Twilio Ventures Founder Spotlight: Adam Turner, Colin Turner, and Alex Beller, Postscript

Twilio Ventures Founder Spotlight: Adam Turner, Colin Turner, and Alex Beller, Postscript

Company Name: Postscript.io
Founder Name(s): Adam Turner, Colin Turner, and Alex Beller
LinkedIn: Postcript.io Company Page
Industry: Talent Acquisition Technology
Stage/Funding: Series C, $65 million USD 
Location: Fully Remote

This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Ventures. Twilio Ventures invests in companies building tomorrow’s solutions for developers and customer engagement applications. We had the pleasure of working with Adam Turner, Colin Turner, and Alex Beller on their startup, Postcript.io. 

Describe Postscript’s startup journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message)

Postscript serves 12,000+ Shopify Merchants by making SMS their #1 revenue channel. 230+ folks, fully remote, delivering best in class service and strategy.

What does Postscript mean and/or how did it originate?

We chose the name Postscript for a few reasons:

• A “PS” at the end of a note or letter is friendly, relatable & casual. A Postscript is something you might add in a letter to a friend. We wanted our communications platform to have that warm, friendly feel, which our branding matches if you go to our site.
• We’re in marketing automation, so we thought that the “scripting” part was nice
• Abbreviating with “PS” is fun

What have you enjoyed most about building Postscript?

I’ve never learned so much so quickly. That pace of growth has been unrelenting, which has pushed the team to our limits in the best ways possible. We wouldn’t have it any other way! Most importantly, though, we’ve been able to make a tremendous impact for our customers. We’ve driven billions of dollars of e-commerce transactions that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. We’ve brought hundreds of millions of customers in deeper connection with brands that they love, how cool is that?!

What is one decision you made building Postscript that you would make differently today?

I would have hired more people earlier. There are benefits that compound with early employees, especially ones that are able to persevere through all the growth – this layer acts as a structural foundation for future hiring by becoming culture carriers, knowledge centres, recruiters, onboarding buddies, interviewing resources etc.

Our second stage of hiring was much larger than our first, which created a relative imbalance because our foundation was smaller than it could have been. This caused more pain than it needed to, and if we had hired folks earlier we could have avoided some of that pain.

What should potential customers know that is unique about Postscript?

• Our suite of products (SMS Marketing, SMS Sales, Fondue CashBack) will make you the most money out of any provider, hands down. Our products and expertise for list growth, segmentation, targeting, and personalization result in merchants collecting and monetizing subscribers at the highest possible rate;
• We also believe in the power of using SMS for 1:1 conversations. From being able to manually respond, flexibly automate responses or have a team of expert sales associates reply back, Postscript is making SMS more human;
• We have a strong compliance first approach to the channel and proactively adding features and tools as both legal and industry requirements change;
• We are all-in on SMS and deliver strategies and product innovations to help make SMS the #1 revenue channel for ecommerce merchants;
• By working closely with Twilio as a partner, and as our exclusive global customer engagement platform, we are able to work closely with the carriers to help shape the future of industry requirements balancing the needs of consumers with the complexities of support SHAFT adjacent verticals like alcohol.

How are you building on Twilio? E.g. How do you use Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify etc. to communicate with your customers?

We use Twilio's APIs for programmable SMS and conversation management to power our e-commerce SMS marketing platform for over 12,000 Shopify merchants. Twilio is Postscript’s exclusive global customer engagement platform.

Why did you select Twilio Ventures as an investor?

Twilio has been with us since I began developing the product on Day 1. It’s been incredibly rewarding to grow into a success story of theirs from developer to strategic partner. Twilio has seen our growth and vision for what the channel can be for merchants, and it feels great to be so aligned with a commercial partner in finding success for our customers.

How has Postscript benefited from partnering with Twilio?

Our close partnership with Twilio has helped Postscript unlock much higher throughput for our customers which is super important during peak sending times like BFCM. There are a lot of other benefits to us in being able to work closely with Twilio on larger topics like how the carriers view alcohol and help advocate on behalf of merchants.

We are also able to resolve issues with deliverability a lot faster because of our extremely close relationship with Twilio.

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Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight interviews and learn how others build, prototype, and demo on Twilio, please check out the series of articles here.

For questions about Twilio Startup Labs or to learn how to get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu at fyawowusu@twilio.com. 

To find out more about how Twilio supports Startups, check out Grow with Twilio.