Entering a growing ecosystem with Postscript's Alex Beller

Episode 24 of the How to Win podcast with Peep Laja podcast, hosted by Peep Laja, titled "Entering a growing ecosystem with Postscript's Alex Beller" was published on February 7, 2022 and runs 29 minutes.

February 7, 2022 ·29m · How to Win podcast with Peep Laja

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Summary

This week on How to Win: Alex Beller is the Co-founder & President of Postscript, an eCommerce SMS platform for Shopify stores. We hear from Alex about the advantages of building a business on top of a successful, growing ecosystem and why they have chosen to focus their product on a very specific market segment. I add my insights on why it is important to get into the limited consideration set of category buyers, why strategic choices are all about trade-offs, and why scalable pricing models are a key component of successful go-to-market strategies.

Episode Description

Key Points:

The origins of Postscript (01:05)
Why Postscript chose to build on top of Shopify’s platform (02:15)
My thoughts on the advantages of attaching yourself to a growing ecosystem (03:34)
Postscript’s initial, rapid growth (06:38)
Alex’s thoughts on the SMS marketing channel opening up(08:45)
I explain the law of double jeopardy, and how B2B buyers are satisficing (09:40)
Why Postscript’s product strategy is to stay ultra-focused (12:57)
My take on differentiating by building for a specific audience (13:56)
Postscript’s hiring strategy through a year of explosive growth (18:02)
My insight into common hiring missteps, and how to avoid them (20:43)
Why Alex wishes they’d built out Postscript’s go-to-market strategy sooner (23:51)
My thoughts on pricing strategy, and the advantages of a usage-based model (25:15)
What Postscript is building to carry them into the future (26:57)
Wrap up (27:50)

Mentioned:

Postscript

Alex Beller

Y Combinator

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Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science