Social media can be a powerful networking tool for entrepreneurs and investors.
I’ve “known” Rev Reddy for years. I put “known” in quotation marks because we hadn’t spoken or met in person for much of that time. But he followed me and we regularly engaged with each other on Twitter.
In 2019, Rev joined Voyage SMS, an ecommerce messaging startup, as head of product, and last year he became CEO. When it was time to start fundraising, Rev immediately thought of York IE. He sent me a direct message, and we started talking.
Fast forward to today, and I’m happy to share that York IE is an investor in Voyage and I’ve joined the company’s board of directors.
Voyage is building the most comprehensive messaging platform for marketing, ecommerce and customer experience, and the company has partnered with major names such as Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento to disrupt the SMS marketing market, which is rapidly growing. The U.S. market size alone was $3.5 billion in 2018, and that’s expected to reach $12.6 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research.
The Voyage platform enables brands to focus on messaging performance instead of volume, so they can create better experiences for their users — and ultimately develop long-term customer relationships.
Personally, I’m excited about the opportunity to again work in the sending infrastructure space, which many of my York IE colleagues and I know well from our time at Dyn. There, we focused on DNS and email infrastructure, but we were familiar with the broader market, including SMS infrastructure. So we know what a massive opportunity Voyage has in front of it, with major macro tailwinds at its back.
It might seem crazy to think that you can secure an investor or land a board seat just because of Twitter. But if you put in the time and effort to build strong connections, you can open up new doors for your business and your career.
Follow Kyle York on Twitter.
