Several years ago, Adam Turner, CEO of the text messaging marketing company Postscript, set out to address a surprising phenomenon among consumers who had signed up to receive marketing messages.
Just one-quarter of those who signed up for the texts Postscript was sending on behalf of its ecommerce customers actually made purchases. Adam decided to find out why.
He tasked several employees with asking consumers, via text, what was holding them back, yielding a wide variety of explanations. “People had all kinds of questions or concerns about the products they were considering,” says Adam, who co-founded Postscript with his older brother Colin. “It was the normal things that in a store or at the mall consumers could figure out themselves or ask a store employee about. These conversations had just never happened over ecommerce. That was the missing piece.”
Adam decided to complement Postscript’s automated messaging with a team of knowledgeable and friendly sales associates who could have those conversations over text. Today, a group of 50 Postscript employees, who are trained extensively in the brands they represent, work from 7am to 10pm, seven days a week communicating with end users via text. They answer questions about product details, provide information on new items, send along discounts, and otherwise engage in the kind of smart, personal, non-annoying interactions marketers have strived for decades to deliver.
The outcome has been a dramatic sales increase for Postscript’s customers, all of which are Shopify merchants. Instead of a 25% purchase rate, 60% of consumers who interact with the equivalent of an online personal shopper end up buying, making text messaging an effective way to communicate to customers.
Adam sees this as the foundation of something really big. Postscript currently has the capacity to offer human sales associates to just a fraction of its 15,000 customers. The rest use the company’s automated text messaging, or SMS, services. Postscript’s recently-introduced AI tools have the potential to dramatically accelerate this, allowing the company to scale their conversational and personalized interactions to thousands of additional brands and millions more consumers.
“For over a decade, marketers have been pretending to do personalization. SMS is what’s going to actually be a for-you ecommerce experience. That’s the future,” says Adam.
The entrepreneurial gene
Growing up in Phoenix, the Turner brothers – Adam, Colin, and their middle brother Derek — got an early introduction to entrepreneurship. Their father formed a handful of struggling enterprises before finding success with an educational technology company that eventually went public. “He was a very soft-spoken, intellectual person, with this massive, almost daredevil appetite for risk,” says Adam.
Colin, who ran several ventures as a kid, including an eBay store selling Beanie Babies, was the obvious heir apparent. Adam took a different path, spending his freshman year as a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy before transferring to USC where he studied physics. Yet before graduating, he too caught the startup bug.
Colin convinced Adam to comb USC’s campus for new users for his latest venture, a multiplayer mobile gaming company called Wiblits. “I ended up seeing how quickly you could create something and have an impact,” Adam says. “I saw it spread like wildfire in my friend group. That real-time feedback and impact got me addicted to startups.”
After college, Adam joined his brother at Wiblits full-time and taught himself programming languages like Python, SQL, and Javascript. The brothers spent nearly two years trying to boost revenue from subscriber fees, but ultimately decided the market wasn’t big enough. In 2016, they shut the company down.
A big marketing opportunity for small businesses
The experience taught Adam the value of solving problems for business customers instead of selling directly to consumers. He also decided he wanted to zero in on large, growing markets, ultimately joining the ecommerce company StackCommerce, which ran online stores for media properties like CNN and Mashable. At StackCommerce, Adam was a product manager who oversaw data products. He also met his future Postscript co-founder Alex Beller, who worked in business development.
In his spare time, Adam worked on coding projects and looked for new ideas. As is often the case with startups, the inspiration for Postscript came by chance. At a lunch meeting with a friend in 2018, the conversation turned to texting as a more personal and potentially more effective marketing outlet than email. The friend, who ran a small, niche store on Shopify wondered why he couldn’t regularly text his most loyal customers. At the time, Shopify didn’t offer this service. Email and social media ads were the dominant digital marketing channels. The friend agreed that if Adam would build a text messaging app, he’d pay him $50 a month. “At the time, I was just looking for revenue on the side,” Adam recalls.
This time, it was Adam who roped in his brother. Colin got to work building the app’s user interface, while Adam created the back end that would link to a customer data layer. Alex, Adam’s StackCommerce colleague, took on the go-to-market function. The deeper Adam went into the app, the more passionate he felt about what he was creating. Initially still employed at StackCommerce, he would work on Postscript five hours before the start of his day and another four at night. “I’d wake up at 4am to code and then go until 10pm. My girlfriend thought I was in a manic state, but I had found something I loved doing,” he says.
Since they had no bandwidth for finding additional customers or money to hire a salesperson, the three co-founders set their sights on Shopify’s established ecosystem of mostly small businesses. At the time, the Shopify app store had a little over 1,000 offerings, making standing out a feasible goal. As the company prepared to launch in late 2018, the pent-up demand for their service became apparent. A dozen businesses had put themselves on a waitlist, with some even trying to pay by credit card on a payments page that didn’t work. “That was a good sign about how huge this would be,” says Adam. Another early indicator of Postscript’s value was the fact that, for many Shopify businesses, a majority of consumers had selected the option of being contacted by phone, as opposed to email.
“In 2018, if you asked businesses about SMS marketing, they would say ‘Nobody would sign up for that.’ But we realized there was this dissonance between what stores believed their customers wanted and what customers were saying they wanted, which was to be texted,” says Adam.
The future of marketing
Adam sought to build on Postscript’s early momentum with positive reviews on Shopify’s app store. He set up notifications so that each time a new business signed up, his phone pinged. He would then start texting the business to help them onboard, even if it happened to be the middle of the night for him. As momentum built, the three co-founders stepped away from their other jobs to focus more on Postscript.
As text message marketing gained steam, what was once a cutting-edge marketing opportunity became a crowded field with dozens of competitors. To stay ahead of rivals, Adam has worked to maintain Postscript’s devotion to its customers. “You have to make sure you’re talking with your customers more than your competitors are,” he says. “It helps you build the differentiation and find the areas where other companies are falling short.”
Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock and Postscript board member, says that Adam uniquely balances deep connectivity and empathy for the Shopify community, with a long-term vision for where the future of this ecosystem and channel is heading. This has made him a unique partner to both the Postscript team and its merchant base.
For Adam, the next phase of growth means using AI to help customers deliver even better, more relevant, and ultimately personalized marketing. Instead of doing the standard A/B method of testing one option against a control, Postscript’s AI models, for instance, create and analyze thousands of versions of a text message. “What are the chances that the first message a brand uses is the best one?” Adam asks. “By continuously running tests, we can get a tremendous amount of data on what resonates with a particular group of consumers.”
Postscript customers that used this “infinity testing” have seen a 20% boost in their sales coming from marketing text messages. “We’ve already generated hundreds of thousands of incremental dollars for our customers. By the end of the year, it will be tens of millions,” Adam says.
Eventually, perhaps a year from now, AI will start taking over the personal conversations Postscript associates have with consumers, allowing them to happen at scale. For now, though, the LLM models are still being trained on human conversations and will have to be mapped to sophisticated profiles of each consumer’s buying history, shopping preferences, likes, and dislikes.
As for whether consumers will be OK talking to a bot instead of a human, Adam says that customers should always have the option to talk to a real person. “But if the bot is truly smart – or even better than a human because it’s 24/7 or can have faster or more accurate responses – then I think most people will come away feeling like it doesn’t matter at all.”
