Jesse Hanley

Jesse Hanley is an Australian marketer and self-taught developer who founded Bento, an email marketing and automation platform. Before software they worked at a supplement company in Australia, where they moved from retail into tech by proposing and implementing technical solutions, and then went on to freelancing and consulting.

Their freelance work grew into an agency of around 25 people, which they later sold to focus on Bento. Bento began in 2018 as a side project, and its founding memo was written in a cafe in Tokyo. Hanley has said Bento eventually surpassed the revenue of their former agency, and podcasts have described it as a seven-figure business.

Bento combines email marketing, automation, a lightweight CRM, transactional email and chat in one product, with a strong emphasis on deliverability and on support answered by the people who build the product. It is independently and privately owned, and lists customers such as Laravel News, Examine and Geocodio. Around it Hanley has built sister products including PostShiba for email infrastructure, Tatami for deliverability monitoring, and Can I Send This for checking emails against mailbox provider rules.

Hanley lives in Fukuoka, Japan, and runs the business with a deliberately small, quiet footprint. They write a newsletter about building small internet businesses and appear regularly on indie and SaaS podcasts.