighting spammer gangs. You can tell these are like gangs. It’s a group of people because they come with hundreds of domains that they botch, and it’s just like the most sophisticated attacks you can ever imagine. Why I never talk about these things publicly, but it’s a big part of our operations on, on the day to day, and then one day.
I don’t know if you, if you saw the news, but there was like a huge flood in the south of Brazil, close to my city, the city I was born at. And I’m like super sad that this is happening. I’m, I’m watching on the news. My friends are, are talking about it all the time. And then one day I go to recent and, and there’s like a phishing email targeting, like donations for that flood
[00:11:52] Victoria Melnikova: that’s personal.
[00:11:53] Zeno Rocha: And I, I saw that. I was like, wow, this is so low. How come like a human being is trying [00:12:00] to take advantage of folks that are like donating money to like a flood That was like so bad. And we see stuff like that all the time. That was like, wow. Like we just need to, to improve. So you put all those things in place, the, the sum of all those little things that start happening, like realizing that GX is much more than what it seems, the, the things we’re seeing on the day-to-day and what we see for the future with those roles.
We just needed to like hire more folks and, and build a more sophisticated system so it felt right to, to make that investment.
[00:12:32] Victoria Melnikova: You are one of those founders that is very hands-on. You’re an engineer yourself and I mean, you still code right? Today. Is it hard for you to delegate?
[00:12:44] Zeno Rocha: Yeah, it is for sure in so many ways.
I feel like it’s still important for me to be on the prs and, and I’m not necessarily reviewing everything that comes in. My CTO does that, [00:13:00] but I try to keep a pulse because as the person who’s deciding where the product is going, it’s important for me to understand like, what are the engineers building?
Because maybe, uh, one thing that this one engineer built might influence this other thing, though, like a bigger strategy. So for me it’s super helpful as a product person now thinking from, from that angle to understand what’s going on in engineering. And there’s just something about like, like showing the team what’s possible and where my mind is at.
I feel like it just translates like, what are your priorities very quickly when they see a PR with your code changes. Right. I try to be as hands-on as possible. It gets harder every single time. And, and that’s not only within engineering, like within support. We don’t have, uh, weekend coverage for support.
So who does support over the weekend? You know, just this weekend we were celebrating like, oh, okay. Inbox zero Friday afternoon, and the team even tweeted [00:14:00] about it. And then Saturday I was super busy, I couldn’t do support. And then Sunday I’m like, okay, let’s, let’s do it. And then I open and it’s like 200 plus tickets that, because we’re just getting so many users, a lot of people from Lovable and V Zero and Bolt who are different types of users that don’t really know how to troubleshoot.
So we’re just learning a lot. And you know, so I try to be in touch with support so they know like that I’m there for them as well. And I feel like that really translates. The culture that, you know, we want to be hand hands on and there’s no room for someone that just sits and you know, demands like, oh, a Jira ticket creator, like they don’t have space at reason, but a maker.
They, they do.
[00:14:47] Victoria Melnikova: So interesting. So in my previous episode with Jeff, we talked about perfectionism and I think that you guys are also similar in that sense because if you kind of think about your product and your [00:15:00] website and everything across the board, it strives to be at a certain level of excellence.
You know, and one of the things that we discussed, and I also kind of like looked at one of the pages in the handbook about providing feedback. With that level of perfectionism, with that level of like striving for a certain level of excellence, how do you not become toxic? Like how do you give people space to make mistakes, to be imperfect to learn?
[00:15:31] Zeno Rocha: That’s a very fine line, so I’m glad you brought it up. Like there are many times that I felt like, oh wow, like. Maybe like if, if I continue down that path, that that’s what’s gonna show up. But what I’ve realized, like there’s always this battle when we’re building something of like, if you want high quality, that means it’s gonna take a lot of time.
Or if you want something that’s gonna be very fast, okay, we’re [00:16:00] gonna ship next week or today or tomorrow, then the quality bar is gonna be low. There’s always that tension, right? Yeah. Between those two things, and when you’re trying to, like, if you think from that perfectionist brain, then what you’re gonna do is like, yeah.
High quality and, and it’s gonna take time. The speed is gonna be low. I truly believe you can do both. If you look at scope and we cut scope relentlessly, like we are always like, okay, we’re not gonna ship something we’re not proud of. We’re not gonna ship crap, but we need to ship fast. So how do you do that?
Like, oh, we thought about these four use cases, we’re just gonna focus on three of them, or two of them, or one of them if necessary. So I, I push the team a lot about that and culture wise. What I try to like steal on the team is that mentality of like doing something that is so good, but so good that inspires others, right?
So they have to go to the [00:17:00] recent website and be like, wow, I wanna copy this. And when they do copy, we want to be proud that they copy, not like a bitter about it. Yeah. You know? So I would like ask the team, the designers, the engineers, like, okay, who do you admire? And then they would say like, oh, Guillermo from Versa, or Patrick from Stripe, right?
Okay, we’re gonna release this feature and we’re gonna tweet about it. How can we tweet this in a way that when Patrick sees it, they will be copying that link, go into the stripe, slack, and sharing with the Stripe team like, Hey guys, this is awesome. We should copy this. We should be inspired by this. So that puts the bar like very high because now you’re like, okay, how do I impress my hero?
If we’re shooting for that, you, you are probably gonna be able to build something that’s better than what you’re thinking. So yeah, we, we try to be an aspiring brand and doing work that’s okay is easy doing work that inspires, [00:18:00] it’s a. Huge challenge.
[00:18:04] Victoria Melnikova: It sounds like a lot of pressure, but even listening to you talking about it, I get excited.
I’m like, Yeah, because I understand what you’re talking about. Because when I was on your website, that’s the feeling I got. And we talk a lot about being proactive rather than being reactive. Right? And this is something that you bring up, right? Thinking about your ICP or your heroes or whatever, and thinking about how would that exact person.
See this message, right? Like, how would they think about our product or our offering? Was it always like that for you? Like do you always have that customer experience kind of like focus?
[00:18:44] Zeno Rocha: I think this doesn’t have to be a rule for everyone listening and, and thinking about building their their own thing, but for us it was because we were entering a super crowded market.
Like email APIs exist for 10 plus years, 15 plus years. [00:19:00] The players in that industry, they’re super established. Like they have their, their piece of the, the pie and they take advantage of that. So for us coming into this market, like how are we gonna be different? We’re not ai, we’re not like invading like crazy.
Of course we have like some innovations here and there, but it’s not like we are changing the way the world operates. So we just gotta. Come with like a very fresh brand, a a 10 X product, which is super hard. And so everything about it like, okay, we have to build in public because none of our competitors do the color palette.
Like it’s all white and blue, or white and red, white and yellow. We’re gonna go dark mode first and it has to be that way. ‘cause we need to stand out. The Rubik’s cube you see rotating on the page. Like, you’re not gonna get that on our competitor’s websites, but this is what you’re [00:20:00] getting here. You know?
So from day one, everything had to be like a a, a notch up. And I remember joining YC and thinking like, okay, we’re gonna be the best company in this batch, not the 10th for the 15th. The best one. So even like how we bought our domains, like people are buying like, oh something, do I owe something? Dot ai or something, and we’re like, no, we’re getting a super strong.com domain, a dictionary reward.
If we, if we can, and something that’s related to our business, it just needs to be something cool. And so even for like something that could seem as small as a domain. For us was super important. So I and I I didn’t want to get like a get send.com or get recent.com. No, it’s recent.com. So the Twitter handle, we had recent labs in the beginning.
I hated that with like all my heart. Yeah. But because we couldn’t get recent and the [00:21:00] moment and I, I was fighting like, like we need just recent, you know, now we are fighting that battle with YouTube. It’s hard to get the, the YouTube handle. Like all of these things are part of that. You know, if you take that one thing seriously, then everything else you take seriously, right?
As a brand. So that was really important to us.
[00:21:22] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s talk about YC for a second. So before you even launched, you had something like thousands of signups on your wait list. How did you manage that?
[00:21:32] Zeno Rocha: This was like years in the making. I remember I created my Twitter account back in 2009 and I, with every single open source project I had.
I tried to be as public as I could, and I remember when I was still living in Brazil back in 2014 or something, I started to tweet in English instead of Portuguese and all my friends, they were like, wow, that guy, such as Knob, like who he thinks he is or something like that. [00:22:00] But I was already having that mentality of like, I’m building for the international market.
I’m not building for a specific country or geo. I’m building for everyone. So if you have that mentality like from the start, then the way you operate changes. So it doesn’t matter where you live, what matters is like who you’re serving. So I remember seeing a lot of companies on YC that were like very geocentric or, or center around like specific language and we’re like, no, no, no, we’re not gonna do that at all.
This is an international company serving international market. We can be anywhere and, and that’s great. It doesn’t matter where the team is located, but. Focusing on, on a specific place. So yeah, that was a, a big part of like just building that audience early on, building that founder brand. Even today, every morning I wake up and I feel like it’s a duty for myself to like continue to [00:23:00] evolve that founder brand because a lot of prospects are gonna come through that, not for the company’s branch.
And we have to like, have those two brands like, uh, uh, at the, the best capacity they can. And just having like a, a fresh, like the wait list. Like I remember we already had the Rubik’s Cube for example, like from from the start. And because we already wanted Yeah, like you needed the mo we needed a mooch and you gotta earn it.
You can have a strategy or an idea, but like, you gotta earn it. And for us, if we wanted to have the quality mooch, we would have to put it to work in.
[00:23:38] Victoria Melnikova: And your co-founding team, you’re friends, right? You were friends before Yes. You, you started
[00:23:43] Zeno Rocha: Yeah.
[00:23:44] Victoria Melnikova: Business together.
[00:23:45] Zeno Rocha: That’s right. So I used to work with Boo, who’s my CTO at work Os and my CO we used to work at Liferay and those are two people that I knew, Johnny, my CEO for a long time.
But Boo, [00:24:00] I was, I think I, I. I’ve worked with him for like a year, a year and a half. So I see like co-founder stories, people that went to school together, they know each other for 15 years and so on. That was not my case with Boo. But he had something that was so special. He was able to be vulnerable and not be afraid of being vulnerable.
So he would come and say like, yeah, I’m not feeling great today. So I didn’t like in a daily standup, right. I wasn’t productive, but it was a day I kept watching YouTube videos, but you know what? Like tomorrow I’m gonna make it up for it and I feel much better now. And, and, and that’s it. And I just felt like something really powerful, like zero ego, like absolutely no ego.
And that was really important to me. Like if I’m starting a company with someone, we gotta have that because I’ve seen ego destroying cultures elsewhere. So. That was the only [00:25:00] thing, like internally that I could feel like, okay, this is a great co-founder. And as time went by, there were many moments that I was like, wow, I’m glad he exists in my life.
You know, YC pushes a lot for you to have a co-founder, and I never really got it. There was one day that I was traveling to New York and this was like a big event and I was going to. Meet like some executives in the stock exchange. I’m like, wow, this is big, right? So I traveled there and then as I’m entering the building and remember this, it was so vivid.
I can feel it in my bones ‘cause it’s so traumatic. I get a call and then it’s our alerting system saying like, oh, there’s a downtime. And I’m like, wow, there’s a downtime. But I have a meeting with like the Warner Brothers executive in like 10 minutes. What am I gonna do? And I, I’m like, I, I cannot deal with that because I, I need to be that [00:26:00] become head space, you know?
I, I need to project confidence to that guy and, and, and tell them like, yeah, recent is the best thing that exists in the world, you know, but at this very moment, yeah, like, there’s like a situation happening. So I remember just telling Bill like, boo, I cannot deal with this. Good luck, man, and I’m here for you and I trust you.
And then I just put my phone in airplane mode and, and went in and, and that’s the level of trust you need to have, you know, that’s the beauty of having a co-founder because you can have those moments and yeah, like it, it’s great. And yeah, I’m super thankful that they are in my life because it will be very, very hard to do this without them.
[00:26:41] Victoria Melnikova: Do you feel like your skillset compliment each other?
[00:26:44] Zeno Rocha: It does. Even though I’m technical and I’m pushing code every day now my code is much more superficial than it used to be, right? Even though I can help with operations and stuff like that, [00:27:00] that’s not the place I really wanna spend my time. You know, I’m really good at product, I’m good at marketing, and that’s the my, my Genius zone, and they have their own genius zones.
And BOO is like super ultra technical. Super low key. You, you don’t even see a photo of him online, like he has an avatar, like you can’t see his face. So it’s a different personality and Johnny is like so focused on culture and so focused on like making everything eternally work well and function well.
I don’t want to deal with payroll, I don’t want to deal with like those things. So I think it really helps to, to have those skills. We could all do a little bit of each other’s work, and we do step in into each other’s areas many times to cover and to help think through the problems and stuff. But yeah, having a, a corner of your own, I think it’s important.
[00:27:52] Victoria Melnikova: It’s so interesting how you talk about the genius zone. So it’s not just about things that you’re good at, right? There are things that you’re better than anyone [00:28:00] else at. Even if you are technical, your strength is not there, you know, it’s something else and it’s so important to be so kind of like aware of, of your genius zone.
And for me personally, for example, like recording videos or like posting something quick is much easier than for my engineers, you know? And because it comes so easy, sometimes it’s really easy to dismiss it. Have you ever felt that that okay, it’s so easy. Yeah. Like what’s so, you know, cool about it, or you are hyper aware of like your genius zone.
[00:28:37] Zeno Rocha: It takes time. It takes a lot of self-awareness and self-reflection to even be able to identify what you’re good at. Because I think when you’re starting a, a startup, like there’s just so many things you can do. And in the beginning, for example, I could have spent a lot of energy in engineering. But we needed someone to be thinking [00:29:00] about distribution and we wouldn’t have those 20,000 people on the wait list if there wasn’t someone thinking about that.
So at all times we had to be like aware that, and those things change as well. So as time goes by, you realize like, oh, internally this is the place where I get the most energy from. So for example, fighting the abusers. I don’t get energy from that at all. Like I’m drained. I feel bad about it and I feel stressed because you’re always like in, in fighting mode.
It’s always like a game of mouths and, and, and cat where they never stop and you also cannot stop. You have to like, they are innovating and we have to innovate as well to block them. I hate that game. I don’t want to be in that game. But the game of like building something that people enjoy, they’re inspired by that.
Raises the bar for the whole industry, not only for ourselves. I love that game. So that, that’s a game that [00:30:00] I, I, I get energy from. So like I think that’s a good way of framing. Like I think you find your, your genius zone when you understand like, where’s the place that I get energy from? Of course it’s hard to, because I love coding, and coding is also a escape hatch for me.
Things are, you know, like complicated on the sales side, which is not my, my, my favorite area. I go to coding so easily. I’m like, oh yeah, there’s this thing. It’s so important. We need to build it. This feature is so important. Then I go there and I have to stop myself too, because then you get into this comfort zones.
That’s not really like where the company needs you to be. So it’s so tricky. Like every single day I’m bouncing between those things.
[00:30:46] Victoria Melnikova: So we work with about 40 developer tool startups each year. So this is something that I see time and time again, right? Like, oh, I need, we need to perfect this. We need to make this product perfect.
We cannot launch, you know, and it continues for a long [00:31:00] time because it’s such a safe space. You know, when you’re not visible, you are not vulnerable and. You can just kind of like creating tasks for yourself that are super important to do. Shifting that mindset is actually painful. Like it’s not an easy thing to do because it forces you to do things that you’re not comfortable with.
Do you have kind of like a recipe for how you make yourself do things that feel scary?
[00:31:27] Zeno Rocha: I do. I try to seek the truth as much as possible. And when you’re in that mindset, for example. We launched a new AI product for you to create email templates, and I remember like, oh, I have like some idea of how this would look like, some confidence, but.
I don’t want to put like everything in that one basket. Like I want the market to tell me is this a product or is this a feature, for example. So almost like detaching yourself from your beliefs and just trying to seek the [00:32:00] truth. I’ll let the market tell me if this is good or or bad, and I’ll try to cut scope as much as possible.
I will have like. A paid plan from day one, because that’s a way for me to get to the truth and not just like be hiding behind like GitHub stars. That’s so easy when you’re building a developer tools like, oh, I have these many GitHub stars, or I have these many people on your wait list. It doesn’t matter.
Like in the end, it’s how many people are paying. And even in that sales mindset, I remember in the beginning for me it was always about like, oh, how do I move? This one prospect, this one person from this stage of the pipeline to the next stage. And now the way I feel it is like how do I get to the know faster?
And when I try to get to the know, it’s hard because I don’t wanna get the know, of course, right. Rejection, it’s hard for every human being. For me personally, I’m a people [00:33:00] pleaser. It’s hard like, and I have to like fight that. That nature to be like, no, I want to get to know as fast as possible, because then it can move to the next and to the next, and finding like, okay, what’s really blocking them?
If I push for the no, then they will tell me like, yeah, we cannot close because you guys don’t have this, or because you don’t have like HEPA compliant or like, whatever the the reason is, doesn’t matter. But I need to find that objection as fast as possible. ‘cause there are many other companies that should be pursuing or should be thinking about.
[00:33:32] Victoria Melnikova: That’s so interesting because like, if you think about a, a deal that is closed and taken a while to close, it already feels like there is, it’s not a fit, right? It’s like, okay, there is something that I don’t quite understand yet. It’s really hard to close. I’m sure there is something, right? Like, uh.
A concern on their side or something blocking the decision or whatever it is, and you try so hard to make the ends meet. [00:34:00] But in reality, I think you’re right. Like you want to hear the no faster because you’re wasting all this time and all this energy just like down the drain. This is not a deal that’s gonna happen unless, yeah.
You know? Yeah. There are different scenarios. Yeah. But you know, and maybe. You know, the answer is somewhere else, like not in this deal. Yeah. That’s so interesting. And in the moment it’s hard to say no. Yeah. To, to an opportunity, you know? So it takes courage in a way. And like looking at your bio in general, I feel like you’ve taken a few kind of like leaps of faith.
If you think about it like moving to the us, you know, or. Going from the VP of developer experience at work os to starting your own company or building in the space that’s already overcrowded. You know, there are so many kind of bets that you’ve taken and you do it with such confidence.
But I’m sure it’s not always easy. I’m sure like, you know, in your mind [00:35:00] you are, you know, win the options and it takes you a while to make a decision. How do you go about those difficult decisions? Like do you have a strategy as how you approach those, or it’s something that you just do on a whim and figure it out?
[00:35:16] Zeno Rocha: I think it’s more like a mindset. I remember watching this video from Steve Jobs and he was saying like how like everything in the world was built by someone, right? Yes. You know, that one’s a classic. Yes, yes, yes. And if you push in one place, something pulls up on the other place. Right. And I try to look at the world from that angle, like, okay, this desk, yeah.
It was built by someone. Is this like. The, the best desk that could exist. I don’t know. Maybe it should be a different shape. It should be a different size or, yeah. Different material that no one has ever done before. And that’s something that, when I think about my daughter, I wanna instill that in her, like, yeah, everything you see around you, it can be shaped and, and [00:36:00] influenced by you.
It doesn’t mean it’s gonna be easy, it doesn’t mean you’re gonna succeed. I had a lot of projects that failed for sure, like a graveyard of side projects that I can look back, but I try to approach it from that angle and as you progress in your career, as you get like the early wins, that gives you more confidence to then take that bigger step.
So yeah, just like my experience at work os. It completely influenced my decision to start recent because I saw that business from the inside and I saw how something as boring as SSO and single sign on saml, like no one wants to deal with that. You know, when there’s something that no one wants to do with.
That’s actually a great business idea, you know? And turns out no one wants to deal with email. They all hate it. They all like don’t, don’t wanna think about spam folders and the priority inbox, like all that kind of stuff. So let me go into a space like that. [00:37:00] That business was so sticky. Like once you integrate with single sign-on or any authentication provider, you don’t wanna move to another one.
If it’s working, you just keep it. Same for email, like you integrate with email, you’re like, yeah, just set it and forget it. Right? So those things, like as you see them for yourself and you see those machines like working, you get more confidence. So I try to approach from that angle. Yeah, like it, but it’s hard.
It doesn’t mean it’s easy and you gotta always find like, okay, what’s different about it? Even if it, like, for us, like a big insight was like, yeah, let’s focus on brand. And people are like, yeah, but brand alone doesn’t, you know, solve all the problems. Like yeah, we know. But we’re gonna layer that with other things over time and we have like react as an angle.
And then that was a way for us to get into that ecosystem and focus on, on JavaScript, on on the node ecosystem. So [00:38:00] yeah, you keep layering those bets and getting confidence over time.
[00:38:04] Victoria Melnikova: So throughout your biography, open Source has been a huge part of your philosophy of everything that you do. And I mean, react Mail was you just posted the other day, that was like the top male agent.
Right? So when you think about open source, and obviously for reason too, I mean, in your conversation with the investors, you know How your stance on open source. Impacted the deals that you were discussing and in general, how important it is for you to have, you know, open source offering for your customers?
[00:38:42] Zeno Rocha: I feel like open source is more than a distribution channel or distribution strategy, and. It’s more like a lifestyle. So that’s how I try to approach it. Like how do I open source my thinking as a founder? Okay, that’s through Twitter. How do I open source [00:39:00] my company? That’s through the handbook. So I try to apply that lifestyle everywhere.
That’s why we’re here. Yeah. You know, sharing the, the strategies and what worked and what didn’t, and for us. It was all about like, okay, this company, this idea, it doesn’t seem like an open source project necessarily, but we need an open source component. So I knew from the get go, the reason will never be open source.
That’s not a plan. We’re not gonna do it. If you’re waiting for it, don’t count on it. But we are gonna batch heavily on open source, especially in the beginning. So I remember. Writing this master plan inspired by the Tesla one, and there was just only like three bullet points. The first one was build an open source project.
Second one was establish ourselves as email experts. And then the third one was launch a SaaS around that open source project. [00:40:00] And that’s how we layered, like we were building recent and we already like, okay, this seems like a good idea and, and so on. Then it came to a point where like, okay, we’re maybe getting close to launching how we’re gonna launch it out of nowhere without even thinking about it.
No, let’s do an open source project first. And then we, we launched recent later, so that’s what we did, like launching the open source projects in December. And then in January we announced recent and that played really well. Just thinking about the, the story that we’re gonna tell, like, Hey, we’re giving first.
So it’s the whole. Jab jab, right Hook strategy. You know, like you give, first, you give, you give, you give, and then you ask. So that was our plan, like let’s give, give, give. And then you know, when people are already adopting React to send their emails, now they need a platform to send it. Oh, here’s the platform and this is the place we’re gonna make money.
This is the place we’re gonna charge.
[00:40:56] Victoria Melnikova:
[00:40:57] Zeno Rocha: Like innovating how email [00:41:00] templates are built. We’re gonna invest on that in terms of r and t. We’re not gonna charge for that. This is where we, we feel like it’s the best place to charge. Uh, and that turned out to be like a good strategy. So I highly recommend folks to have some component, even if it’s not your whole thing.
Right? Like call.com post hog, it’s their thing, like their, you can actually run their super base. You can run their whole product. You don’t necessarily need to go down that far. You can, and it’s amazing if you can do it, but there’s some products that you can’t, and in our case, that was the case because of all the, the security portion.
So then let’s make this component of,
[00:41:39] Victoria Melnikova: do you have a certain strategy as to how to kind of convert those potential paying customers from the open source base?
[00:41:48] Zeno Rocha: Some of that is counterintuitive because. I remember I wrote those docs myself, like, here’s React email. You can actually use SendGrid and use Mayo and [00:42:00] use postmark and use Cs like all of our competitors.
Here’s how you use it with them and. I was very intentional about like, no, we’re gonna promote our competitors here and we’re gonna show recent right next to them. The only difference, like it’s like a little banner. Hey, recent was created by the same creators of React email, and that shows the level of confidence of like, like this product is built for you.
If you want to use it with something else, that’s fine. Actually love it when people use with something else, because that means maybe one day they can be recent users. But we, we don’t try as hard to be like, oh, let’s look at everyone that star the repo. Let’s get their email addresses, let’s put them in the funnel.
I try to be as organic as possible in that world, but what I try to do is every single day post about recent and every single day. Be top of mind. ‘cause one day when people do need a new email provider, or finally need to add [00:43:00] email functionality to their apps reason, needs to be the first thing that pops on their mind.
So I try not to convince them at all times, but I try to be in front of them at all times. So the moment they need something, they know the, the answer is already there on their subconsciously.
[00:43:18] Victoria Melnikova: Do you ever struggle with what you want to write about
[00:43:20] Zeno Rocha: or, oh, yeah. Every single day.
[00:43:24] Victoria Melnikova: I thought you were just overflowing with ideas.
[00:43:26] Zeno Rocha: No, not at all. And I, I tried to create some, like systems for myself. Like, yeah, I have this notion page like, okay, ideas for tweets, and then it’s like, oh, tell a story about the past, or. Try to create a listicle with like things that you, you think are important or like, I have like all these methods to help me think about what to write because I wake up.
I’m not excited to write about anything. I’m actually, I have so many problems I need to look at when I wake up here in sf, my whole team is already working at [00:44:00] full speed and I know I have like one hour to tweet before the day starts, so I’m like, okay, I just gotta get this out of the way and then continue with my day.
So, yeah, I definitely don’t overflow if I choose.
[00:44:15] Victoria Melnikova: So your team is distributed and there is this whole debate. Our team is distributed too, and we try to make it work, right? And we are quite spread like from Japan to San Francisco. Wow. Like the whole thing.
[00:44:27] Zeno Rocha: That’s crazy.
[00:44:28] Victoria Melnikova: And sometimes it’s super effective because they can work on something during the day.
Somebody in Portugal picks it up, work on that during the day. And then, you know, here we work with clients so easy. How do you make it work and do you believe that you need to be in the same office heads down to be productive?
[00:44:46] Zeno Rocha: I’m not like super, I don’t know, religious about like remote as as many people that are like, oh, this is the only way to make it work.
Or you see that with like so many [00:45:00] topics, right? Like some people that are like, oh, VC is evil. Yeah. And bootstrapping a business is the only way to go. I bootstrap a business before. I think it’s beautiful. It’s amazing. That’s what I did with Dracula, that that was so cool. But you know, there’s certain types of business that needs to be VC backed and it’s fine.
So for me, that’s the same for being remote or not. If all your network is in a specific city already, you grew up here like, you know, like you went to school here, like, yeah, just make it here. If your whole, like all your friends, the people you met online are all distributed, maybe that that makes sense.
So for me it was just more about like, what fits this company, this group of people. And the remote thing was, was the way to go. And we, we get the same benefits as you are describing. Like we have a person in South Africa, you know, like how amazing is that, that we can serve that time zone and we might be sleeping and that person can help with support and or deal with an incident.
[00:46:00] So yeah, there’s just so many advantages, like being able to explore the whole. Talent that exists in the world versus just concentrated in a specific city. And I’ve seen many people like change their minds along the way. Like many of my friends from yc, they were like fully remote and that’s why we connected in the first place.
Now they’re buying offices and they’re like having everyone move to San Francisco or somewhere else. I think both can work. So, um, I think it’s more about like, what are you committing? The hybrid one is the the most challenging one. So I think it’s better if you go all in on remote or all in on in person, because the hybrid one is like the thing that disconnects most people like, oh, you have some people in a room, they’re all like watching on tv, and then you have like some people their homes.
This is tricky, but. You know, I don’t even know, like for the future of recent, like what’s gonna be like when we have 500 people or a hundred people or [00:47:00] 50, like maybe it’ll change, but right now remote serves as well. We, of course, there’s so many challenges. You know, everyone knows it’s super hard, but if you’re intentional about it, like, like the handbook and those things, they help.
[00:47:15] Victoria Melnikova: Do you feel like it’s still important for you personally to be NSF?
[00:47:18] Zeno Rocha: Yeah, at least in the beginning I felt like. If my mentality was, if I was a board member of this company and the founder came to me and said, Hey, we’re gonna build a remote company. I’ll be like, yeah, go for it. It’s fine. It works. But you as a founder, you gotta be here, at least in the beginning.
So that’s how I, I think about it. Like, okay, I gave myself like three years that I had to be here. And I had like all these crazy stories. My car was stolen here, like just like a mess. Like there, there’s so much stuff that happened when I was here, but I was like very committed. Now I’m more open, like now I’m traveling everywhere.
I try to be with the team a lot and I felt like investing [00:48:00] on the team is sometimes more important than trying to be in a specific place and in investing my time on trying to close like a specific company or. So I’m, I’m way more conscious about like, how I spend my time and Yeah. And then the city doesn’t matter.
Like what matters is where my team is and if I have to travel to see them in person, I, I do. Or if I have to travel to be on the same time zone as they are, I will do that. Whatever it takes to, to keep them motivated and, and always trying to raise the bar for.
[00:48:33] Victoria Melnikova: So this is second to last question, Uhhuh, and it’s about events.
[00:48:37] Zeno Rocha: Nice.
[00:48:38] Victoria Melnikova: Because you, you are everywhere. Honestly, like any event that I can think of, you’re there probably with a booth too. How do you make those decisions? Yeah. Do you have specific goals in mind?
[00:48:50] Zeno Rocha: Yeah.
[00:48:51] Victoria Melnikova: Is it ever difficult?
[00:48:52] Zeno Rocha: This is an experiment for us. I personally been to a lot of events myself, so I [00:49:00] know what it takes to be at an event and the mental toll of being at an event and how tiring it is.
So there’s so many problems and challenges, uh, in terms of like going to events. But now I’m on this seed of like, okay, how do we position the brand in places that are not just online? There’s an undeniable component of like being in person and how that affects how you perceive a brand. So we are just trying now, so it’s hard to tell like.
We don’t have like a goal of like scanning these many badges at the booth and that’s how we’re gonna justify. But we try to keep it fresh and like have like different ideas with like the hot sauce at the super base event. And that’s where we’ve met. And like those things they. They, they help you keep on your toes and it helps you like expand the umbrella of what your brand looks like as well.
That’s why I love doing Lounge R [00:50:00] because you can also stretch the brand a little bit further than you think,
[00:50:05] Victoria Melnikova: and I think you and IA met at Laracon, right? Or something like that.
[00:50:09] Zeno Rocha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arena. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:50:11] Victoria Melnikova: So it’s like you have quite a breadth of different events and you are very present and you try to be creative, which is cool.
And I know it takes a lot of energy and it is, it gets tiring.
[00:50:25] Zeno Rocha: It can be a huge distraction. Huge. You, you’re putting so much money if you’re doing a booth, like we did the emails that changed the world. Yes. Yeah. I loved it. I loved it. That was cool. Right. But that takes like a lot of brainstorming and going to the store and fighting the piece of wood and like that kind of stuff like that.
It’s so much better. You record a video and put it on YouTube, you’re gonna reach more people, like even a thousand views. It’s better than like the 200 people that are at the event that are not gonna all interact with your booth. So it’s [00:51:00] super difficult, but there’s just something that you can’t really put a price tag on, like the right people at the right place that are looking, they’re like, oh, okay.
Like one speaker that’s there that, that’s now seeing your booth.
[00:51:12] Victoria Melnikova: And I mean, super base select. I love the event. I was like squeaking the whole time. Yeah. It, it is just, it was awesome because it was so small. Yeah. I think like the, the feeling there was just great overall
[00:51:24] Zeno Rocha: and you want to position your brand as peers.
Right. So for us it’s like, okay, super base is insane now. Right? Like superb. They just raised it on the round. We wanna be perceived at the same level of super base, even though we’re not. Remotely close to how much money they raise or other metrics or number of users or whatever, right? But that’s the same for other events.
Like we gotta be like, we wanna be perceived as. As equals, even though you’re, you’re not there yet.
[00:51:50] Victoria Melnikova: I mean, and now with Vibe coding, you’re also serving the same audience that give them that huge boost, right? Yes. With Bolt and all of the, all of the [00:52:00] tools that people use for, for vibe coding, so for sure.
Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. So my final question, and this is my favorite question, I call it warm fuzzies. Mm. And the question goes like this, what makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:52:14] Zeno Rocha: It’s hard because I feel like I’m a founder, I’m a dad, I’m a husband because like you’re always trying to bounce everything and trying to be good at all these things, and it’s so damn hard, right?
So I don’t feel great. Most of the time I actually feel like I’m either dropping the ball in one place or another. But now as the team is growing, like I wasn’t expecting to be as fulfilled as I am in terms of like. Building a company and building this place that people are excited about. Yeah. I saw a tweet from our team member from South Africa, and he’s such a hard person to read.
Like you. You wouldn’t really get like, okay, all his reactions and how he’s feeling. He’s more closed [00:53:00] naturally. So then he was just reading about like how he’s having like the greatest time and waking up super excited and he never felt that way at work. So I saw that, I was like, wow. And we are providing that space for him, like we are building this out of nowhere.
So you think about a company, think about a brand that’s such a artificial concept. It’s just, it’s just a group of people that are hanging there that are like hanging out there and trying to build something cool, right? So I got a lot of, yeah, like energy and I’m super happy when I, when I see that. Wow.
Like, yeah, if it wasn’t for us, like this place wouldn’t exist. I’m sure they’ll have amazing jobs. They’re probably making even more money than there are here, but, ‘cause they’re so amazing. But yeah, I just love that.
[00:53:47] Victoria Melnikova: Finally, I want to provide you space to talk about recent, so if you were to encourage our listeners to try it
How can they find it? Where should they start?
[00:53:57] Zeno Rocha: Yeah, definitely go to recent.com [00:54:00] and check out what we have over there. It’s an emo API that helps you, you know, get to humans and other spam folder. That’s what we are all about and we can help with like transactional emails, like the ones you send with reset passwords.
Welcome emails, but also your marketing ones. So if you’re sending a campaign, if you’re sending like product update every month, recent can help with that. And yeah, we’re just trying to build something cool that’s fresh, that’s unique and, and raise the the bar for, for the whole industry.
[00:54:31] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you so much, Diana.
This was amazing and so many insights. So much inspiration. I. I really hope that all the energy that you produce for the world gets reciprocated and you guys just, you know, grow and make more people happy by employing them. Yeah,
[00:54:51] Zeno Rocha: yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:54:53] Victoria Melnikova: Thanks. Thank you for catching yet another episode of Deaf Propulsion Labs.
We at [00:55:00] Evil Martians transform growth stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. If you are a developer tool needs help with product design development or SRE, visit evil martians.com/dev tools. See you in the next
