Postscript is an SMS advertising and marketing supplier for Shopify manufacturers. The corporate launched in 2018 and has since raised a whopping $106.2 million throughout 4 funding rounds, per Crunchbase. Alex Beller is Postscript’s president and certainly one of three co-founders.
Postscript’s advertising and marketing platform is SMS-only and Shopify-only. To Beller, that interprets to “finest at school” efficiency.
In our latest dialog, he and I mentioned the corporate’s focus, regulatory compliance, and extra. Your entire audio of our dialogue is embedded under. The transcript is edited for size and readability.
Eric Bandholz: How was 2023 for Postscript?
Alex Beller: Postscript’s enterprise is a mirrored image of the Shopify ecosystem. We solely work with manufacturers constructed on Shopify, so we’ve felt a whole lot of what ecommerce manufacturers have felt this yr. We’ve seen development when it comes to manufacturers adopting Postscript. It appears like 2023 is the yr we carved out our area of interest out there. It’s been difficult, however actually, as I replicate with my co-founders, yearly has been difficult. That half doesn’t change.
We’re an SMS supplier for manufacturers constructed on Shopify. We don’t work with another platforms. We don’t do electronic mail. We’re finest at school for SMS on Shopify
Our platform is constructed for manufacturers to attach SMS to order and conversion knowledge. That will get fed into Postscript from Shopify, and it’s anonymized. Roughly 12,000 manufacturers of various sizes use Postscript. That’s not practically all Shopify’s buyer base, nevertheless it’s a superb snapshot.
This yr, we’ve seen inconsistencies. On the one hand, headwinds actually appeared current. We’ve seen extra manufacturers exit of enterprise than in prior years. We additionally noticed mixture development decelerate. The previous couple of years we’ve had excessive annual development charges. This yr’s development is smaller. Many retailers had been nearer to flat. Nonetheless, ecommerce didn’t fall off a cliff. It was a little bit of a retrenching.
Bandholz: In 2021, Florida handed a sweeping SMS compliance invoice. What are the legalities retailers ought to pay attention to?
Beller: There are numerous compliance guidelines within the SMS business. One is governmental regulation that creates authorized threat for manufacturers. On the U.S. federal degree, it’s via the Phone Shopper Safety Act or TCPA.
The opposite is provider regulation — T-Cellular and Verizon — to impression deliverability. Carriers may shut a telephone quantity off if a model breaks their guidelines. These firms are protecting over their airwaves and rigid when coping with an attraction from a small to medium-sized enterprise.
Then there’s the authorized regulation. Traditionally, TCPA ensured firms by no means texted anybody who didn’t explicitly choose in or had opted out. State rules have popped up over the previous few years, including new dangers. Florida is likely one of the leaders on this, together with Oklahoma.
A lot of the danger includes sending the messages and a better threshold for opt-ins. Our strategy is to improve our backend compliance so manufacturers don’t have to fret as a lot.
Sadly, the state rules have triggered a groundswell of lawsuits. We deal with this in our product and have an in-house authorized effort to assist manufacturers in the event that they want it.
Bandholz: Speak extra in regards to the dangers to retailers.
Beller: Florida has longer quiet hours for subscribers within the state — from 8:00 p.m. to eight a.m. There’s additionally a restrict of three messages inside 24 hours for a selected marketing campaign or product. These state-level rules in Florida don’t exist on the federal degree. They apply to any model with operations in Florida. The penalties are significant — $500 to $1,500 per message per subscriber.
Sadly, there are plaintiffs who purchase deactivated and outdated numbers to obtain texts they didn’t join or are within the quiet hours. These plaintiffs accomplice with regulation companies to certify it as a category motion. If profitable, they will run down everybody who acquired that textual content, significantly rising the penalty, which, once more, is predicated on each message and recipient.
Manufacturers have a number of prevention choices. Postscript received’t deploy messages throughout the quiet interval in Florida or elsewhere. We additionally advocate that manufacturers undertake phrases of service that embrace a category motion waiver, whereby subscribers agree to not take part. That will restrict legal responsibility to a single subscriber, the plaintiff, at $500 to $1,500.
Bandholz: Postscript is SMS solely. Do you propose to diversify?
Beller: It’s the early days for SMS, and we’re engaged on driving efficiency throughout the complete buyer journey. We deal with subscriber lifetime worth and checklist development. There’s a lot alternative for my co-founders and me if we are able to differentiate our product from rivals. We might be devoted gamers.
Bandholz: The place can individuals discover you?
Beller: Our web site is Postscript.io. I’m on LinkedIn and @ringmybeller on X.
