0:00It's like, oh my gosh, how are we ever going to beat Sang Grid? It's just impossible. And then earlier this year, we crossed the number of uh downloads from Sang Grid. And I was like, that's insane. And now we're more than double.
0:12So recent now is powering 4.3 million users as of this morning. Uh we have all sorts of customers like uh Warner Brothers, HBO, there was a Japanese gang that recently came. They they brought like maybe 20,000 domains at recent like those are 20,000 different TLGs registered in different domain registars and we are 10 million AR company. I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're hund00
0:42million company and my daughter doesn't want to play with me. It's not interested in me and we're not that close. So we are we're building the infrastructure and going like down to the metal now. But it's a big project. Like we've been working for months now and we're gonna announce something soon about Okay. We're in a studio with Zeno Roachcha. Roa Roachcha.
1:05Rocha from recent. Uh you and I go back to your VS Code theme days.
1:12When you're just an indie hacker and I was like, man, uh I don't know what this guy does, but everything he does has taste. And then now you made build an email infrastructure platform. Uh anyway, welcome. You underell just the indie hacker top 20 most active GitHub under 2020 22 very very active open source stuff.
1:30Yeah. Yeah. What's your typical how do you introduce yourself these days?
1:34Yeah. I think I just focus on my recent career for the longest time. Uh even today when I say like oh I created Dracula people know Dracula more than recent but yeah but it's been nice like there's a Yeah, it's changing.
1:49Yeah. What was the impetus for I guess picking email? You know, I think I you know, uh people always have like obviously react email and all those things.
1:59I just don't know if I would have made it a company, you know.
2:02Yeah. If if I knew like how hard email is, I I probably wouldn't start the company either.
2:07Yeah. Were you a primarily JavaScript front end to CSS Jav like I was a front end guy.
2:13No infra, right? No email HTML 5 guy, you know. And I think what was interesting and what draw me to it is like I just look at all the tools uh around that and I've used all of them before. The male guns, the male chimps, the sang grids of the world and I've always felt like man there should be something where um there's just some someone should care about this space.
2:35That's that that's how I felt like you have all these players. It's a massive market, a lot of competitors, but no one that cares about the developer persona.
2:43maybe they care about the marketer, the product manager or whatever, but not for the developer. So, I started just building around that premise of like if this was the the stripe of email, how would that look like? Um, and yeah, the like I had no idea or knew nothing about email. Like I was a user of email, but I have never built like an email pipeline and and all that infrastructure before.
3:06Yeah. I mean like you know typically if you ask me like Postmark was still a thing but like uh and then and then obviously Sang Grid and all these all these guys they're still around but like uh they're not maybe as innovative as someone who's like a new YC startup like trying to try to make it.
3:21Um just to just upfront I like to let people brag a bit. Can you like for people who never heard of recent what are like the the ways that you talk about like the most impressive numbers or logos anything? Yeah. So, Recent now is powering 4.3 million users as of this morning. Uh, we have all sorts of customers like uh Warner Brothers, HBO.
3:42So, customers that are really big and have all sorts of demands, but also a lot of indie hackers and folks who are just building a website, building their own application. And yeah, we just crossed 120,000 paid customers and the endless logo.
3:59Oh my god. Yeah. Do you think this is effective?
4:02You wanted the flex. There. There you go.
4:03You know what? Like in the beginning I felt like I just need to have some sort of social proof and then in the end I was like, you know what? This is actually pretty cool. And I I I honestly like I found companies like Warner Brothers just like on a random Saturday.
4:17Uh I was just this was before AI. So I will go to my database. I'm like, "Oh, let me see who can I put on the website." And I just I did the the most naive thing you can do like let me look at the domains. Yeah.
4:30And let me just filter bys and filter by the small ones. And there was this domain WBG, Warner Brothers Discovery. I didn't know what is WBG.com. And I was like, oh no, Warner Brothers is using us. So yeah, I I I just love featuring customers and yeah, specifically for listeners. One of the reasons I reached out for this interview, one, you know, I'm uh I I should declare up front I am an angel.
4:57Uh when you sent me the memo, it was super simple. you were like, "Look, uh, Mailchimp has exited, Postmark has exited, Send Grid is under Twilio, who is doing this?"
5:06And I was like, "Okay, yeah, seems seems right."
5:10Honestly, like in terms of like the the pitches I get, I've invested in about like 30 plus companies. That was like one of the most straightforward things ever.
5:17And then uh secondly, I I don't like to add API keys, right? Like I like to have everything on one platform, one API, one API key everything. So, uh, Cloudflare has built-in email and I had a project and I set up my Cloudflare email domain DNS, all that junk, the DKIM, what have you, right? I don't know all the alphabet super stuff.
5:38And I already had this set up and then I was like, okay, well, I want to add another sort of email thing.
5:43Bloody model said, you must add resend.
5:46And I'm like, who the resend that like, you know, even already I have a cloudflare email set up and is still recommending it. It's on the on the screen now.
5:55This is him praising and like I don't need resend, but you want me to keep adding resend.
6:00Yeah. So, okay. Who did you bribe in OpenAI in Andropic to get resent on there?
6:06Oh, man. I I wish there was someone to bribe because yeah, I will definitely be paying them.
6:12But I do personally spend a lot of time on that topic. Like that's something that I feel like every generation that's why I was so interested to build this thing in the first place. like every generation you have those tools that define that moment, right? We remember the Heroku days.
6:27I mean, Nellifyel, you know, and and so to me, it was like, yeah, there's room for a new generation. And this new generation is not going to be distributed in the same places that it was before. So, since the beginning, I was like very focused on, okay, we we got to be number one when someone asks about that.
6:45Yeah, you're very number one. Cloud code recommending 60% plus of the time. I think it'll be fun to see the playbook.
6:51How do you how do you win that? Um I do want to get back into Okay, so you said you had no idea why email, how to start email. I think a lot of people actually don't understand what goes into making a service like this, right? Uh you might cuz you've set it up. Some people would just, you know, okay, I can use Twilio, I can use Send Grid, I can use you guys, but what goes into making a tool to just mass send emails? What do people not think about? Yeah, there's just a lot of different things you can do because landing on the inbox, especially when
7:20you're doing high volume is different from like when you're scaling just like an an app where you throw GPU at the problem or you just scale more vertically or horizontally, whatever it is. With email, you got to respect the rules of the game and how Gmail behaves is differently from Outlook and differently from Yahoo mail. And it's an industry that is fascinating because it's so old school and it relies a lot on on contacts. But what we found early
7:50on was like okay we we knew nothing about this world. And so and and coming from this perspective like extremely naive was the best thing that ever happened. Uh like honestly like it was the best thing because like there's no preconception of what is right, what is wrong. So for them, for example, every single app you go and then first thing you see is like this form that you got to fill out about like how many emails are going to send, what's the volume, what are you trying to do, and then you
8:18go through a human verification process, two days later they accept you or or deny you. Most of the times they're going to deny you. And I was like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like why are we blocking people? So I know I'm going to remove that friction completely and the friction will be on us. We're going to figure that out. Of course, now four years, three years in into this business, I get it why they do that.
8:42There's just so much fraud and fishing and abuse across the board. I don't talk too much publicly about that, but we build like all sorts of crazy systems internally for that. But to your question, like how you architect that.
8:56Like for example, when you're sending an email to 100,000 people, if you just throw 100,000 emails uh like to Gmail, what Gmail will do is they're going to throttle the emails because it's way too much. And they they want to see the engagement. So what you do is like they see like, okay, are people opening the emails? Are people archiving, deleting right away or or not interacting? Okay, depending on those initial uh interactions, then what I'm going to do
9:24with the rest of the emails will dictate that that beginning. So, there are clever things you can do where 100,000 people put the most engaged audience members in the beginning of that queue.
9:36You have to put that in a queue. You You need to It's an art and a science where you got to space out each batch. So, and space out between the different providers, too. And yeah, now we're like buying different IP blocks. You got to look at the history of the IP blocks, distributed folks into different IP pools, and then balance the IP pools over time. So, it's a whole crazy infrastructure game.
10:03How automated can that be or is there a lot of human judgment still?
10:07Yeah, it's a lot of automation for sure. Uh and I think over time we learned that okay this is how fast we can send for new customers. Of course if you're sending more then maybe you can send faster but there's a a throttle that we have to do to protect you as a sender.
10:27So like what Gmail and all these players will want to see is like a graph that is consistently sending more and more versus what most people do which is like you send once to a big audience and then you never send again and then it's empty and then boom you send it again once a week twice a week.
10:46Yeah. And those are patterns that an abuser will have. Right. So the whole way of thinking about email marketing and and email in general is you you need to do exactly what an abuser wouldn't do. It's the opposite of that. So what what's a abuser do? They buy a domain.
11:03We have now like there was a Japanese gang that recently came. they they brought like maybe 20,000 domains at recent like those are 20,000 different TLGs registered in different domain registars and we look for every single factor there. So they they come in it's a domain that was bought two days ago. So very new domains they they get bad reputation.
11:27Then you you look at the website is it returning 200 or basic things like that.
11:32Some people don't even set that up or they do like a lookalike domain. So they're like, "Oh, maybe I'll do another domain for code outreach." That's terrible because it's it looks like you're fishing, right? Like because you're you're using a domain that looks like the same. So all these little things and they just do they send a lot of emails all at once and then they never send again. So you kind of got to reverse engineer how fishing works and and build a platform that does exactly
12:02opposite of that. Do you have a list somewhere or do you recommend people go to some well-known lists?
12:07Yeah, what I've learned is again another thing I didn't know. Email is the type of world where it requires a lot of education but people are not interested in learning right like the platform should do all those things for them. So we added like insights inside the product so people can just apply the insights. So we look at sending patterns and now with AI it's pretty cool too like we have link checkers and spell checkers like all these checkers before
12:35you send. So yeah it's a mix of you're teaching your audience but at the same time the product needs to do the teaching and the more you can bake in the the best practices the better. So one example too when you send an email you can send an HTML version and a plain text version. very early on we were like you know what like this the whole world is changing there are way more agents than than before let's just generate autogenerate the the plain text version
13:04uh of each email we can extract from the HTML the markdown and then just send that so we start sending that automatically and that increased deliverability a ton you know it's so much easier for spam filters to just look at the content reactly without having to parse that uh so those things that we are like oh No, let's bake into that product. And most people don't do that, but we're like, ah, that this makes sense.
13:26But with plain text, there's no tracking, right? Because you can't embed the the image.
13:31So, you don't have open rates.
13:33How do you know you have deliverability if you don't have open rates?
13:36Yeah. This is very interesting because the the industry there are two ways of tracking, right? You have open tracking and click tracking. Open tracking what it does it it includes a one by one GIF uh image a transparent image and then if that image is loaded then you detect that as open. The problem with that is that all the changes that Apple did recently in terms of uh transparency and and data privacy like they read the
14:05emails before it lands if they're doing the summaries and all those kinds of things. So like the open rate as a metric as a whole isn't really as reliable as it used to be because all these spam filters are are checking that before. So then you rely on click tracking. Now click tracking can also be uh difficult because you want the URLs to match the sending domain. You also want the images URLs to match the
14:34sending domain. That's another pattern that an abuser will do. They would host images somewhere else, point links somewhere else, and then they're sending from this domain.
14:44Yeah. I I feel like I have uh used email services that would rewrite like for the link tracking, right? They'll rewrite to their own domain. Yeah.
14:50You're saying that's bad.
14:51That's bad because what happened we did that too at first and then I thought that's normal.
14:56Yeah. But what's bad is when and you have a noisy neighbor problem too where if one of the customers using that click tracking is an abuser and sends a bunch of fishing that domain might get listed on a blacklist and then it takes maybe days or weeks to get out of the blacklist then you're screwed as a business.
15:16Is that pretty common? Like you make it very easy to just sign up free tier send a bunch of email. I would assume you have a lot of spam, a lot of fishing.
15:26But you're able to avoid and this is why Yeah. I think what what was different to me and then this is more like a philosophy, right? So I saw the those other products and the way they behaved and I felt like okay, it's almost like if you were born in a society where you first go to prison and then you have to spend like 18 years in prison. you got to prove that you are a good citizen and then you get out of prison and now you can do the things you want to do. I was always always felt like no I want to
15:54live in a society where I'm born free and if I make a mistake then I I might be punished just a little bit or if I do something like really bad a bad punishment right so that's how I feel about that too like you come in we trust you by default of course again a a naive way of thinking but you know what we're going to trust you by default versus make the whole platform worse for everyone because of those bad uh actors right So we trust you by default but
16:24then what we do differently from others is like at the very first moment like when we notice something is off like by looking at the bounce rates complain rates all the feedback we get from mailbox providers then we block you like very quickly and then we chat with you we try to understand and most of the time it's just misuse it's not abuse so we learned that we need to differentiate skill issue yeah it's a skill issue exactly it's just skill issue I think we learned we have skill issues too we wouldn't have expected
16:53Yeah, email is so important and it's so dirty and it's so secretive and it's just such a I almost just want you to like just tell us everything.
17:02I will say you have a you have a fun page literally your philosophy as you called it. I got lost just reading around this and then there's like a cool you have a pledge that you will make email safer like if you're interested in this stuff you know you you have quite a bit up here.
17:17Yeah. Um okay so uh actually uh I do want to there's this there's a how we scale support there uh I think that's this is uh you you remind me of another uh investment that I had uh Jake from railway cuz also another like very very permissive very developer oriented but also you have to scale support right because the moment someone gets blocked they come to you and say hey like you know don't kick me off your platform yeah how do you scale support man I think we if support was a a
17:44software we're probably on major version four or something. Okay.
17:49Like the very first version was like you me and I was so stressed out. I'm like dude I just need someone to be sitting on the chair. Like it's that simple. I cannot be doing this anymore.
18:02And it was like just anyone. Anyone I don't care. Then you do that. Of course it doesn't go well because you realize very quickly you need someone that will actually try to prevent the tickets from happening in the first place. So then we went to V2 which was like a new version like a new person that we that we ended up hiring that was like okay we're answering the tickets they have domain expertise but they were still like not doing the proactive work of like no let's make sure this is documented
18:32before we we talk about so one policy that we we set it was pretty cool actually is like you can only respond to a ticket with a link. So you cannot just give the answer right away.
18:45You had to stop write a a knowledgebased article, write a docs and then so it takes like an hour and a half maybe for you to answer a ticket. But guess what? Now you're sending that link all over again. Uh so that was super cool and it helped us build that knowledge base. But even so like after that we when we crossed maybe 1 million users. So we had 1 million users back in December and now we have four. So, I can throw people at the
19:13problem, but that's just not going to solve it, right? Like, I I'm just going to keep staffing and and that's how it is. Like, no. So, we really have to rethink like, okay, everything from scratch again. And we want to keep like that free tier. It's not I don't want to get rid of that free tier. I started as an engineer because I was able to use those free products, right? Like we all like if it wasn't for Heroku's free tier and all these other products, like we wouldn't be here. So I want to keep reasoning that way but it took us many
19:43iterations to yeah to get to point of this is like okay it's a domain people don't know a lot about there are actually unique questions that need human support versus you know command K with just you have docs you have a model customer service bots exist right yeah I think right now is much better the there are few things where man there's just so much friction DNS oh my gosh like that's it's always DNS See, it's always CNS, right? Like the majority of the
20:12questions we get today is just like people not able to set that up. And it's fascinating because we're serving a new audience, right? It's an audience that doesn't even know how to troubleshoot.
20:25Like I remember uh last year when lovable came and bolt and vzero, I could tell these are different users. The like they don't know when they have a problem, they are stuck. They don't know how to go past that. And with DNS, that was always the case of like, yeah, they just simply don't know what is a CNAME, what is an A record, txt, where do I put those things? So they they would paste the wrong value or silly things.
20:51By the way, right now I use computer use like codeex or cloud code. Uh, and it just completely manages my DNS records.
20:59It's beautiful, right?
21:00It debugs it. It like digs, you know, and tries all the DNS stuff. Like I don't have to worry about it.
21:05Yeah. One thing that we did like I found this super obscure protocol that like very few people in the industry were like investing on it's called domain connect and it's super interesting by the way and it's something that started like from some domain providers and Oh uh yeah yeah yeah this is like the oaf for domains right exactly that I yeah this is like cloudflare oriented yeah so some people have like cloudflare
21:32is there then we we convinced versel to be there as well and we started like gathering more people. So you have the the two sides right the DNS providers the service providers uh we are the service providers for example and then the DNS providers are implementing but it's a crazy crazy industry like GoDaddy charges like just a lot of money for that it's so weird like Yonas it took us like the the first one it took us like
22:02months to get after that person to like no one really maintains the protocol and things like that but It's beautiful like having a protocol that you can just do an oaf for domains is Yeah. Yeah. So, so for listeners if you're not familiar if you haven't tried it something like that. Uh it's literally like you do use plaid or use like ooth off. You only click buttons you don't type in anything. There's nothing to get wrong. You basically just like sign in and as long as you trust this thing called domain connect which you have confirmed that it is legit then
22:31like it's trust. Like I literally I used it for the first time like two weeks ago. I was like what is this? I've never seen this before.
22:36Yeah. Um, so it's really cool. One of the things that I'm trying to figure out as well is how you like start this company. Like you said, you you you tried to get in touch with the Ionos guy. I'm like I wouldn't dare to start recent without knowing like like having like some guy on the inside at Gmail.
22:52Even now it's like okay, can we vibe code our own email thing?
22:57Clearly no. But that that's that's even with tools today. You did this years ago. Like I've you know you want people at domain like you need the guy, right?
23:05Yeah, but you need to pick up the phone.
23:08Yeah, there were many times that we had to pick up the phone. It's fascinating. Like it's an industry that relies on relationship a lot. Uh and we didn't have those relationships. So, we hired for a few key roles like deliverability roles, folks that have been at Postmark since the beginning or 15 years ago at Mailchimp and then we releveraged that network. Uh but yeah, it's pretty crazy.
23:32But what's interesting now, of course, I didn't know that when I started like I could never predict what was going to happen.
23:39You didn't do any research.
23:40Yeah. No. Like I could never predict like okay what AI was going to do and all that, right? But I think we are in a space where man I'm glad we chose infrastructure. I'm glad we're infrastructure as a service and not a just Yeah. software as a service.
23:54You had a little bit right. You had you made React email the year before. So you did dip your toes in open work.
24:01Yeah. Um and then came the company.
24:03Yeah, React email is our nextjs, right?
24:06So we wanted like an open-source channel for top of the funnel and I remember doing some things very intentionally. If you go to the docs, for example, you'll find there are docs about how do you set this up with Srid and Mailchimp and Mayo Gun. I wrote every single one of those docs over there. Um, and I just wanted like, okay, this is for everyone and we're trying to redefine how this is and it was a strategy of like we're gonna
24:35give give and then we ask uh and if people are is Gary Vee yeah and if people are like building the like the email template using react like now they need a platform to send it where do they do that here's resend. So it was a like a storytelling kind of way of approaching the market like we're going to fix the first part of the the journey which is building the template and then once you have the template now that that problem is fixed you need a
25:04platform to send it here's the platform but uh did you have the idea for resend when you started react email or was it a side project that then became a company we started recent and as we were building resend I was like doing a lot of user research and people were saying like oh the pain of writing the template. I get the the Figma file from my designer. It sucks. Like it's HTML tables and and everything.
25:28They would cut the images, right?
25:32Because there's nothing.
25:33And then there's like a special syntax of HTML that only works on email.
25:37Right. CSS. It's all in line CSS.
25:41Yeah. Inline CSS. That's right. And then like for Outlook, you have like some special comments and then you got to It's such a mess. It's like a It's a mess.
25:50And so like to me the reason that React works is that it is basically a compiler. It's like it's like well somebody writes this once and then as long as you fit the API it's going to work everywhere.
26:00Yeah. And you can import your tokens from Ten. Now you have a a type definition with TypeScript. So no more hey empty comma you know like on your emails like you can actually have like a string validation or whatever you want. I think one of the initial people that pushed back on React email is like, well, you're not actually using React.
26:20And like React is supposed to be a views as a function of state.
26:24Uh but so is mostly JSX is templating.
26:27Is there actually like animations? Is there interactivity?
26:30Expanding like accordionss, no nothing like that.
26:33So you cannot ship JavaScript on an email. So then what you do is Yeah. We basically use the templating.
26:40It's turning complete. If you Okay. So, cool. Um, I actually do want to like continue on this email path, but I see so many names I used to know. I was just kind of wondering if you can indulge us a bit and just go through like some of these names like what you learned from them. If you have any like cool stories, if just just anything, you know, man, so much so much. Uh I remember the very first year of recent I was like I
27:08got to meet the founder of Mayo Gun because I was still a user of mailogun and I talked to Ev um he's he built uh oh my gosh blogger medium um no it's a se it's a different product um but anyways like he it's a security product uh that that he's building now and I remember talking to him I was like man why did you sell so quickly your company what was the thing? And he told
27:35me like, "Oh yeah, 90% of our R&D was just to fight abusers. So it was a it's a terrible business. Like you shouldn't go there."
27:45And I was like, "Uh, like I don't want to live in that world at all." Uh, so I was very worried about that. Uh, and it was a big lesson for me of like, okay, we got to automate this thing. Like there's no way we're just going to build like a massive org. uh for we do have a lot of people interested in safety now, but it's not like that's going to be our core business. No, we're going to we have to be pushing the industry forward, but that was one. And S grid has always
28:13been my favorite out of those ones and always been the behemoth like the the biggest the it's like, oh my gosh, how are we ever gonna beat Sang Grid? It's just impossible. And then earlier this year we crossed the number of uh downloads from S grid and I was like that's insane and now we're more than double.
28:33So in terms of unique users or what's the what's the number downloads of the SDK?
28:38Is that the best metric?
28:40Yeah like I think there there's something about that metric in terms of adoption but then if you look at how many emails they sent is obviously much more than us because they have like the big enterprise customers yet and that kind of thing. I think one thing that's surprising is the whole point of the Twilio Sangid acquisition is that I now you're no longer an email service. You're a communications platform, right? You you integrate across everything. It's not it's not just about
29:08crossell. It is about I can reach you across multiple channels.
29:11Something like that. Or that you have the size. You know, Twilio's like I don't know what the size is now. Let's let's call it 13 15 billion company.
29:19Uh you should have all the relationships, all the talents, all these all these all these things, right?
29:23So h how do you compete with that?
29:26Yeah, man. I I admire Twilio so much.
29:30They kind of invented that rail or or or ask your developer, you know, ask your developer like and now when I I I I go past that 101 billboard and I see a customer AI or whatever, I'm pissed. I'm like, why?
29:45Like you neglected the thing that got you there. Um, and I think uh now like Jeff is not there anymore. The CFO is he bought the onion.
29:56Yeah, that's right. That's right. So I feel like they're just sleeping on it.
30:01And first they did that with Sen Grid and they're doing that with SMS too. And yeah, but I think my my lesson here is I'm trying to figure out the economics of scale of this industry, right? Like clearly, you know, let's let's call it they're 100 times larger than you when you when you just got started, right?
30:19um how come they cannot use their size to just win right so so in in other words maybe maybe there is no benefits to scale maybe just you know and you just make a better product and you can slowly for sure and I've always thought about too like why did Twilio acquire Sen Grid and not the other way around uh uh Twilio was bigger I mean SMS is big but like if email and communication is a
30:46commodity like SMS your margins are even slimmer, even worse. So, have you looked into SMS?
30:55I think one day. Yeah, I think one day.
30:58What are the channels that matter?
30:59Email, SMS. What else?
31:01WhatsApp. WhatsApp is big in in WhatsApp is free, right? You don't pay anything.
31:04Yeah. But then you you got to go through Meta and now uh business messages are going to be charged. Uh so there there is some friction there. Uh for sure.
31:15Phone calls is a good one. Uh I'm less I never take any robocalls, right?
31:20Yeah, that's true. I'm less interested about that too. What I care is like what are the things that makes me able to connect with my audience? Like that's what I ultimately care. Like I don't care about email.
31:34Yeah, DMs it's one. It's hard because you cannot like DM a big crowd like but Slack maybe is one, right? Slack like I have so many Slack connects uh and I need to share the news about like this one new feature that they built.
31:50Pylon I don't know if you guys use pyon uh I think they kind of innovated this like slack support thing but you can obviously trivally build your own.
31:57Um okay and then I think the other one I want to touch on is AWS.
32:01U so my connection to this is uh I learned to code with free code campy Larson and everything.
32:08Uh they have like 5 million subscribers on their newsletter.
32:10Yeah. sent through Amazon SCES for like $5,000 a month.
32:16I don't know how I don't know what you will cost.
32:18Yeah. More than that.
32:20So So basically like to me it's just like the lowcost player, right? That that is I mean it's Amazon. It's like they're they're super established.
32:27Uh what do you take from them and then what do you what should people know to stay away from them?
32:33We started with SCS too. uh we knew that okay if we're going to be innovating here I wanted to innovate on the DX layer and because I felt like that was the underserved uh space so let me have SDKs for every single language I remember with serverless we highlighted service because like no one had like guides on how to send an email with lambda or something so there's just this underserved space in in DX so we started
32:59with like the most high level layer and that that served us really well was able to like scale because we were using SCS behind the scenes. Turns out there's just a lot of limitations when it comes to the way you structure domains and they have this concept of configuration sets and the hidden cost if you're going with SCS is that okay you might be paying only 5K for example but now you
33:27need SNS for the events. So you need like all the feedback from bounces, complaints, open clicks, all that. And now, so you get the events. Great. Now you need cloudatch for the logs. Now you need a queue because it's going to be a lot of events. So now you add SQS. And now that you have SQS, so you start like adding all these different layers. Oh, you want web hooks. Okay, now you got to build another thing. So if you go with
33:54SCS, it's a great platform. It it's fine. But you're going to notice like your footprint will be much bigger than you would imagine very quickly because you need all the apparatus uh around it.
34:06Yeah. Um I would say you know another YC startup that came up in the male area is agent mail and then they they I talked to the guy as well and it was like yeah we were not going to we're going to build on top of SCS and not really compete with them.
34:20But for us it's changing that now. So we are we're building the infrastructure and going like down to the metal now.
34:26And for us it it feels like we got to the point where now this makes sense to innovate on the the most basic layer and now we can get better throughputs, better deliverability if we just focus on that. Uh but it's a big project like we've been working for months now and we're going to announce something soon about the what is the hardest thing to is it like uh trusted IPs is it compute and data centers or what what is the blocker?
34:54Yeah, definitely IPs you're buying like a whole IP block and then now you're managing the IP pools yourself. That that's one and then you're almost doing like traffic control uh and you're controlling the throughput into each mailbox provider and then you need the relationships with the providers but then like once you have that established that infrastructure now you have way more control into what you can give to users. So one of the my biggest things
35:23were like observability you know like that as an engineer I I want to see exactly what's happening and I've always felt like in this space there wasn't enough information like once when an email goes out is it really delivered is it really on this P is in the promotional tab like I never know like you just trust that the email goes out and then you always hear from some users like oh it didn't get the email I'm like what like what happened so there's that empty space between those things and the
35:52more we're close to the metal, the more we have in terms of data that we can surface for for users. So, I'm really excited. It's like the the flagship uh change that we're making now to I mean, you're becoming it's it's really interesting for all like DX type businesses. You start with like a thin layer like a React email and then it's like okay well we'll build on other people's infra and then once you get size then you can actually build your own infra, right? Are you doing anything differently because now you own everything?
36:21Yeah, I think what we're doing is um and by the way, obviously your dashboards are beautiful.
36:28It's funny, man. Everyone I talk to now, like all the customers are like, "Oh, I never opened the dashboard, but we can talk about that later." Uh, but it's interesting like I spend so much time trying to make the dashboard beautiful and now people don't go there. It's kind of frustrating, but I get it. But yeah, we're just trying to approach that with the same naive mentality uh that we approach all the other problems and we're like okay this shouldn't be this way. So you're challenging the most basic things of like this shouldn't be
36:56this way the P99 shouldn't take this long how we can make it faster. Okay so that's one of the things we're doing now like focused very very deep into performance and we have always been like a no.js JS shop and we have like just TypeScript everywhere and most recently like in the sending path we no longer use a JavaScript we have go there and we're changing other parts to be more more performant in other ways cuz now languages don't matter.
37:25Exactly right. It's just so cheap to Yeah. like pick a problem and yeah you can rewrite the whole thing in whatever the fast languages. I'm like running Rust projects and I've never I don't really know Rust. Like I know like some theoretical things about Rust, but I've never really bothered to learn it. I I feel like we're not really covering the recent product surface area. Uh maybe you want to go.
37:46No, no. I mean, you know, there's everything we've talked about, which is why it's hard, what all you're solving.
37:51And then there's also just send emails from CLI super agent forward. You have some takes on this. I think the other day you tweeted like MCP is so back, right? like over a million MCP calls. Like what's the what's the AI side of email?
38:07Yeah. Yeah. Everyone was saying MCP was dead right a couple months ago. Like yeah, the only thing that matters is the CLI. What I've noticed is that I stopped paying attention to what what's in, what's out. And I I really think about these problems is like, okay, how do I want my product to be? Well, I want my product to be formless. whatever they want to do with the product, it should be possible. So that that's why we've always been API first. Uh you know, I
38:36had no idea how much this would help us down the line, but I knew, yeah, like if I will never be able to cover all the use cases, so let me just give the API, you do whatever you want. And with the MCP is just fascinating like every month like at least 2x growth. And now in August, these numbers are even more.
38:54This was before the end of August. I think it was 1.2 2 million by the time it ended. But um yeah like people are starting to work from cloud desktop or uh codeex and if work starts from there then you need those integrations right it's just super important.
39:14I just want to clarify as well uh so you know you show like sort of like the month- bymonth numbers on the MTP thing. It picked up from like let's say 50% month-to-month growth which is already super high. Then it starts to double basically every month. Mhm.
39:26Did you do investment into MCP or you just had an MCP and it just after some time it gets picked up?
39:32Well, the fun fact about that our very first MCP was built by Yoko from A16Z, our investor.
39:42So, she she built the the open source version. It was a remote local MCP. And and then it started to grow like like crazy. I was like, man, why are people using it's like so hard to set up MCP?
39:54This was uh last year and then Yoko.
39:58Yeah, exactly. And so she built that uh and then I just asked her, hey, can you transfer to our org? It was like just like an engineer building something. And it was nice to see after the traction it was getting. But to do the MCP, right, to do the remote one, we had to go back and revisit our entire permissions model because we need it all off. And then we we're like okay now we have a blocker let's build off. So then we build off
40:27and it's like okay our back let's look at that like let let's look at how users uh have access to each one of the resources. So it was a whole journey to build OAF and then after we had OF okay now we have the remote MCP and then it's distribution. So then okay now we have the remote speed. Okay, great, great, great. Observability is in place. Great, great. Okay, all the data dog dashboards. Okay, now all in. Let's talk to everyone. And that was hard, too.
40:53Like, uh, it's not as easy. I wish I had all your connections. Uh, it's not as easy to me. Talk to me.
41:01Uh, but like talking to the labs and trying to get into like the the official stores and plugin market.
41:09Do you think that actually matters?
41:11Yeah. I I think sometimes like I've been on the other side where I try so hard to get these partnerships, we launch it and then nothing, right? So which one matters?
41:22So as a consumer, I make decisions now based on do I have the access to that data or not? So as a as a buyer of B2B software, if I go to the claude connectors and I don't see the company listed there with an official MCP like for we had this like we had a we were using Plausible and Post Hog Plausible had an MCP built by Sentry.
41:47I don't care if the Plausible doesn't maintain that and that's not official. I I don't I cannot trust that as much. Even though I love the Sentry team and I trust that team, but I need the owner of the software to own this piece of integration.
42:02And I made the call like no, we are getting rid of Plausible and we're just going to use uh Post Hog here because I have the MCP there. And I did that as a as a B2C consumer too. I'm like into running and then I'm like, "Oh, let me like Straa Straa has an MCP. I can like access my runs." So I use Straa because of that. So, and if there's like, oh, no, we have an MCP, but you have to connect like this. Like the XMCP for example, I have to do like the the local
42:32one. It's just so frustrating. It works on the desktop client, not on my phone. Like like to me, it's just Yeah. If it's not there, I don't use it.
42:41Apart from okay, it is officially maintained by the vendor or whatever.
42:45What makes a good MCP versus a social MCP? even for hours as I as I interact with that. There were like I always like it's always collapse, right? The the tool calls I'm always opening and trying to understand like what did it do? And just a couple days ago like there was one call where it couldn't put everything on the contacts for some reason. And then I'm like no, this shouldn't happen. Like how much data are we sending? Maybe we're sending way too
43:13much data to the client. So that's something that I noticed like the amount of tools. This was a bigger concern earlier like oh if you have way too many tools they get confused. I don't see that as much anymore. Uh and in fact we are just adding more to the MCP. Oh like we had like maybe I don't know 20 tools when we launched or even less than that. Now we have like 80 something tools.
43:38What the Yeah. And like I'm adding more and more like the the long tail of to like the the footprint. That's what I've noticed like you can do like only 90% of what your dashboard does and that's one way of doing it or you can do 100. Getting to 100% coverage of what your dashboard can do is actually very very difficult because now you're doing usage billing team invites account
44:07provisioning deletion should that be exposed as an API or not? Like it's it's really hard. Like it's a it's a difficult problem.
44:14Yeah. In fact, uh you know there you are one of the few lat space guests I can I can ever talk about this with.
44:20I think this is one of the mistakes of Nex.js.
44:23Because Nex.js and server components and uh pages API or apps apps API.
44:29Um they make it easy for you to basically bind data to your page.
44:33So you never expose a public API.
44:36So by default the thing that is performance and they encourage you to do you will not have an API.
44:42That's right. then you have to just do like separate code paths or whatever.
44:46In fact, you should just always have like completely headless back end and then your front end just happens to be one of many clients that connects to your back end.
44:55Yeah, we started with uh our API on next. I remember that first of all the bill was just so high that we were like there's no way we can pay for this. So then we moved to a traditional node server uh server full or whatever you call it and and then like our dashboard was always like a private API consuming the same thing. and we had to duplicate a lot of code. It was a mess, right? Um, now it's so much better. Everything on a monor repo, you can reuse stuff. But
45:24yeah, like by default, ideally those frameworks like just gives us those components, right? We had to build a public API separately from that and it sucks to maintain both.
45:36Yeah. Okay. And then one more thing about just just on front. uh you know so you are 80 you got 80 tools in there you're growing more tools you are very counter consensus compared to Cloudflare which only has two tools search and execute or something like that so far you haven't felt that issue but uh what would make you change your mind right like you you it seems like numbers are going up but do you actually know do you do you talk to your customers and say they're like oh my god it's like the best MCP on earth like Mhm. I do try to get a lot of feedback
46:05on that and then the way uh the way I like to build products is I got to use the product my on my own right so if I'm like the investor update that I sent you yesterday that was built using the MCP you know I was like fetching data from one place from another place and then uh you're making me feel bad now I don't do all this I don't use MCP enough now basically is what I'm hearing I mean I guess the other thing is also like you do have CLI you do have regular SDK Yeah.
46:34Are those also just growing crazy? Is everything just from a lot of growth or Yeah, the CLI is definitely growing, but not as much as the MCP. But I have a lot of fun with the CLI too. Like if you go to our careers page, I'm actually proud of this because I built it on a weekend or something. But if you go to any job there and you you try to apply for a job and you do those go down now you have three ways of applying. You can apply
47:03via or API. So you can just log in and it has an interactive mode or we have skills baked in into the CLI and you can just ask claude like apply for a product designer role at recent.
47:19Okay. So you're very you are filling yourself with slop especially in careers but no I mean I think maybe that's also the people you want right totally I actually have a filter if the source is the CLI I look differently because I know people are going the extra mile like setting that up like oh no I got to download this thing and I have to authenticate and then I have to go through that flow but guess what like people who go through that they always tell me like man I've never applied for a job using a
47:48CLI before so even they are not accepted like there's just something like it's just a different experience than other job applications even API apply for one job through API exactly I mean it's you know the same thing as uh yeah so so I think one of the things I'm trying to figure out as well is like product philosophy right like you you are you're clearly just like you just max everywhere like every SDK every language every uh surface area obviously easier with agents but I think
48:16some other founders that I would know would say, "Hey, this doesn't matter. Give that to Greenhouse or Ashb."
48:24It's your job applic. You're not going to differentiate like this, right?
48:28You clearly have a very different philosophy of you care about everything even though, you know, probably some of this stuff is just wasted. The way I see it is um I'm trying to optimize not only for the privileged users like the users who who have the greatest Wi-Fi the MacBooks that are here in ASV or in New York right all these people in the margins that are in other countries with a terrible Wi-Fi Brazil growing up that that's how it was
48:59for me a terrible Windows computer and terrible internet access. So that's why we have the free tier. We we don't have the free tier because of the you know like there's a there's a reason behind it when we we have all the SDKs. So I'm maxing on the SDKs man building the net SDK. Do you think that was fun? Like and we looked into stainless fern what's the third one? Uh
49:27but like we look at all these companies right we didn't like what was generated. So every one of those SDKs is humanly generated. The Java one, the Rust, all those ones, right? And I do that because I feel like, yeah, if you're using a product, you should have the best experience in that language that you're using. Oh, but there's only 500 people out of the 4 million. I care about those four 400 people.
49:56You know, why not? You know, why not is you have 4 million users.
50:01that's why not there's a lot of stuff to do but it's it's good to have that opinionated side towards building this right any other product surface area stuff that we should cover uh you covered CLI covered templates covered MCP I think it's good to get a highle perspective from you of how much of this is very traditional you even have dashboards templates to manually write emails you have programmatic you also have the full agent build like where do you see it going how do you think about
50:30building this for a pretty fast changing world, right?
50:33Yeah, there's definitely still a component of email moving out of this single player mode and going more into multiplayer. Uh we even built our editor like this. It's multiplayer. It fix all the conflicts if you have two or three people. We actually run if I have a private recent account with all the teams and uh we run all of our all hands uh there. So the all hands is pretty much you go there it's a huge you make an email
51:02it's an email and we send the email together at the end of the all hands it's super fun and you have like 20 people in the same documentary this is like no I I feel like 99% of people have not thought about multiplayer email right but yes you have a lot yeah and it was really fun man that editor alone it's so freaking hard to maintain that thing but I love it I love that we have the UI for people who need the UI. Like some teams hate to have the
51:31email template pushed into their source code. Then they just want to build a visual editor, a template, give to the marketing team and just call the ID. I do I don't care about the template. I just want to call the ID with variables and I'm I'm done. Uh other teams they they do they do like no, I want to commit. I want to have source control over this and own this piece of thing.
51:52So I try to tailor to those different audiences and uh and build a product that feels that we care uh which is not the feeling I get elsewhere.
52:04Yeah. By the way, what does the recent team used to read email uh superhuman or Yeah. Oh man, that have you seen the last superhuman update uh this busy with other launches too, right?
52:17Uh yeah. And and for for listeners, we are recording this on the day of the Astra launch, which I was pulled into and like I am not sleeping, but uh no, what's wrong with it? They just updated the UI a little bit.
52:28Yeah. The there's just um a sentiment of like, oh, this is going into the direction of every other acquisition goes, right? Like now you're feeding a brand that has other Grammarly and other things.
52:42Okay. This is just email. I know I I do want to keep up to date on email tech in general. Uh you're on the sending side, other people on the reading and receiving side. Yes.
52:51Uh and then I think uh you know increasingly I would say agents reading my email, right? Like uh I actually don't read most my email. I have Poke and Two Humans helping me with my email.
53:04Um Poke is pretty good. I I honestly like Instinct now super hot. $2.5 billion company with no no revenue. Um and like it's just like people trying to read email agents.
53:16Yeah, that we are definitely looking to that space. That's another thing that I'm spending a lot of my time like how you can programmatically create dozens of inboxes and then how are those inboxes accessed by because you you create you uh enabled re receiving email. What is it called?
53:35So now we're going another abstraction.
53:37Inbound is like the most basic abstraction. Now we're going one step further and be like, "Oh, you need 100 inboxes for any reason and here are the APIs that you need on top of that, right?" So you need a read API, markers and red, you need star API labeling. I see.
53:55Uh so we're going to be launching a product around that soon.
53:58Yeah. But again, it's all API driven because that's the the fully because like uh I I would say the comparable stuff that I've been looking at is missive.
54:06Yep. And there's other like uh help scout.
54:10Yes. Or like a shared inbox type of product, right?
54:14Front. Yeah. So hopefully this can be uh a version of that. Uh I can share with you. There's a feature flag for you if you want to try that out.
54:22Yeah. I'm I'm very interested in email tech. Uh okay. And and then to me uh and then I again I'm just like asking all these questions.
54:30What percent of your email goes to a G Suite or you know like what's the market share, right? like Google versus Outlook versus Apple versus Hotmail.
54:40Yeah, I don't have the numbers top of my head, but the vast majority like at least 60 60% Gmail and then you have like maybe the the big tree after like the Outlook, the the Yahoo Mails of the world right after and then you have a long tale of Apple's not that big.
55:00Apple is big. Yeah. And especially with the the privacy thing that they did now, um it's hard to sign up to an Apple ID.
55:09Yeah. Like Apple autogenerates an email address for you. So if you sign up for Yeah, I use that. I use that.
55:15Is that a problem for you guys?
55:17They're more strict in terms of what can get into those inboxes. Uh so sometimes as a domain owner we actually have like an in product wizard to help you like register with Apple so that you can get your emails delivered there.
55:33Yeah. Yeah. Um okay I I understand.
55:36Obviously this is your job right? The whole thing is deliverability. If you don't have deliverability you don't have a business.
55:40Exact that's kind of the we can have the most beautiful Rubik's cube in the website. the most cool like coolest handbook ever. If it's down, yeah, it's all for nothing.
55:52And how correlated are they are they right? Like if you get banned or down downranked or put in promotions tab in Google, does that transfer over to the other guys or are they very decentralized?
56:03Thankfully now, like in the beginning of the email industry, it was very IP based and if one IP was damaged, like now you you getting the the consequences of that. Now there's a lot of reputation associated with the domain. So then what people do is uh you create different subdomains depending on what type of emails you're sending like one subdomain for transactional emails that you know that maybe doesn't have click and open
56:31tracking and then you have another domain for your marketing emails and those subdomains help segregate the reputation of uh whatever.
56:40Would it be like transactions.reresend.com?
56:42Yeah. updates, notifications, whatever you want to use it. Uh, and do I have more dots if I want like a b.c.resent.com?
56:50you could do, but we just see like uh doing I don't know five subdomains is like yeah not not really practical but like people do uh yeah like some special ones like we do that at recent for our own emails like marketing has a different stream than the transactional ones and yeah even the the investor one has a different like I I use confidentialresent.com to send those emails I didn't even know you could yeah and
57:18that that is good advice It's before it was very IP based now it's domain based you know I have okay I have received so many bad I had to buy a separate so because we use AIER and space these are all like weird TLDDS that nobody recognizes right so I was told to get coms for everything and then maybe that improves deliverability the problem with that is that now like let's say let's take Coca-Cola right Coca-Cola has a domain now your
57:47Coca-Cola like oh yeah let's buy another domain domain that looks like our domain.
57:51It looks like fishing.
57:52It looks exactly like fishing. So, the chances of damage is way worse.
57:57Is this still a thing when you're buying the com? Like, I would get it the other way, right? You're latentpace.com. I buy laten.space looks like fishing, right?
58:06But the com still, man, you would be surprised like there's just like the things I see on a day-to-day basis. This is like crazy.
58:17Yeah. So what I'm hearing is like com is worth it. It's Yeah. Yeah.
58:20That's all the sort of uh business of email. Obviously some part of it is you just got started before trag and then you were a leading player that people liked and then obviously organically you you pop up. You didn't do anything special for AEO.
58:35What did you do for AEO? I would say we were not the leaders because we coming up like in 2023 like very few people knew about recent and we were like so behind twillio Postmark mail gun those companies invested in SEO for 10 plus years. So for us to get ranked for anything was like almost like it's it was a uphill battle like so so
59:03difficult. So then what we did was like okay let's focus on the docs for sure and the docs was very intentional about like okay if we're doing a docs on it has long tail again like oh here's a docs on uh not just python like how you set it up with Django yeah how to blah with blah how to blah with blah super short articles focus on just traditional SEO traditional SEO uh nothing fancy there when models started to come then I was like okay maybe I got to change the
59:33content of the page because if people are asking questions then I need to like create content that is in action and answer ask and answer type of format. So a lot of FAQs now almost every page at recent has an FAQ you know like you go to pricing page or like Yeah. Uh of course pricing almost always has pretty standard. Yeah.
59:56But like you do FAQs in like all sorts of Yeah. I think maybe security also.
1:00:02Yeah. So like you see it's like a pattern uh of like all pages have that because that's how people are asking is recent so to compliant and then just have the answer right there and then okay now we have those things in okay now we got to do llm.txt so we added llm.xt on our docs thankfully because of Mintify that we use great product and we're like okay how we take this to the marketing site too so then llm.txt txt for every marketing page.
1:00:32Same with the like docs hatch mark uh markdown versions of the docs. I'm going to do markdown versions of every single page on the website on the marketing website using content sniffing or you just append like MD.
1:00:46Yeah, just append you do append uh so if you go to the yeah security page MD it will work.
1:00:54Yeah. But also if you do content negotiation with that page uh it will render on that page like the markdown version without going to the Yeah. Which for listeners this is one of those things I'm not sure it matters.
1:01:06I'm really not sure.
1:01:08I mean you're winning really well. So yeah I think what one example that changed uh and maybe it doesn't help with distribution but helps with accuracy. So go to the pricing page. I remember this was like a random Sunday and I I was just like doing competitor analysis and I was just asking like okay if you send 1.2 million emails using resent and you do that with X and Y and Z competitor who is the the cheapest and who who's
1:01:37the most expensive and it got completely wrong. He got the recent one like so bad and it it actually said like very bad things about us like oh recent pricing is very obscure. I was like what the Like it's not obscure at all. Uh so it was like super frustrating.
1:01:54Oh so you made a calculator.
1:01:55Yeah. So the the problem was you know agents don't really uh drag a JavaScript widget.
1:02:03Okay. So then what I did was the the MT version of this page uh which has a tremendous amount of uh access by the way like now like you get analytics on this.
1:02:16Not through the the the regular analytics spots too because like we cannot track that.
1:02:23Yeah. It's a server side.
1:02:24So then like we got to go to data dog to figure that out.
1:02:27And man it was really crazy like uh and then I made that change. I pushed that and then I asked again like a few days later and then he got the numbers right.
1:02:37So I'm like okay this way to live update and fix stuff in your Exactly. And and this is what matters right like okay it does mean that you don't have a single source of truth like you have to update the MD and then you also have to that sucks completely.
1:02:52But again if if I wanted the the happy path and the easy path like I wouldn't be doing email. So I'm like that's the price of like well you know if you're good at react you can write a custom renderer that like yeah you know you know how to do this.
1:03:07What else we talk baselines basically have FAQ everywhere basic SEO stuff comparison pages us versus sang grid us versus uh although our page could be much better go to yeah I notice it's not there. I mean I'm sure you have it somewhere in some footer or something or whatever.
1:03:23Yeah just do slashmigrate. Uh, I can give you some.
1:03:27By the way, 404 pages, I always think we should guess, you know, pick the slug.
1:03:33Nearest neighbors.
1:03:36I mean, I think there's a side in case you any break a URL like it just auto fix itself, right? You don't you don't just serve the 404. My intention with those was like, "Oh, let me try to do something that's not exactly like a comparison page, but I don't think uh it was a great idea because it uh our competitors actually built the comparison pages and they get recommended more than ours." Yeah.
1:03:58But what we try to do like if you go to Postmark for example is like okay let's demonstrate first like hey if you want to migrate here's a code converter uh insert example.
1:04:09Yeah. So if you just put any co code block there. Oh why why dude? Why?
1:04:18That's what we do. That's what we do.
1:04:25There's a cube on the landing page.
1:04:27Everything is extra.
1:04:30But like the the adoption is one that I pushed this last weekend. Um like now we have a graph that compares like our adoption uh with every different competitor and you you see one thing like again this was a lesson that I learned with the pricing page JavaScript widgets they're not going to be executed so I spell out the same data in text so that uh LLMs can actually read that
1:04:58thing. Uh so I think they're getting somewhat better.
1:05:03I see a lot of agentic use. Okay. Load load website, click on image, interpret image. It's slower. But yeah, but with computer use, they are getting much better. I agree. But if you're fetching information and you're just comparing stuff, they don't they don't do that, right?
1:05:18I think they're starting to go more towards computer use. I've been doing a lot of compare this and this and the browse of website is pretty computer use.
1:05:27Okay. Yeah. I noticed that you don't have like uh you know another classic AO tactic is like here's how to connect our thing with CL code here's how to connect our thing with codeex AI page oh okay page okay there are some things that are interesting like if you go to the legal page so recent.com/legal any one of these like oh you summarize or ask to explain complexity I see that's just an external link yeah
1:05:57yeah I Again, not sure that matters, but you mentioned a lot about recency for AEO compared to traditional SEO. So, yeah, that was my like the the thing that I was super uh curious about uh in the beginning like there was no reason for any of the models to recommend us because we're so behind in SEO. We we don't have the typical glossery page or whatever like or articles that are so generic that were just like SEO heavy.
1:06:26And I was trying to uncover like what what is that? And I could totally tell like uh at least with Opus 4.5 there was a recency bias in terms of the the technology and where they were fetching data. I know recently like they said like maybe rapid is not necessarily um something that people suggest anymore but definitely like newer tools uh they started popping more and recent was one
1:06:53of those and because there was a lot of I don't know organic content about the tool then we would be getting recommended more so the advice here is just like try to get as more people in in more places to talk about the product as possible because it definitely influences Obviously, I think that is a class of it. I guess did you ever engage SEO consultants, AO consultants? Are they useful? Are they waste of money?
1:07:18We never really did.
1:07:19You seem like you're just doing everything yourself.
1:07:21You're the 2024 tweet of let's talk about I think you were one of the first ones to to pick it up, you know.
1:07:30Yeah. I mean, I think people generally the state of things we because we did an AEO or GEO episode at the time around this stuff and most people were like just do what normal SEO does and don't block AI chatbots, I think.
1:07:44And then most most tools like profound at at the time, they would just like track your mentions and then, you know, let you do experiments and all those things. All those things are part for the course and normal. I I'm just trying to obviously like people are pinging me cuz I'm also doing AO experiments on like what to do.
1:08:00I have unfair advantage cuz I'm a content business.
1:08:03So obviously I pump out content whereas you actually have a product but I guess how important is it to you too? Like you're very winning but how much do you keep a track of how well are docs used? How often are we recommended compared to competitors? Like man, I think it's so crucial because before we if we want if we're like a little bit unsure about which tool to use, we would ask Google and then you would get to
1:08:32like those comparison pages or you would get like the first three responses and now you just get the one response out of the gate, right? if you're asking which tool should I use and yeah people just want to go with the the one that is the most frictionless and yeah which I think free tier is very important and um I think uh Michael Grenage from work OS is trying to promote this idea of off MD right I don't know if you seen this so so uh the idea that you it's very similar to as
1:09:01well where you don't need an account to to do the basic action so it's like unauthenticated usage of your product which very dangerous obviously because it's prone abuse, but uh it is the the easiest like no sign up.
1:09:14Yeah, that's the thing that I'm I'm try. Yeah, I'm debating doing that or not. Do we need a provisioning API? And I keep going back and forth uh on this like okay call this provisioning and claims right is that provisioning and claims but then free tier. Yeah. Like I don't know if it's something about our industry but there Yeah. You just have abuse. Yeah.
1:09:36Yeah. Just have a lot of abuse.
1:09:38Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I I mean I I think those are the the main tactics. I I think the other thing that uh I would just tell listeners to think about is literally hook your clanker up to your analytics and your codebase, right? Like you need to like fully complete the loop and then like basically auto research, right? Like like this like so what I have now is my cycle. I have both lat I have a latency CMO agent, right? and they spawn other
1:10:06agents or they their job is to like research ideas, keep track of things that we've tried. Well, and then I sign off on like things that we want to experiment. We have we have an experiment window. We go and do the experiments really and then those are other agents that then moni are monitored by them. So, uh I would say that's like kind of like the auto research loop for doing this stuff. Uh I think then you also need to give it tools. So like I signed up for AHFS, I signed up for data for SEO.
1:10:32Oh yeah. And then uh most recently I made my own AEO tracker which which you can make.
1:10:38Um and then yeah, you just want to make the number go up.
1:10:40Yeah, for sure. And it's like you don't know, right? Like you're throwing things at the wall. That's why like Yeah. The thing on the legal page, does that matter? I have no idea. But I'll I'll keep throwing things at the wall and seeing what I think like uh Reddit doesn't matter. Hacker News. You you used to be big on Hacker News. No less.
1:10:58Yeah. Not anymore.
1:10:59Twitter doesn't matter as much.
1:11:01Yeah. It's weird like like it's so crazy.
1:11:04Do you have a tracker?
1:11:06No. Like we use all of those profounds of the world. Uh there are other products. So we tried them all. Like people ask me like oh should I use godge or or profound or this other one? I'm like yeah we have four subscriptions you know like that that's what it takes now. Like you you got to see which one works best. What I miss from those tools is like give me the action. And I think that the problem they don't they don't give you like what to do because they're also trying to figure out what what
1:11:34needs to happen right like oh write an article on Wikipedia like yeah yeah I would say like the old school SEO tools like Moz and all those kinds they will actually have more more opinionation around these things right now the AO tools mostly from what I hear again I'm not an expert we should probably talk to profound is that they just are reporting tools right they're analytics reporting tools and uh that's that's fine it's a big business. Exactly.
1:11:58HFS is a Singapore business and apparently they do like I don't know $3 400 million.
1:12:05The other parts of your business like we're going to talk about like the parenting side and personal side.
1:12:10I just really want to be like, okay, you you seem very chill. You you have 50 people remote all around the world. You are worrying about MCP. You're worrying about AEO.
1:12:21That cannot be the way you're closing all these big customers, right? like where's your fancy sales guy with the steak dinner and the golf course?
1:12:28We're just starting that motion. Uh and I think we are uh very lucky that we're able to go this far without having that motion. I've worked at a enterprise only company in the past. So I knew what does that take and the steak dinners like all the the apparatus around like that sales or the enablement there's all these things that that I needed. I knew that okay when it when the time is right we're going to have to turn on that key
1:12:57but I've been very cautious about doing that at recent like in different layers instead of just like add 20 I'm very maybe it's because we are remote but I think we are very protective about the culture like let's make sure we don't damage the culture at once so no let's try to figure out people who fit so we just have one a now and it's been helping it's been yeah going going super Yeah. Good enough.
1:13:24I I would say I think you know once you have like you know you double your AR because of like a couple deals you're like okay like this is a good time.
1:13:32Cuz people want to pay you more for things that you're like okay well you know uh I have like the agreement with you. I have like your software on my premises or in my VPC whatever.
1:13:46Yeah. And it what I'm learning too is like you're building a different product. So that's what how you need to see it's not only I'm building a different machine internally as a company as I'm designing the company I'm designing okay which department who sits where how each person is is better equipped to do their job. No, like for an enterprise it's actually a different product. Like what do they care is very different from what $20 users care and
1:14:13if I just add you know work OS and SSO and and scam and audit logs it's not going to be enough. So it's it's not just putting those items on the on the pricing page. Um so it's a journey for sure. Any other things you want to reflect on the the journey before we go into the the personal side?
1:14:34No, I think yeah, we covered a lot of ground. Oh, okay. Then I'll talk a little bit about my use case, right? Like I'm a content creator. Nice.
1:14:41Right. You're the bulk of your business, I assume, is transactional email. I I probably could look it up, but I That's right.
1:14:46You have marketing emails, you have inbound emails. I'm I'm sure that's like sort of less outside of the business. I pay Substack something like $10,000 a year to send my emails and that seems too high.
1:15:00So I think like why why is marketing email versus transactional email so different?
1:15:07It's a great question. Um cuz your business model is also different, right? If you click it is it is more expensive too.
1:15:14Yeah. Then I was like I can't do this.
1:15:16Yeah. The industry has this pattern of like charging per contact. That's the first thing. So the way they they try to price is around the value you create in each contact. But now it's crazy like the the AI companies that we serve, they grow so fast. Like uh Mistro uses recent. Okay. So they're like the amount of users that they add is just insane.
1:15:40So like the business model of contactbased pricing is kind of broken and we are realizing that and trying to fix that too. But that's how it had always been. And there's something about like when you send a transactional email, it's just like put a message in a queue and get out of the queue. With marketing email, you you're building that engine of like batches and intervals between batches, analyzing, increasing the speed, decreasing the speed as the sending is going, maybe
1:16:09blocking. So is there is there a max rate you should send emails at a time?
1:16:14Yeah, for sure. Per domain uh specifically. Yeah.
1:16:17Okay. So like let's say I have um 100k emails to send out. It should take me 10 minutes.
1:16:22Yeah. And it for example now with the 4.3 million users that we have, it takes more than a day and you Oh, what? No, that's unacceptable.
1:16:31So then I pay you more to get in a different queue.
1:16:34Yeah. Okay. So you you have to be like always trying to figure out, okay, we need more at the door. So how does that work?
1:16:41Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. It's like uh rate limits for let's say token limits.
1:16:47Where's my reset button?
1:16:49Yeah. You also like you went into YC, you started this company as a young father and I think like part of things like uh there are a lot of no kids people in in SF. Uh and I think that's part of the consideration. I think a lot of people are listening who are like I can't be a founder like I have this great idea but like I got I got young family. How you manage?
1:17:09You got to preface with you left SF for Yeah.
1:17:13kids. Yeah. So this is the recent news like I'm spending more time in Brazil now because we're expecting our second kid and I think at first man it was crazy because I came to SF my daughter was one year old and every YC founder around me had no idea like yeah what does it mean to have kids and what is this reproduction you don't you don't even have series B
1:17:41like what are you doing married like totally Most of them weren't married at all. And it it's crazy how um I think it again I always try to look at those things. At first you you see them as a the advantage like oh man all of these guys they went from like they came from MIT all these amazing schools. That was not the case for me. Oh they don't have they they are not married. That's not the case for me. They don't have kids.
1:18:09That's not the case for me. But still going for that program, I'm like, man, I'm I just want to build the best company on this batch. Not number four, number five, like number one out of the 250.
1:18:25You realize in the middle of that is that there's no winner in YC that there's no such thing.
1:18:33Mer, but like I'm I'm pulling a winter 23 now. Let's see who I know.
1:18:39Yeah. And especially what you understand is that uh winter 2022 batch it's like an infinitive infinite game, right? Like those even if you had an amazing batch and you raised the biggest round, it doesn't matter because like life goes on and it continues and many of the people that I met there, they are not here anymore.
1:19:01Co-founder breakups, seven pivots and they're dead, right? But we are here. So I I was very much like no no no we're even the domain when we bought recent.com like no it's going to be an amazing website with an amazing.com like it's not going to be aio or whatever right um but doing that with kids was so freaking hard especially because I wanted to enjoy my my first daughter and I really thought about this like there
1:19:29was one point during YC so this story like translates to what I'm going to say I came to this event and PG was there.
1:19:39So I'm like, "Oh man, Paul Graham, the father of everything. God is here, right?" So everybody is paying attention to PG. And then he says, "You know what?
1:19:49We always tell you don't do this thing. We we tell you that as partners and then you ended up doing the thing and then months later you come to us and say, oh, I regret doing this or not doing this."
1:20:00So So he just said that. So then I came to my partners and I asked like okay what are the things that I'm doing now that I shouldn't be doing that you think it's wrong and then one partner not my main partner but another partner told me like you just worry too much about design you care too much about that if you didn't care about that you'll be much further ahead and that hurt me so bad because it was true like my slides when I was like pitching it was like a beautiful slides and he's like doesn't
1:20:28matter I'm like yeah now I know it doesn't matter But like that hurt really bad. And then a few days later, I was reflecting on that. I'm like, "Yeah, but if I if I were to build a product uh that had like this identity and only 1,000 people used, I prefer doing that than having a product with 10,000 people that it's a product that I don't want to go, that I don't use myself. So, you
1:20:56know what? I'm going to follow what I believe is right." And I think in this industry again going back to the industry everyone had terrible products. There was not not enough like design infused into them. So I felt that was a differentiator and we needed a differentiator in such a crowded market. So, I go back to that for my kid, too.
1:21:18Like, okay, 10 years from now, I have 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 10 million AR company. I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're hundred million dollar company and my daughter doesn't want to play with me. It's not interested in me and we're not that close. So that's the decision I made. Maybe it's right, maybe it's
1:21:47wrong. I have no idea. I go extremely hard. I I have a lot of ambition. That's not going to stop me or or anything, but like setting up those priorities and figuring out for yourself like what works for me. I think it was important. So yeah, more than ever like she's the most important thing for me and I I I prioritize her a lot.
1:22:11How do you balance that with your ambition? Right. like I also have this in a smaller way. I don't have kids but uh yeah I have a lot of ambitious things and I have a family that I should spend time with and when I spend time with them I'm not present. I'm looking at my phone. I'm like saying like, "Oh, I should be reviewing Astra, you know, GPT6." Like, it's it's like, you know, AGI.
1:22:32No, it's not right. Like, like, but I really feel like I should be working and, you know, and like Yeah.
1:22:39at the same time like I feel guilty and then and so like I'm unhappy in both areas.
1:22:43Totally. And and that's how I feel. I feel like I'm a terrible dad. I'm a terrible uh husband. I'm a terrible CEO.
1:22:51and like you're failing in every single area of your life. I feel that way ex exactly like that. But every day I try to be a little bit more present, you know, and it's a especially when you're working from home like man, you leave the your your your office and then now you now you're a dad and then now you're not anymore. Oh, now you got to be a husband and pay attention to your wife.
1:23:14Like and your your mind is like, "Oh, man, how I do this enterprise? Like I got to close this deal. I feel like I cycle all the time, too. We're in the same boat.
1:23:24Yeah. Yeah. Well, never easy. And I think like just naming the thing for your category is important. And people don't really think about category creation enough. I think uh this is something weirdly something like that Netifi tried to do and failed with Gemstack and I think that more people should really actually try to do a category creation because when they're successful then they own the whole thing. Um so which which which we did for this recent you know it is the next generation sang grid let's call it right
1:23:52or like AI native sang grid something like that I I think that uh you know and you know this is like being me being like probably too honest that is not category creation yet but it is category dominance you know like you own your category that's good but like it is not clear enough yet what is difference so my classic example is another guest that we've had um Dorsha from HubSpot Yeah, anyone who wants to think about category creation, go and read up about inbound marketing versus outbound marketing and how they created the category of
1:24:22inbound. The the ideal phrase of cate of category creation is once you've heard the category, the two words that your company represents. You don't want anything else.
1:24:33There's no long essay. There's no long manifesto. There's no talk. There it's just two words. Maybe some examples. That's it. The the your audience can take it from there. M. It's very hard, man. I've seen friends trying to do that. Like Zix uh from uh it's a web hooks as a service.
1:24:52Yeah, they took my name.
1:24:54Yeah, man. It's just so freaking hard, right? Like I think they're doing okay, right? I don't know if they're still around. It was like a there's a web hook company and then there was like a anti-web hook company where you you would take like you were like we don't do web hooks. We just help you publish a JSON file that you pull or something. Wow. You know, it kind of reverses the the push versus pull the the data flow.
1:25:17Yeah. This is again COVID era dev tools. That was the most exciting thing that at the time was Yep. Yep.
1:25:25Cool. Well, uh always a pleasure to catch up and congrats on all the success. I still, you know, uh am very curious how much you have dominated your your category. I think you you just chose it very well and you executed very well and you're managing your family as well. So, uh, lots of respect.
1:25:41Thank you so much. Yeah, it was great chatting with you guys. Thanks a lot.
