How Did Resend Take Its First Payments?

Zeno Rocha took Resend's first payments with a Stripe payment link in January 2023. The YC batch was kicking off, growth milestones had to be hit every single week, and there was no time to build a full Stripe integration. He barely had a product.

On a call he would pitch Resend, ask whether the person wanted to try it, and send a payment link generated on the Stripe dashboard. Some people paid on the call. Others paid after he kept following up and asked them to sign up. He could code, and he still chose the no-code link because he simply did not have time.

A few months later the payment link was not going to scale, so the team embedded Stripe's widgets in Resend. With more users, the widgets felt ugly and did not match the brand, so Resend switched to the APIs and the SDKs directly. He feels Stripe is brilliant in the way it executes: people might have different knowledge, or the same knowledge at different stages of a business, and there is still a way to solve the problem.