The path to startup success is a tumultuous one, and for Phoenix natives Colin and Adam Turner, the bust preceded the boom. Their first startup project was a mobile multiplayer game called Wiblits, which failed in 2016.
“We got to like 100,000 iOS users, but made no money,” Colin Turner said. “We eventually had to give up when we ran out of money.”
That first failure set the brothers on the path toward meeting co-founder Alex Beller and creating Postscript, a text message marketing platform, that unveiled a $35 million series B capital raise last month.
Postscript is a marketing platform for e-commerce stores on the Shopify platform. With PostScript, e-commerce stores can run SMS text message marketing campaigns and have two-way conversations with their customers.
The latest funding round was led by California venture capital firm Greylock Partners, with participation from YC Continuity Fund, OpenView and others. The funding will be used to bulk up the product and expand go-to-market efforts by hiring more people.
Postscript is a completely remote company without any brick-and-mortar offices. The HQ is technically in Scottsdale (the city where Turner lives) and about 10 of the company’s employees live in the Valley including several other executives.
The Postscript path
The company was co-founded by Alex Beller, Postscript’s president, Adam Turner, the CEO, and Colin Turner, the COO. All three grew up in the Valley, but Adam and Alex currently live in Colorado.
Colin, the elder Turner brother, said he has seen both ends of the startup spectrum, from the Wiblits failure to the PostScript raise.
“It's a tale of two product market fits. One as fortunate as it gets, really, and the other one we just tried and tried and pivoted and pivoted, but didn't find it,” he said. “By the time we started working on Postscripts, we were good enough to build something from start to finish.”
The Turner boys and Beller all grew up in the Valley and all attended the University of Southern California, though they didn’t meet each other until they joined the workforce.
After Wiblits failed in 2016, Adam Turner returned to Los Angeles where he met Beller while working at StackCommerce, an e-commerce provider in Venice.
PostScript was officially founded in 2018 and launched on the Shopify app store in September that year. The three co-founders then joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in San Francisco, in 2019.
Upon graduating from YC (and raising $4.5 million in the process) the three physically parted ways, with Colin coming back to Arizona and his co-founders heading for Colorado. The team knew they wanted to be remote from the start, despite adviser concerns.
“Actually, when we were in YC, they were worried that we would grow too quickly,” he said. “They thought we would have to hire too quickly to be able to do it fully remote, because they hadn't seen a natively remote company grow at that pace before in terms of our revenue at the time.”
The company has indeed grown quickly: It had less than 20 employees at the end of 2019 and has nearly 100 today. There are pockets of PostScript employees around Phoenix, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Denver and San Francisco, with people in 20 states and some provinces of Canada as well.
Turner said they have another 20 jobs available now for engineers, marketers, salespeople, customer success positions and others.
Remote revamp
Even though the company is completely remote, Turner said the pandemic still impacted the way they do business internally. For example, Postscript used to do regular in-person retreats that were shuttered during the pandemic.
The three co-founders also used to fly to meet new-hires and work in their city for a week or so to help with onboarding, though Turner said that would have had to stop anyway with such rapid growth.
They’ve since adopted different ways to build camaraderie during truly remote times; Like show and tell conferences to present work projects or ‘share of the week’ events for employees to share anything they like with their coworkers, such as an interesting hobby or personal story.
“You get this really great sense for not only what people are working on across the company, but their personalities too, which is really important,” he said.
Turner has worked with StartupAZ in the past and has since returned to the group to address the challenges that startups face when they grow quickly.
While Phoenix may not be a tech capital like San Francisco, Turner said that is changing quickly and he has valued the support from other founders who are growing their businesses.
“My experience has really been incredible here,” he said. “The other founders in there have been a tremendous support. It's been really great to have a peer group that's all facing similar kind of scaling problems.”
