326: Zeno Rocha — From Bootstrapping to YCombinator
Download MP3Today, I'm talking to Zeno Rocha. He runs recent. He's the CEO of an email company for developers, but he's also an indie hacker, which is really cool. In our conversation, we're gonna tackle the differences between indie hacking and being VC funded, how he can bring this together, how he runs a company with 7 people that just supplies indie hackers and software engineers of all sizes with reliable email through an API, what his work looks like, what his challenges are, and all these wonderful things. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com.
Arvid:More on that later. Now here's Cido. Hey, Cinna. You said something back in January 2023. You said we are building a communications platform, and we're starting with email.
Arvid:So my question to you right now is, are you done with email just yet? Can and can you ever be truly done with email?
Aaron:Man, I think when I started resend, I never thought how hard it would be to build an email company, especially an email company, tailored to developers. So the quick answer is no. We're not done with email. There's a lot we still need to do. We've been focusing a lot on the sending parts, but there's a lot of interesting use cases around the receiving part as well.
Aaron:So So this is one of the areas that we're focusing right now, inbound emails. And, yeah, email is wild. It's so hard.
Arvid:I do wonder what are the things that you that you'd never thought you were gonna run into? Like, I have a couple on my mind, but I would like to hear what the actual journey was for you.
Aaron:I feel like there's an angle of email that, very people know about when it comes to anti abuse. So we all know that there's a lot of phishing emails and a lot of people sending spam emails and a lot of bad actors in that space in general. We we get that feeling because we have a hard time ourselves to control our inboxes. Right? But as an email provider, that needs to worry about the reputation of the IPs on that shared IP pool, that needs to worry about how one bad actor can impact other good actors.
Aaron:There's just, like, a huge amount of energy that I personally put and the rest of the the team also puts in terms of anti abuse that no one knows about. And we created so many systems internally, And we even call it like RoboCop. You know, that's like our little machine that helps deal with that. And it's just so wild. I'd never thought I would spend so much time fighting, spam and and phishing, which is crazy.
Arvid:Yeah. That it's actually interesting because I think that kind of technology, that's the actual innovation in the space. Right? Like email, technically, the protocol has been around for 40, 50 years or something. It's been quite quite a while.
Arvid:But having to deal with criminal or, you know, illegal activities and fighting that, the whole cat and mouse game, that's where most of the innovation happens. Am I right with that?
Aaron:That's so true because what happens is that, and that this was one of my motivations when I started. I was like, man, when I go to Postmark or SES or SendGrid, and I start to, you know, just set up a new account, they ask me all these questions, and then I I have to go through a 2 day verification process where they're vetting if my use case is allowed or not and that kind of stuff. And I was just so pissed about that. I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, I just want to send an email. I don't want to be, you know, like, what is this?
Aaron:Do I need to send a photo of my passport now? Like, what's the deal here? And I'm like, we gotta remove friction. That's just, like, just not ideal at all. And now I know why they do it, because there's so many bad actors.
Aaron:But the way we're trying to solve this problem is we're not gonna put friction on the user side. We're putting friction on, on us, you know, like, we have to do the work to make sure that we detect bad actors faster. But we cannot make the experience of good actors bad because of these guys. So how can we create, like, the most optimal experience for people who are legit, that just wanna send an email, though they're starting something new, a side project that they don't know if it's gonna work or not. So I like, why, like, do I need to spend a like, wait a week or 2 days waiting for a response if I just wanna try something out?
Aaron:So we are trying to trust users by default instead of the opposite, which is not the common path that, you know, platforms take.
Arvid:That sounds like as you target the service more to developers and being one yourself, you can probably have a little bit more trust. I mean, I know there's, like, people who are really into hacking, like the the bad the black hat kind of stuff. But I think on average, developers probably have a more, you know, rule based and rule following behavior. Is that right? Like, have you seen developers actually being more or less criminal in that regard or abusive?
Arvid:Let's just say abusive at at this point.
Aaron:Yeah. That's a tough one because I don't really know the the pain that other companies feel. Right? So it's hard to compare. But I feel like they they are definitely, like, the type of people that, they recognize when something is good or not.
Aaron:They are willing to give feedback. And for me, the way I I treat developer feedback is that they will only give you once. And if you don't act on that feedback, you'll never hear from them again. But the the type of feedback they give is so valuable. Like, they will go in so much detail.
Aaron:And if you can really act on that feedback, they will keep coming and they will keep helping you build that product. So it's definitely hard, and there are all these analogies of, like, Oh, if you're building for developers, you're trying to, you know, cook for other chefs.
Arvid:Yeah. You
Aaron:know? There's this idea that developers can spot things, pretty quickly. And, so it's it's been an amazing journey. Just serve that audience. And as a developer myself, I just, yeah, I just love it.
Arvid:Yeah. I bet. And and as a developer myself, I wonder how do you get developers to talk to you? Because they don't like talking to people. Like, they don't necessarily I mean, some people really like to write these 4 page, like, ideas that they have and sent them over, but most devs are pretty busy building their own stuff.
Arvid:So how do you encourage people to give you feedback? Like, where do you where do you get them to actually give you anything meaningful?
Aaron:Yeah. I think it goes back to removing friction, because, I feel like most of the time, people are trying to hide the contact support forms or like hide the feedback button. And I remember, debating or in terms of where should the feedback button be and what are the fields that we're gonna have in that experience. And we tried to make it you know, as less friction as possible. There's, like, a button on every single page you click.
Aaron:There's, like, a text area, and then there's no form like, oh, is this a bug? Is this a feature request? Or like, what is your sentiment as you're giving that feedback? No, Just like, here's a text area, click send. The message goes to us, and then it's up to us to act fast on that.
Arvid:That's cool. Yeah. It it it sounds like you exactly know how people use your tool. Right? You know how much effort they're gonna put into it and how little effort they want to put into giving you something for free.
Arvid:I think that's a that's an important one. I wonder and and this is a kind of almost a a business future question. How long you can keep this going? Right? Because usually as businesses grow, their capacity to deal with the influx of feedback diminishes a little bit and particularly the speed at which they can react to it, which like you said is important.
Arvid:Right? You you only get feedback once and if you don't act on it, they will never help you again. How do you plan to keep this feedback loop tight in the business?
Aaron:I feel like there's some battles that, you as a founder, you have to choose if you're willing to die on that sword, sort of speak. And there's some battles that you know that as you grow, you have to be more flexible and maybe like, you know, be a little bit more, relaxed with that rule. For me, there's some things that I believe that are very deep, that I I will die on that sword. One of them is attention to detail. I feel like to build a a great product, you need to slowly add those moments of joy, and there could be no, broken windows.
Aaron:You know, just yesterday, there was a page where you would load the page, and then the loading state will be 1. And then once the content was loaded, it would jump a little bit. And I told the team, can we fix this right now? Because this is not good. So if you go to that extreme of, like, no.
Aaron:Like, we have to really take care of the details, and that's what makes a great product. That's something that as we scale, I'll I'll keep to, you know, keep pushing on that. And, you know, responding to feedback is another one. Every churn that you have, every message that you receive, like feature request, every ticket that someone opens on your support channel, that's an opportunity for learning. And if you don't take advantage of that opportunity, you're just missing out.
Aaron:You're missing out on building a better product. So, you know, receiving that message is a privilege, and you have to like, you're, like, receiving gold in your hand. And if you're just dismissing that, then you don't really care about your product that much, as you're saying you care. So I value that a lot. I'm I'm not gonna say we're perfect.
Aaron:We make a lot of mistakes. There are a lot of feedback that we don't act as quickly as we we want it to be. We're super small team, and we're serving a lot. Like, we are now a team of 7 people. We're serving 100,000 users, in the platform.
Aaron:They're sending millions of emails every single day. So how can we keep scaling, without necessarily just putting more people on the problem? Right? It's always a challenge. So, yeah, those are some of the things that I I I'll dial on that sort.
Arvid:Yeah. It also sounds like that with a team of 7, you still look at these emails at the feedback that people give you. Right? It's not that you kind of push it away. Like you sound like the guy who would just want to read every single one of them at this point.
Aaron:For sure. And what's even more important than me reading those emails is also for the engineering team to have access to that data. I feel like a lot of teams, they try to shield the engineering group from, like, customer feedback. And then there's this gatekeeper, this product manager or the support team that compiles that data and then give that data to engineers. And I've always subscribed to the idea that, you know, engineers need to be talking to users.
Aaron:They need to have access to the support system. The Zendesk system cannot be, like, separated and engineers cannot have, like, a license or a seat. No. Like, engineers should be able to go to the support to and answer questions themselves. So that's super important.
Arvid:Yeah, I recall being in a lot of companies that had this kind of divide. And they mostly did it because they thought us engineers, we wouldn't be able to speak the language of the client. And which is funny because in in all of these businesses, we were talking to technical people, like we were serving other technical people with our technical product. And I think in your case, even more so right it's developers building for developers like if there's anybody who should speak to these customers that you have it's your development team they know their language They know exactly the, you know, the little slogans and the the lingo of of the community. They know what people want, what they what they need.
Arvid:I love the fact that you kinda keep this in the team. How how do you avoid, like, pulling people out of their flow states? Because that's that's something developers really need. Right? And your customer service conversations, they come in when they come in.
Arvid:So how do you how do you keep people focused on their work while still being involved in the customer service world?
Aaron:Yeah, that's something I still struggle a lot, you know, and we've been trying different strategies, different ways to to handle that, because the truth is that we cannot just have all the engineers doing supports every single day, right? Otherwise, they can't get stuff done. And as a developer myself, I know that I need my focus time. I need that time block. I can't have, like, multiple meetings in between.
Aaron:Otherwise, I'm I'm gonna lose context. So it's something we have a hard time doing it. But we try to, like, come up with different stuff and different strategies, or initiatives to create that culture. So just last week, we're all like traveling for off-site, we are remote team. So everybody works from home.
Aaron:And we went to Mexico for a week. And then on the 1st day, when we were there, we knew that, okay, the week is gonna start and we're gonna be in meetings all day. So how can we, like, make sure we handle all the support load before so we have more room to to do all the brainstorm sessions. So then on Sunday night, we all sat down. And then we're like, we're doing support night, and everybody has to help.
Aaron:So those are the types of things that we do. And then, you know, maybe an engineer that is not that involved to support, they might be thinking like, oh, yeah, oh, this is cool. Interesting. Oh, look at all these problems. And engineers are lazy, right?
Aaron:Most of them. And when they see something, they're like, oh, wow, like, I can't believe people are having these problems. Let me fix that for them. Because they shouldn't be having these things. So I, yeah, I feel like it's so important, but I wish I had the the answer, to the question because
Arvid:Well, you do, and it's trying to make it better step by step. Right? That's what it is. Like, you just try to figure out how you can involve people without, like, taking away their focus time. And that is always I think it's a unique process for every business because first of what you built depends that on that depends, like, how focused you need to be and what your customers have as problems also impacts that.
Arvid:Right? So that that's the unique part there. You you said you were remote. That's that's unsurprising, I guess, in a in a post pandemic world, but it is it is pretty cool with the team of 7. Like, how how distributed are you?
Arvid:Like, is our time zones already a problem in the the business at this size? Or are you still waiting for that to be an issue later?
Aaron:Yeah. No. I I actually think a lot about what is the best setup for an early remote team. And I feel like that looks pretty different, in terms of what are the skills you need? What are the time zones that you that you're open to?
Aaron:And I had that experience at WorkOS when when I used to work before. And we were a team of, like, 50 people. And back then, we were very strict about what are the time zones that we hire. So we still do not have people in Europe or or Asia because we wanted to keep the time zones in between, like, North America and South and and Central America. So that's pretty much how we we also behave here.
Aaron:Like, k, we're a small team. We we try to hire people as senior as possible because we don't have too much time for training and and developing. Like, we just need to get stuff done and and learn as quickly as possible. And we also need to be able to have some sort of, overlap between our work. Not full overlap.
Aaron:We actually don't believe that that's the case. We we very much believe in in working async and having everything around, like, async work, but some overlap is good. So that's how we we try to do. So we we have, like, people in North America, people in in South America today, And then we have that, like, 4 hour gap, between those time zones.
Arvid:That's cool. That's still that's pretty close. Right? It's it's it's not the other side of the world, but, yeah, I I could see that. I'm I'm kinda I'm mesmerized by the fact that it's just 7 people because, like, you went through YC, which is something that a lot of people aspire to, and I guess a lot of people in the in the hacker world have very strong opinions about, you know, like, Daniel Rossello has written extensively about this, and a lot of people are mirroring the the idea that, oh, no.
Arvid:I never would raise VC because, I wanna bootstrap and all of that. But I see you do it and still have some kind of sustainability built in and a very strong focus on, like, team cohesion and actually, like, moving forward in a in a kind of less crazy way than what most people attribute to the v the VC money world. So it's great to to get, like, a glimpse behind the curtain here. How has going into YC impacted the trajectory of this business? Like, because you're defying expectations on my end.
Arvid:Right? You don't have 400 engineers right now, and I thought everybody is trying to grow as much as they can. So what else am I missing here? What's what's the the magic there?
Aaron:You know, it's super interesting. I I'm an NG hacker. You know? I only started Resend because indie hackers inspired me. Indie hackers like you, Indie hackers like Daniel, and so many others.
Aaron:I remember starting Dracula Pro and then, like, going through all that journey and then making my first dollar online and, and being like so puzzled about like, how can people really, you know, you know, put their credit card information and buy this thing from me. And then waking up and seeing the Stripe notifications or the gumroad notifications, Yes. And selling books, and being inspired by your journey as a self publishing alter. Same same for me. So I went for that journey, and I noticed the pros and cons of being an NG hacker.
Aaron:And I feel like that's the same for the VC route. There's pros and cons. And when I looked at the business that I was building with Dracula, for example, I'm like, I I'm pretty sure this is a lifestyle business. Plain and simple. It's real like, how can I scale, you know, selling colors online?
Aaron:It's hard.
Arvid:You know?
Aaron:And I have so many ideas to grow that community, and I still do that on weekends and during the evening. But that was a lifestyle business. That's an indie hacker business. Great. When I had the idea for Resend, I knew this is the type of business that requires capital.
Aaron:I need for as a developer myself, I really believe I need a generous free tier because I wanna empower other NG hackers. And I know that when they're just getting started, they need a way to try it out. And then if it plays out, the and then, okay, this is good. Okay. Then they'll start paying later.
Aaron:So whenever I see people trashing the VC route, I'm always surprised by that because I feel like they don't really understand. Like, for this type of business, this is the route you should go. And for that other type, there's another route versus this is the only way you should do it. I feel like there's a lot of nuance that that, focusing this. And I remember, like, seeing people, like, saying bad things about YC.
Aaron:And there's something really interesting about, you know, maybe you don't like the person who runs it. Maybe you don't like the idea of an accelerator, or the model that they execute. Whatever is the thing that you don't like about them. I don't really care the the the root cause, so the the main reason. Maybe you were rejected three times, and now you absolutely hate it.
Aaron:And you feel like, you know, I don't like, those guys are evil. Okay. I don't really care. What I what I don't think is nice is when people just think that, okay, every YC company is bad because YC is bad. You know?
Aaron:And I remember when we had an incident, with recent, and there's a lot of attention around that. I saw that type of behavior, and I was, like, kind of disappointed with that. But at the end of the day, you know, everybody has their opinions, you know, and and it's fine. But I would definitely recommend folks that if they either think that just the VC route is I it's perfect, this is the way to go. Stop for a second and think, like, okay.
Aaron:Maybe there's something on the other side. And same for NG hackers. Look at that and then think, like, for the type of thing am I that I'm building, is this the right funding model? If it is, great. Go for it.
Aaron:If it's not, there's another route. I personally wanted to experience both, and I still do every single day. I I still see all the the Stripe transactions on recent. I still see all the Dracula transactions on Gumroad and all the Amazon thing too with self publishing the books.
Arvid:That's right. You could KDP. Yeah.
Aaron:The KDP. Exactly. The KDP figure. I still see the the their emails. So, yeah, the there's a lot to unpack there, but I I feel like folks need to experience those things by themselves before really talking about it.
Arvid:Yeah. I I like that very balanced nuanced approach. Like obviously, different business models require different kinds of funding and different founders have different ways of going about business. Right? It's like some people can be indie hackers forever and be perfectly fine.
Arvid:Like, Peter Levels comes to mind. I don't think he he would be the guy that takes on funny, but who knows? Maybe there's an opportunity. Like, maybe he will find his recent one day. Right?
Arvid:Like, you never know. And and I don't think you should close off the opportunity to to if hiring, a lot of people and needing a lot of money or having high expenses. Like, it's kind of what I'm going through with PodScan right now. Like, I need to pay all these GPU servers in the cloud. And if if I hadn't raised some money from the Calm Company Fund, I would have to, like, pay this all by myself, which I probably could.
Arvid:But then again, I don't need to. There are funding solutions in between bootstrapping and VC as well. Right? There's a there's a continuum and you you I and what I love about your journey is that you've that you still are both. This is so cool.
Arvid:That is so cool to see somebody not leaving in the hacking for greener pastures, but just saying, okay. I'm gonna do this as well. That's nice. That's that's rare, I think. And that's why people have these split opinions.
Arvid:Right? Because it's either or. People go do other things, but you're still you're still in both being in both grounded in realities and both realities there.
Aaron:And what's really cool is that a lot of the way I act today is so influenced by my NG hacker path. And I bring that to the team, you know, like, oh, this mentality, like the sense of urgency, like, this sense of, scarcity is like, we got to ship it, like, we we don't have time, like, we got to really think about this one thing we can do. Because as an indie hacker, you're typically working, you know, just these 2 hours on a Friday night,
Arvid:you
Aaron:know, so with those 2 hours, you got to be so focused, and I bring that to the team. And just like the the opposite is also true, right? Like, now that I'm going through that VC route, I see like these founders that have like the super ambitious vision, right? And they're like, oh, yeah, we're, you know, for recent is like, oh, we're gonna help humans communicate. It's so broad.
Aaron:It's so like, you know, inspirational. And then I'm like, you know, it's actually cool to have that, that audacity. And then I bring that audacity to my anti hacker business. So with Dracula, I'm like, we're building the biggest theme on Earth. And that's what Dracula is gonna be.
Aaron:It's gonna be available everywhere, And every single developer should use it. Cool. Not so I love that, you know, that opportunity. I feel like it's an opportunity.
Arvid:It it really is. And I what I like, like, particularly, there's a dream. Right? There's a dream to help everybody communicate or all developers communicate more easily. You can probably, like, just size it down into niches, and it's still a big dream.
Arvid:And it's still a big dream to help every developer out there build, like, better emails or write better emails, send better emails. That is already, like, audacious as a goal. And then taking this into these small projects and small, I mean, by just, like, tightly scoped, that's also great because why not make the best theme? Like, Dracula is great. I think I'm a customer.
Arvid:I was back then. And and it's like, yeah, this is great. This is not like the the the biggest revolution in technology, but it's gonna help me be better at my job or it's gonna make life more enjoyable. And that is already a lot. Right there's already a lot to have that dream to make it a really cool thing that people can use and will use every day I think dreaming is alright it's alright to dream a little bit and take that into your business.
Aaron:That's so true. And you said something that that's so impactful, because I feel like, we're not reinventing the wheel here. Right? Like you you said it before, like, email existed for the past 50 years, it's probably gonna exist for the the next 50. And it's not like there are no email solutions out there.
Aaron:There's actually plenty of them. And we're trying to take a new spin on an existing problem. And just trying to solve it for this niche. That's something I learned with being an indie hacker, I just got to nail down this one niche. And if I do it, then I have the opportunity to grow to other niches as well.
Aaron:So I remember for a long time, I thought that to be an entrepreneur, you had to just like come up with something that no one ever thought about it gotta be revolutionary, or, and I, I learned that that's definitely not the case. There's actually a lot of opportunity, especially now when so many people are looking at AI as this shiny object, and everybody is like Goldrush. Everybody go into that side. I feel like there's so much opportunity for India hackers to look at existing products and say, You know what, Google Analytics is not that good. Maybe I could build an alternative to that.
Aaron:Oh, like, I don't know, JIRA is not that good. Maybe I can build an alternative to that. And you see, with plausible and with linear, they took 2 different paths. 1 is a VC backed company. Another is an indie hacker, bootstrap company.
Aaron:So I don't know, I feel like, this is the best time to build. And and it doesn't have to be something that no one ever thought about.
Arvid:Yeah. I think your approach of, like, really sweating the details, I think is the phrase, right, like really caring about the you can you can see it on the recent home page. This is a well constructed home page, and it looks cool. Like, it just you know, like, it it immediately invites you into, like, you can feel that the people who built this, they probably care about quality product. And I think that speaks the language.
Arvid:I think in a marketing sense, you did a really good job conveying how much you care about quality because, like, developers can see this. Like, we we all have seen the documentation pages of weird software from the nineties. Like, we have memories of the shittiest websites that have information on them that we could barely read, could barely parse. It's unstructured. It's really bad.
Arvid:So we know what bad looks like, and then you come and you provide this wonderful website that is clear, that has messaging that is very approachable to a a logical analytical mind. That suggests that you know what you're doing. And I I wonder how much work went into that because that feels like a lot of effort on that website, man.
Aaron:Dude, it was so much work. And there were so many times that we were like, okay, it's been months that we're developing this or weeks. This is getting out of hand. Are we doing the right thing or not by spending so much time on the website? And there are many times that we're like, okay, let's launch it next Monday.
Aaron:And then Monday comes, they were like, it's not there yet. And then we're like, okay, next Monday then and then, it's not there yet. And that's something I I truly feel like it's an opportunity to for NG hackers because there's this MVP mentality, right? Like, you gotta ship fast, you gotta validate as fast as possible. And that's all true.
Aaron:Like, I don't disagree with that. My point is that people then cut a lot of corners. And they they miss the opportunity to communicate something deeper. So speaking of free send, you go to the website. First thing you see, this crazy Rubik's cube rotating in front of you.
Aaron:What's that about? Like, what's that related to email or developer tools? What's the deal with that? And for me, the the important thing about that is that it communicates a lot of things. It communicates that, hey, this is different.
Aaron:This is not SendGrid. This is something else. Oh, this is there's a technical excellence here that I don't see elsewhere. So if this is good, imagine what's behind this and the attention to detail. Oh, this is a team that cares.
Aaron:So if I have an issue, they'll they probably care, to help me. And I could create a values page and talk about all of the things that we care as a team and then write that down. Or I can demonstrate on the most important real estate that I have on the web, which is the first load on my homepage. And I highly recommend NG hackers to do the same. Like, how can you communicate the things that you value and that your audience values?
Aaron:And there's just a sense of giving back that I cannot articulate. I wish I could. But when you see something, and you're like, oh, these people care. Oh, by you just like you also care by by extent. There's just something weird about humans I I can't explain.
Arvid:I think it's something there. Something I think I think it's it's absolutely show, don't tell. Right? You you show them, and by doing it, you you make them aware of it. You you don't do have to promise something and then maybe you fulfill it later.
Arvid:Like, here it is, an example of your craftsmanship and all of that. And I think you do this not just on the website, which is great, but also in all the integrations that you have, like, and that you actively pursue. Like, you've been you've been trying to get your open source stuff, like all the integrations and the different tools. That's really cool. And did I hear something about you?
Arvid:Are you going more into the world of PHP? Is there maybe something that's gonna happen?
Aaron:Yeah. That's so true. You know, like, we know there's a revival in in the PHP community of some sorts. PHP has been around for a long time, and, the community is still extremely active despite what other communities might say about it. So one of the cool things that I'm super excited about is that, Taylor, the creator of Laravel, I stumbled upon him on an event, and he was just, like, on this circle with me.
Aaron:And then I just mentioned something about, someone that he just had hired. And then he's like, oh, so, yeah, what do you work on? I'm like, oh, resend. And he's like, oh, I actually, developed, like, a transport layer, and and I committed that into Laravel. Like, really?
Aaron:He's like, yeah. And I'm like, when yeah. When are you shipping this? I'm like, oh, I just need to push the commit, and then we're we're good.
Arvid:Like, Yeah, let's do it. So,
Aaron:yeah, recent is now, like a core, the transport layer on Laravel. And then that was super cool, because then the folks from symphony saw that and they got inspired by that. And now recent is also part of symphony. And we're just trying to make the lives of developers easier, whatever, you know, channel or technology use like another case, is with Cloudflare Workers. The folks from Cloudflare, they reached out to me last year talking about, like, oh, how we can integrate recent.
Aaron:There's a lot of people asking for that, and we didn't have too much time to work anything, with them. So then they came this year again. They're like, man, there's a lot of people using recent Cloudflare Workers. We should do something. And now we have, like, an official integration with them too.
Aaron:They added recent on their docs. And I'm, like, just so happy that, we're building this ecosystem. You know? As a developer, there are tools that I love and every developer loves a different tool. So whatever you love, we wanna be there.
Aaron:We're working on a Rust SDK at this very moment. So there's a lot of cool stuff coming.
Arvid:That's cool. And, again, this shows, like, how much you care about this particular community. And that's that's what what I hear. Like, you you could probably have just skipped Rust, you know, or skip skip Laravel for that matter and just went for rails or, you know, like, pick your thing. But to actually be inclusive and give give everybody who has a preference a choice of integration, that speaks to me as somebody who has missed out on a lot of these in the past because these businesses were way too far gone from me.
Arvid:Right? Way too way too they didn't care about me as, like, the the simple single solopreneur developer. They only wanted to reach other enterprise businesses, but you don't do that, and I love this. And I hope you can keep this up for as long as possible. That's that's really what I hope.
Arvid:Right? Because the the the markets change and you have growth expectations and all that, but I see that that you're trying. You're trying to stick with devs for as long as you can, and it's really cool.
Aaron:Yeah. Man. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Alfred. Means a lot coming from you, for sure.
Arvid:Well, I I will keep my eye on on recent. I I think I I have a free account there, and I think I might migrate PodScan over to the thing. Now that it's also in Laravel as, like, a baseline thing, that's just awesome. I really love this. And I I yeah.
Arvid:It's so funny. Right? But that you didn't necessarily intend to have this happen, but it just happened because you were at the right place at the right time talking to the right people. Like, if there's a lesson in there for founders, it's be at conferences, be at events, go to meetups, like, hang out with other makers in the space and see what kind of partnerships just happened by random chance. Right?
Arvid:And what kind of opportunities can come from this? You have to be present in the space and things can happen. That's really cool.
Aaron:And serendipity is something that, you know, you got to use at your advantage. And when you're building something from scratch, you just gotta use every little opportunity you can to to, you know, make it better. So Well,
Arvid:I I see you do this, and I I see you, like, sharing all of this in public as well, which I really appreciate. So if people wanna find out more about recent, about your journey, which has been, but what since 2009 or something, you've been publicly communicating this on your blog as well. Like, man, there's so much here that we didn't even get to talk about. But if people wanna follow you and the business that you're that you're building, where should they go?
Aaron:Yeah. So I'm super active on x. So, x.com/ xenorocha is where you can find me posting random stuff. And also, you know, resend because I'm super active on, on my personal account, I'm also on our business account. So we're everyday posting new stuff that we're shipping.
Aaron:So at recent on x and everywhere like Zenorocha.com, you can find all my talks, all my podcasts, articles, everything built. Yeah.
Arvid:That's cool. Man, these are these are great locations. I highly recommend following Zeno. Yeah. That's yeah.
Arvid:You're great. And I'm what I'm really really grateful for is that you're bringing the indie hacker mentality into yc and into the world of vc. I think that's that's quite the feat and and something that you're that you're actively helping both communities communicate more and kinda see the good in each other. I think that's that's something that I really enjoy about your work and the way you just explained it to me here on the show. Really appreciate it.
Arvid:Thank you so much for being on and sharing all these insights. That that was really cool. Thank you so much, Sam.
Aaron:Thank you, man. You've been an inspiration for a long time, so I'm I'm super glad, we're having this this discussion here.
Arvid:That was very cool. Appreciate it.
Arvid:And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this. You're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product. You acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue.
Arvid:That's the dream of every SaaS founder. Right? Problem is you're not growing. For whatever reason, maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or applying lack of interest. You don't know.
Arvid:You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business. And all those things you did like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road 6 months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue, and you have this hyper successful business.
Arvid:That is the dream. The reality unfortunately is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who is facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn't look different every time is the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation.
Arvid:Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point, or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option, and that is selling a business on inquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list.
Arvid:They've helped hundreds of founders already. Just go check it out at try. Acquire.com/arved. It's me. And see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time.
Arvid:You might just wanna wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's always good to be in the know. Thank you for listening to the Boostr founder today. I really appreciate that.
Arvid:You can find me on Twitter
Arvid:at avitkahl, a r v
Arvid:e r k a h l, and you'll find my books and my Twitter course tattoo. If you wanna support me and the show, please subscribe to
Arvid:my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let
Arvid:me know. It would be interesting to see. And leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com/founder. It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up
Arvid:in other people's feeds, and that's
Arvid:I think where we all would like it to be, just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
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