Mar 02, 2025
How 3 AM Customer Calls Built a $280-Person SMS Giant
An interview with Alex Beller, Founder of Postscript
Founder Focused
"Every time your company doubles in headcount size, it breaks." This stark reality hit Alex Beller hard as he scaled PostScript from a scrappy three-person startup to a 280-employee powerhouse.
Beller co-founded PostScript, an SMS marketing platform that serves 18,000 e-commerce businesses built on Shopify. What started as weekend tinkering in LA and Arizona became a multi-million dollar company that reached $1M ARR just 6-7 months after launch—all through word-of-mouth growth.
In this interview, Beller reveals the counterintuitive strategies that fueled PostScript's explosive growth: why saying no to big-name customers was their best decision, how waking up at 3 AM for customer support calls became their secret weapon, and the surprising acronym hack that kept their culture intact through seven years of hypergrowth.
Watch the full interview now on EO's YouTube channel! Below is the complete transcription of the interview. Minor edits have been made for clarity and readability.
Key Highlights:
"Every time your company doubles in headcount size, it breaks, especially within the tech and the startup landscape."
"We're all attracted to big names and big dollar signs and big markets, but focusing on a core product and a core user in a core use case, I believe that that breeds excellence in a product. The riches are in the niches, and that's a difficult thing to do."
"We put a live chat widget on our website and inside the PostScript application and we set it up so that whenever anyone chatted in, it would call all three of our cell phones and we would immediately stop whatever we were doing... We would wake up in the middle of the night when our cell phone rang to help customers. This is a secret that I would recommend to everyone."
"We're all attracted to big names and big dollar signs and big markets, but focusing on a core product and a core user in a core use case, I believe that that breeds excellence in a product. The riches are in the niches, and that's a difficult thing to do."
"We put a live chat widget on our website and inside the PostScript application and we set it up so that whenever anyone chatted in, it would call all three of our cell phones and we would immediately stop whatever we were doing... We would wake up in the middle of the night when our cell phone rang to help customers. This is a secret that I would recommend to everyone."
From Weekend Project to YC Darling
Tell us about PostScript and how it all started.
Alex Beller: I'm Alex Beller, one of the co-founders of PostScript. PostScript is an SMS marketing platform for e-commerce businesses, and the idea from the start was SMS marketing for brands built on top of Shopify, make a really easy, really powerful solution that lets people retarget, transact, converse with their customers over text message.
PostScript found product-market fit very early. Customers wanted to send text messages to their subscribers, to their shoppers, and as long as it generates clear ROI they're gonna want to send more. Around this time we decided to apply to Y Combinator and we did that for many reasons. We were kind of outsiders. We were based in LA and Arizona. We weren't very connected to the tech scene.
I went into our application after we filed it every few days and I would update it with our new revenue number so that when they logged into our application to review it, they would see on this date this was their revenue. On this date, the revenue was higher, on this date the revenue was higher, and this was like our second or third month, and that was the time when our revenue each week was going from like $200 a month to $800 to $2000 to $3000.
I believe that the reason that we got into YC was because they saw this growth trajectory. And all that growth was coming from word of mouth and it was coming from the Shopify App Store. It was all inbound to us. We were in the right time, at the right place with the right product that generated value for our users, and by the time we left Y Combinator, we were past a million dollars in annual revenue, approximately 6 to 7 months after we launched.
PostScript found product-market fit very early. Customers wanted to send text messages to their subscribers, to their shoppers, and as long as it generates clear ROI they're gonna want to send more. Around this time we decided to apply to Y Combinator and we did that for many reasons. We were kind of outsiders. We were based in LA and Arizona. We weren't very connected to the tech scene.
I went into our application after we filed it every few days and I would update it with our new revenue number so that when they logged into our application to review it, they would see on this date this was their revenue. On this date, the revenue was higher, on this date the revenue was higher, and this was like our second or third month, and that was the time when our revenue each week was going from like $200 a month to $800 to $2000 to $3000.
I believe that the reason that we got into YC was because they saw this growth trajectory. And all that growth was coming from word of mouth and it was coming from the Shopify App Store. It was all inbound to us. We were in the right time, at the right place with the right product that generated value for our users, and by the time we left Y Combinator, we were past a million dollars in annual revenue, approximately 6 to 7 months after we launched.
The 3 AM Customer Support Secret
What were some of the key strategies that drove your early growth?
Alex Beller: We did something that in hindsight we hadn't put much thought into but ended up being a really good idea, and this is a secret that I would recommend to everyone. We put a live chat widget on our website and inside the PostScript application and we set it up so that whenever anyone chatted in, whenever any user submitted a chat, it would call all three of our cell phones, me and Adam and Colin, and it would ring us and we would immediately stop whatever we were doing and we would drop it and we would go log in and try to help that person.
We would answer their questions, we would take feedback from them, we would help them use the product, whatever that turned out to be. An incredible secret that accelerated us so much, and there's a bunch of reasons why.
First, we learned so much from these early customers. I mean, they were giving us feedback on holes in our product and what we needed to build next and pricing. They're giving us feedback on everything. And so then we could just build exactly what they were asking for and they'd be happier.
But the other thing that came out of it is people were getting great, amazing hands-on support from the founders, and we would be super open that we were the founders of this tiny little business. And people really liked that and so they started to tell their friends or other people they knew about the PostScript product. They started leaving us good reviews on the Shopify app store that then had our application listing rank even higher there.
We would wake up in the middle of the night when our cell phone rang to help customers. We would leave the ringer on, and that created a lot of our groundswell that led to our early growth.
We would answer their questions, we would take feedback from them, we would help them use the product, whatever that turned out to be. An incredible secret that accelerated us so much, and there's a bunch of reasons why.
First, we learned so much from these early customers. I mean, they were giving us feedback on holes in our product and what we needed to build next and pricing. They're giving us feedback on everything. And so then we could just build exactly what they were asking for and they'd be happier.
But the other thing that came out of it is people were getting great, amazing hands-on support from the founders, and we would be super open that we were the founders of this tiny little business. And people really liked that and so they started to tell their friends or other people they knew about the PostScript product. They started leaving us good reviews on the Shopify app store that then had our application listing rank even higher there.
We would wake up in the middle of the night when our cell phone rang to help customers. We would leave the ringer on, and that created a lot of our groundswell that led to our early growth.
When Big Brands Come Knocking (And Why We Said No)
You've maintained laser focus on Shopify e-commerce brands. How did you resist the temptation to expand?
Alex Beller: So we launched really with an MVP that directly grew into PostScript. We've enhanced it and we've expanded it, but we never pivoted. It was SMS marketing for e-commerce on Shopify, and that's still what it is today.
In the early days of PostScript, we had brands come to us, big brands that heard about us that weren't on Shopify, and they wanted to give us a lot of money to send text messages. Right, so they're an e-commerce brand, that's our sweet spot. They want to use PostScript for exactly what everyone else uses it for, but they had a different underlying technology. They weren't on Shopify. They were using a different platform.
I'm the revenue leader of the company. That's a hard thing to say no to, right? That's hard to walk away from a huge prominent brand who wants to pay us a lot of money and be our friend and do a case study with us. But we decided to pass on that and we said, you know what, we'll see you later on down the road, but right now we're focused on this one thing.
That's a difficult thing to do. It requires a lot of discipline, but it would have taken us off track. It would have led to distraction. We would have been building in many different directions then with limited resources, and it would have been a mistake because of that focus, so much of our value has been created.
Focus is one that is underrated, especially within the tech and the startup landscape. We're all attracted to big names and big dollar signs and big markets, but focusing on a core product and a core user in a core use case to start, not forever, but to start. I believe that that breeds excellence in a product. The riches are in the niches.
In the early days of PostScript, we had brands come to us, big brands that heard about us that weren't on Shopify, and they wanted to give us a lot of money to send text messages. Right, so they're an e-commerce brand, that's our sweet spot. They want to use PostScript for exactly what everyone else uses it for, but they had a different underlying technology. They weren't on Shopify. They were using a different platform.
I'm the revenue leader of the company. That's a hard thing to say no to, right? That's hard to walk away from a huge prominent brand who wants to pay us a lot of money and be our friend and do a case study with us. But we decided to pass on that and we said, you know what, we'll see you later on down the road, but right now we're focused on this one thing.
That's a difficult thing to do. It requires a lot of discipline, but it would have taken us off track. It would have led to distraction. We would have been building in many different directions then with limited resources, and it would have been a mistake because of that focus, so much of our value has been created.
Focus is one that is underrated, especially within the tech and the startup landscape. We're all attracted to big names and big dollar signs and big markets, but focusing on a core product and a core user in a core use case to start, not forever, but to start. I believe that that breeds excellence in a product. The riches are in the niches.
Every Time You Double, Everything Breaks
PostScript has grown from 3 founders to 280 employees. What are the biggest challenges that come with scaling?
Alex Beller: There's a common framing that I hear from a lot of other late stage founders or investors that I believe is true, which is that every time your company doubles in headcount size, it breaks. And I've really seen that to be the case, you know, when it's 10 people, everyone's connected to everyone, and it's all automatic, and then suddenly it's 25 people and you need management layers of some kind, and then it's 150 and it's a completely different company and 100 and 200, they're totally different companies and they require different styles of communication and management and they require a lot of different things from their founders.
When you advance to the growth stage, the people challenges really set in. Your organization becomes so much more about how you can direct the resources at your disposal instead of how can you as a craftsman or a practitioner build product or work with customers, and those are very different skill sets.
What makes great CEOs and great leaders is the ability to look at your resourcing, look at your organization, look at all the opportunities in front of you, and sequence things properly so that as much lines up as possible.
When you advance to the growth stage, the people challenges really set in. Your organization becomes so much more about how you can direct the resources at your disposal instead of how can you as a craftsman or a practitioner build product or work with customers, and those are very different skill sets.
What makes great CEOs and great leaders is the ability to look at your resourcing, look at your organization, look at all the opportunities in front of you, and sequence things properly so that as much lines up as possible.
The FEACH Values Hack That Saved Our Culture
What's your approach to maintaining culture during rapid scaling?
Alex Beller: When I think about some of the biggest lessons or tips that I could give entrepreneurs thinking about scaling, what comes to mind more than anything else is values. When we started the business, we didn't create a set of values, and the reason for this was because we'd all worked in companies before that had values, but maybe they weren't that important or they just hung on the wall, but no one really knew them or was connected to them and so we just thought it was superfluous.
But Tim Brady, who was one of our partners at Y Combinator, when we were about to hire our first team member, he said to us, Create a couple of values. It'll help you anchor the culture in something. And that's what we did. The three of us sat down and we banged our head against the wall and we got the whiteboard out and we created a set of values.
That value set has been core to the culture that has been built to PostScript for now almost 7 years. The key tip that I would give people is not just to create a set of values, but to make sure it has a great acronym. This is actually the hack. Because what's more important than what the values are, it's that everyone knows them.
To get specific, the values at PostScript, the acronym for them is FEACH. It's fearlessness, excellence, animal, customer first, humility. Every time a new person joins PostScript, they go through a training with me where I walk them through all of our values, what FEACH stands for, the story behind each one, how we believe it should show up at work.
But Tim Brady, who was one of our partners at Y Combinator, when we were about to hire our first team member, he said to us, Create a couple of values. It'll help you anchor the culture in something. And that's what we did. The three of us sat down and we banged our head against the wall and we got the whiteboard out and we created a set of values.
That value set has been core to the culture that has been built to PostScript for now almost 7 years. The key tip that I would give people is not just to create a set of values, but to make sure it has a great acronym. This is actually the hack. Because what's more important than what the values are, it's that everyone knows them.
To get specific, the values at PostScript, the acronym for them is FEACH. It's fearlessness, excellence, animal, customer first, humility. Every time a new person joins PostScript, they go through a training with me where I walk them through all of our values, what FEACH stands for, the story behind each one, how we believe it should show up at work.
Have you ever changed these values as the company evolved?
Alex Beller: I believe that the values that are going to be relevant to an organization are going to change over time. They're not always the same. I'll give you an example. The E in FEACH of our company's values today it stands for excellence. It didn't always stand for that. It used to stand for 80/20.
80/20 meaning we wanted people to be operating from an 80/20 mindset. We didn't want folks to focus on perfection. We wanted to be moving really quickly. We wanted to be doing whatever we could to capture as much value as we can with 20% of the effort and then move on to the next thing. And that was great. That helped us move quickly and that helped us inform how we built product and that helped us inform how we built process, and that was an amazing early stage value.
But after a while we realized that we were running into issues because of it. We were well past 100 people and we needed more robust processes and systems. We needed our product to be sturdier and more stable, right, and less about just shipping everything that's new and making sure what we had was really robust as we were serving bigger and bigger customers.
And at that point we went in and we changed the value from 80/20, which starts with an E, to excellence, which also starts with an E, and that way the acronym for our value stayed the same, but we got to change the DNA of the company. It's kind of a weird quirky little learned secret, but I would really recommend other entrepreneurs as they're scaling, think about doing something similar, be comfortable going back and changing your company values.
80/20 meaning we wanted people to be operating from an 80/20 mindset. We didn't want folks to focus on perfection. We wanted to be moving really quickly. We wanted to be doing whatever we could to capture as much value as we can with 20% of the effort and then move on to the next thing. And that was great. That helped us move quickly and that helped us inform how we built product and that helped us inform how we built process, and that was an amazing early stage value.
But after a while we realized that we were running into issues because of it. We were well past 100 people and we needed more robust processes and systems. We needed our product to be sturdier and more stable, right, and less about just shipping everything that's new and making sure what we had was really robust as we were serving bigger and bigger customers.
And at that point we went in and we changed the value from 80/20, which starts with an E, to excellence, which also starts with an E, and that way the acronym for our value stayed the same, but we got to change the DNA of the company. It's kind of a weird quirky little learned secret, but I would really recommend other entrepreneurs as they're scaling, think about doing something similar, be comfortable going back and changing your company values.
The Future is Conversational Commerce
How do you see AI and technology changing the SMS marketing landscape?
Alex Beller: When I think about what's going on with AI today with generative AI and when I think about what's going on, what's been going on for a long time with predictive machine learning, what I see is a future where one to many marketing goes away and where it becomes highly personalized and in the SMS space highly conversational.
Since the beginning of the e-commerce use case, marketing has been generally one way. It's, I'm an e-commerce marketer. I am pushing out a notification to my audience to try to get them to go buy. That works. It's fine, but that's not how we actually use messaging. We all text one another back and forth in conversations. And at PostScript we've always believed that there is an enormous opportunity for brands to see even higher performance and for consumers to be even happier if the interactions are conversational between them.
At PostScript, we've been invested in this for a while. We built and launched a product called SMS Sales. It is the only part of our company that is in person. And we have a huge office in Phoenix, Arizona that is filled with e-commerce salespeople who work on behalf of our brands to sell and drive more transactions over the SMS channel. It's kind of old school. It's like if you walk into a retail store and someone helps you shop or buy or answers your questions, it's like that for e-commerce.
We've been doing this for several years and we've built up an enormous amount of expertise in it. And many of our largest customers, many huge brands are using it to drive more sales and to keep their customers happy, and we are so excited at the opportunity of bringing that to further scale with new advancements in AI and the data sets that we've been building and the conversational training that we've been doing over the last several years.
AI and predictive machine learning together are not only going to unlock the personalization I was just talking about, but they're also going to allow for a much more conversational marketing experience. That phrase conversational commerce has been like floating in the ether forever and no one's really done it, and I believe now it's actually going to happen.
Since the beginning of the e-commerce use case, marketing has been generally one way. It's, I'm an e-commerce marketer. I am pushing out a notification to my audience to try to get them to go buy. That works. It's fine, but that's not how we actually use messaging. We all text one another back and forth in conversations. And at PostScript we've always believed that there is an enormous opportunity for brands to see even higher performance and for consumers to be even happier if the interactions are conversational between them.
At PostScript, we've been invested in this for a while. We built and launched a product called SMS Sales. It is the only part of our company that is in person. And we have a huge office in Phoenix, Arizona that is filled with e-commerce salespeople who work on behalf of our brands to sell and drive more transactions over the SMS channel. It's kind of old school. It's like if you walk into a retail store and someone helps you shop or buy or answers your questions, it's like that for e-commerce.
We've been doing this for several years and we've built up an enormous amount of expertise in it. And many of our largest customers, many huge brands are using it to drive more sales and to keep their customers happy, and we are so excited at the opportunity of bringing that to further scale with new advancements in AI and the data sets that we've been building and the conversational training that we've been doing over the last several years.
AI and predictive machine learning together are not only going to unlock the personalization I was just talking about, but they're also going to allow for a much more conversational marketing experience. That phrase conversational commerce has been like floating in the ether forever and no one's really done it, and I believe now it's actually going to happen.
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