2018: A Luta Continua

We are almost at the end of the first month of 2018, and we thought we should also share our reflections and plans before this window ends.

2017 was an interesting year for Alpha Manuscript. The highlight was undoubtedly the launch of Envoy. In case you don’t know, Envoy is our contact management and bulk SMS service.

Envoy is our attempt to provide solutions to allow businesses to be able to easily reach their customers, employees and other contacts and bulk SMS was the starting point. The results after the launch were not satisfactory. Getting customers has not been easy. The discovery we made late is that the bulk SMS market is saturated, there are already good and competitive solutions in the market. We had just not done our homework properly.

After that reality check, there was a feeling among the team that we had spent a year on the wrong product. But we later also realised we had achieved more as a startup than we had given ourself credit for: we had learned a lot from our experiences, we had grown our team as well as our network of partners and mentors, we had grown more cohesive as a team, we had finally found effective workflows and internal processes among other things and hey, we had launched our first product!

But of course, we still needed to figure out what to do next. After deep internal reflections and feedback from our users and friends, we came to the conclusion that the idea we had for Envoy at first would not be the ideal direction in the long term.

This realisation took us to the drawing board. We held meetings, we talked to people, we brainstormed… at the end, we felt we were on to something. Our hope was restored. We reimagined what Envoy could be and how it could offer innovative solutions to small businesses.

While we are still continuously improving the bulk SMS platform and growing its user base, we have embarked on an ambitious journey to build the next evolution of the Envoy ecosystem from the ground up. We are excited about this project and we hope you will be too. We are trying to do things better this time, both technically and strategically, to be more visible and to make sure we are aware of the market and getting feedback along the way.

We plan to release more details about the project into the public domain soon. We also plan to start inviting users in to the beta program of the platform in the first half of this year. If you are interested in getting updates, follow us on Twitter, where we’ll be posting announcements.

We thank all those who use or have used our product and all those who have supported us throughout the journey. We have a lot in store for you this year and we think you will like it. Stay tuned! A luta continua…