How we think about YouTube

YouTube can be a difficult medium.

Without a clear strategy, content will fall flat or be off-putting. To ensure YouTube can be valuable for us, we've set out the following aspirational strategy.

Goals

We have two main goals:

1. Education: We want to become known subject-matter experts for email and we also want to educate our customers on how to get the most out of Resend.
2. Exposure: We want to demonstrate our company culture and values for the purpose of keeping our customers informed, promoting our products to new users, and recruiting additional talent.

Anti-Goals

It's important for us to avoid the following:

1. Chase subscribers or views
2. Over-saturate channel with corporate promotion
3. Pretend to offer value as a thin veil for marketing

Video Types

We produce three core types of videos on YouTube.

1. Subject-matter education

We want to provide genuine value to the email community without making a marketing pitch.

Examples:

• Industry news (e.g., industry protocol changes, Gmail/Yahoo updates, etc.)
• Best practices (e.g., deliverability, form validation, etc.)
• Core concepts (e.g., How email works, SMTP, etc.)

2. Product education

We want to educate our current customers on how to get the most out of Resend.

Content Examples:

• SDK tutorials
• Full builds for specific use-cases (e.g., waiting list, etc.)
• Integrations (e.g., Upstash, Supabase, etc.)

3. Company culture

Videos are a great way to introduce the people behind Resend. These types of videos and help expose our team culture and values, promote our products to new users, and recruit additional talent.

Content Examples:

• Video changelogs / Beta announcemnts
• Founder Q+A
• Handbook topics
• Behind-the-scenes
• Customer stories/interviews

Implementation Guidance

To help us plan our content, we think about both frequency and sequence.

Frequency

Ideally, we try to produce 7–8 videos per month with a mix of subject-matter education, product education, and company culture.

Sequence

Because video content requires more time and effort to produce, we often start with content that requires less lift and then build to full-length videos. Generally speaking, we progress through the following sequence:

1. Social post: focused on the content with embedded media when possible
2. Short-form short: cover the core content in a 1–2 minute video
3. Longform video: provide a more in-depth look at the content in 4–7 minutes

This sequence allows us to validate and improve our content before investing more time into longer-form videos. It also gives us a chance to gather feedback and iterate on our content before committing to a full-length video.