Today we proudly celebrate the third birthday of textPlus.
In many ways, not much has changed from our launch on June 1, 2009. I can look across the room today at many of the same people who’ve been here since the beginning. And those same people remain focused on the same things they were then: the quality of our service.
Of course, back in 2009 there were just a few of us, fresh out of my garage (yes, literally). Hours after launching textPlus, we shared looks of mild panic as we quickly shattered through all of our expectations. To be honest, I don’t know what we were thinking. We were under some kind of illusion that textPlus would be born a cute little pony. In fact, textPlus was born a thoroughbred and raced out of the gate. Of course, that’s just the way we like it.
Now as I look back at our first week, the “monstrous” traffic we had was actually quite quaint. We sent one million messages that week (cue Dr. Evil). At our current rate of 1,500 messages per second, we’ll match that before you finish reading this post (ok - and the comments). We’re sending about 130 million messages per day right now, and have sent nearly 38 billion messages to date. Those hundreds of thousands of users in our first month? It’s grown to 30 million users overall, and we serve millions of you each day. We certainly don’t forget that each of those 30 million users has deliberately chosen textPlus for as their mobile communication destination. We’re inspired and humbled by that choice, and we work hard for the privilege of maintaining their trust and their business.
Back in 2009, we were only focused on messaging. In fact, we named our company GOGII as a nod to our shortcode, 60611 (you have to squint a little to see it). We hadn’t yet imagined giving away local phone numbers to our users (which we added in 2010) or adding voice/calling services (which we added this past December). Our calling platform has grown faster than our texting platform did at the same stage - with more than a third of our users textPlus to make calls.
Perhaps the biggest change that comes to mind this year is that textPlus has become a viable business with meaningful revenue and operating income. Of course, that means we’ll be able to provide and grow this service in perpetuity. It also means that we can provide for and grow the team that has committed itself for years to building our company. It takes a lot of courage to join a startup. There’s no guarantee of success and many fail before reaching scale. There are more than 100 people who had the courage and passion to take that leap with textPlus, and they’re the ones who make it happen. A special thanks to them.
So to all of our employees, alumni employees, shareholders, investors and -- most of all -- to our more than 30 million users, I say thank you and a very happy birthday. If any of you would like to share some birthday cheer with me - you can find me at textPlus username LAMA.
Regards,
Scott “LAMA” Lahman