Resend is taking on email deliverability. Here’s how they do support.

Why we love Resend

Resend is a modern email infrastructure built for engineers, by engineers, with a focus on a frictionless, first-class developer experience. Using their simple and elegant interface, companies of all sizes can start sending email in minutes. Rather than building emails using <table> layouts and HTML, Resend customers can build theirs with React. Considering most email service providers are plagued by slow performance and mostly designed for marketers (read: WYSIWYG), Resend feels like a breath of fresh air.

The team is particularly focused on a big problem in the email world: deliverability. Most tools keep you in the dark once emails are in flight, but Resend exposes all the events associated with your email via webhooks. Proactive blocklist tracking and the ability to send email from the closest region to your subscribers helps minimize latency and time-to-inbox. 

As a YCombinator company, Resend found initial traction with their graduating cohort. Very quickly, word of this developer-first email platform spread amongst startups who value its simple, low-friction and detail-oriented approach to email. But with scale came increased pressure on support.

How the Resend team works

The Resend team operates very much like any modern B2B startup: Linear for tasks, Github for code, Slack for chat, AWS for infrastructure, Notion as their internal wiki, and Mintlify for documentation. Slack is the team’s main operating system, where all communication happens.

Support at Resend happens through a combination of channels:

• Emails for questions from both prospective and current customers

• An in-app form that enables Resend to get queries with all the structured information they need to help someone quickly

• Slack Connect to stay close to key customers

• Linear to track bug reports and feature requests on behalf of customers

Like most early stage startups, the Resend team didn’t start off with a defined support tool or workflow, they fell into one. This workflow consisted mainly of triaging support questions via Slack messages and a shared Google group. Very quickly, the team ran into major challenges.

“We found that many of our solo customers didn’t have a paid Slack workspace, so it didn’t make sense to build a support flow around that,” says Jonni Lundy, Operations Manager at Resend. “It was also a logistical nightmare to track and follow up on bug reports and feature requests.”

How Resend uses Plain

Making support an extension of product

When they heard about Plain on Twitter, the Resend team felt an immediate kinship.

“It was clear that Plain was also built for developers,” says Lundy. “We wanted to avoid having our support experience feel like a separate brand, but to be an extension of our product. Plain’s simple API and customizability made it a perfect match.”

A process that previously involved dealing with Slack channels and email distribution lists suddenly transformed, with the majority of support communications via direct email or in-app form submissions being managed in Plain.

Staying close to customers

The Resend team makes a big effort to stay close to customers, priding themselves on never providing generic responses or asking questions they couldn’t find the answers to themselves. In Plain, they’re able to have all customer data in a single timeline as they engage, cutting down on unnecessary back and forth.

As a product-led startup supporting other startups, the Resend team is determined to stay close to customers—and the requests they have. Where their previous support workflow fell short, Plain makes it easy to log feature requests or bugs in Linear directly from the support queue, then reopens the issue once the problem has been resolved. 

"Right now, my favorite thing is how easy it is to respond to customers' issues or requests with the Linear integration. I can finally confidently tell a customer, 'I'll let you know when we make progress on that—and Plain helps me actually remember to do it,' says Lundy."

Scaling support alongside product

Coming out of private beta to a well-received public launch with Plain already integrated proved to be a big win for the Resend team.

“I can’t imagine supporting that launch with our old support processes before Plain. We saw a 2x of our userbase which translated to equal increases in usage and support requests,” says Lundy.

It has made the team think critically about support efficiency as they scale, though they are careful not to compromise on quality in the name of efficiency. 

It’s a value both Plain and Resend have in common.