It’s not often that startup rivals fight in full view, but that’s the case with mobile messaging service provider Postscript, which took to the Twitterverse earlier this month after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the Attentive competitor.
The Atento letter was in response to customer case study that Postscript had written and posted on its website about the nutrition company BUBS Naturals, which said that BUBS Naturals left Attentive for Postscript after discovering that its list was actually shrinking instead of growing, and then fought with the company to remove your list from your platform.
Calling out Postscript for the “false, misleading, and misleading claims” made in such published materials, Attentive in its letter demanded that Postscript stop publishing them.
When later asked what was going on between the two teams, Attentive, through a spokesperson, responded via email that “Unfortunately, Postscript has a history of false claims and deceptive conduct. We have sent several cease and desist letters over the years as they have made inaccurate claims about Attentive, which they have acknowledged and corrected. We also filed a federal lawsuit in January 2023 against Postscript for continued and willful infringement of our multiple patents for our mobile two-touch technology, which revolutionized the ability for brands to add customers to their SMS lists in a compliant manner.” (Atento shared a copy of the complaint with TechCrunch.)
Some of the “beef” between the two can seem corny to outsiders. For example, Attentive’s cease and desist letter complained about the timeline in Postscript’s marketing, which says former client BUBS Naturals was a client of Attentive for three years when Attentive says BUBs was a client for about half of that time.
In response to Attentive’s letter, Postscript co-founder Alex Beller posted a exasperated sounding tweet, saying that Postscript has heard of Attentive before and calling the company a “thug.” He also posted a “full response” that tried to strike a more measured tone.
Read the response: “Postscript takes his allegations seriously and provides his substantive response below. But it’s also important to keep in mind the larger context in which Attentive launches those accusations. Postscript is winning the market. It also recently drew attention to a reprehensible practice some SMS platforms in the industry engage in: holding a customer’s proprietary SMS list hostage to prevent or interfere with the customer’s attempt to switch providers. Given these circumstances, Attentive’s assertion of dwindling legal claims seems aimed at shoring up recent poor performance in the market and distracting from its own acts of unfair competition.”
russell weaver, a law professor at the University of Louisville, spoke to TechCrunch about what avenues Attentive has to defend itself against perceived defamation or slander. One is to sue, which Weaver says is more complex and can often lead to increased scrutiny or defense of the company. The other is to try the cease and desist route as Atento has done.
Meanwhile, Postscript’s tactics seem to be working. In response to one of Beller’s tweets on the matter, an attentive customer said that he might switch providers. BGC (@Bryan_Clark_) tweeted, “This makes me want to switch from attentive to Postscript. I wonder what the ROI on this thread will create for you guys.”
When asked if it made an impact, Postscript responded via email that it “doubled their ‘win rate’ against Attentive in the last quarter.”
Meanwhile, TechCrunch spoke with TJ Ferrera, co-founder of BUBS Naturals, about not seeing the promised increase in subscribers. As for making a change that probably got more attention than he expected, he said he has no regrets.
“For one thing, it’s the little players that don’t know how to play this,” Ferrara said. “On the other front,” he said, referring to Atento, “you have a 400-pound gorilla holding people’s information hostage.”
To that allegation of data retention, when Ferrara requested personalized data from her account, Attentive responded within six business days and a subsequent request was responded to within an hour.” In addition, his “policies with his clients make it clear that the client is the owner of his data. Attentive facilitates the export of subscriber lists at the customer’s request and strives to provide them in a timely manner in accordance with our contractual agreement.”
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