Converting open source users without hard-selling

Resend founder Zeno Rocha reveals how he built an $18M Series A email API company by obsessing over brand, giving away React Email for free, and rejecting the "ship crap fast" mentality. He shares why seeking rejection accelerates sales, how zero-ego hiring beats talent, and why most dev tools fail by hiding behind GitHub stars instead of charging money.

Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-zeno-rocha-resend

Follow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_pod

Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools

Links:

Resend: https://resend.com/

Zeno Rocha on X: https://x.com/zenorocha

Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians

Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en