Council Post: What I Learned Running Two Companies That Solve Two Halves Of The Same Problem
Phil Portman is a serial entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of Textdrip — a small business SMS marketing tool to automate SMS campaigns.
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A few years ago, someone asked me what my two companies have to do with each other—how they’re related. I didn’t have a quick answer because on paper, they both look like they belong in different worlds. One company helps businesses send automated text messages to their customers. The other one helps businesses identify if a phone number is even read before they send a text message or call it.
For a long time, I thought both of them were two different products, two different teams and two different problems to solve. But I was wrong. Both of them are the same problem, but I was not seeing it as a whole.
Let’s Talk About The Problem That Looks Like Two Problems
The most common thing about business problems is that they rarely show up looking like themselves. They show up looking small, specific and solvable. You fix the piece in front of you and move on.
That’s exactly how I started. I built a messaging platform because I felt businesses needed better ways to talk to their customers. Good templates, right timing and built-in compliance. It solved a real pain point. On the flip side, I also built a phone validation tool because I saw businesses kept wasting money calling and texting numbers that didn’t work anymore. People change carriers, numbers get recycled and landlines get mistaken for mobiles. It makes the whole scenario messy.
For a long time, I ran both like they had nothing to do with each other, but then I realized that a well-crafted message sent to a dead number is worthless. And a real working number is of no use if the text message lands on it is annoying, badly timed or useless. I realized that getting the message right and getting the number right are not different problems. But they’re two halves of one problem: reaching a real person, the right way.
Here are a few lessons I learned running my two companies.
Good Communication Doesn’t Start With Words
Everyone focuses on messaging—what to say, when to say it, how to say it—but almost nobody talks about who they’re actually saying it to.
While running the messaging side of my business taught me something simple. People don’t hate messages, but they hate messages that feel careless. A message sent at the wrong time, to the wrong person, about the wrong thing doesn’t just fail, but it actively damages trust.
But here is what took me longer to learn: You can write the best message in the world, and it still fails if it never reaches the right person on the other hand.
Bad Data Fails Quietly
These halves of the problem nobody notices until it’s too late. Building the phone validation side of the business taught me that most outreach failures don’t look like failures. Nobody gets an error message when they text a wrong number. The message just disappears without any warning or red flag. You just quietly waste your hard-earned money, valuable time and your reputation.
Businesses will spend months perfecting their sales scripts, email copy and SMS copy. They will obsess over subject lines and call-to-action buttons. And then they target a list of numbers that were disconnected two years ago.
What happens here is that bad data does not announce itself as bad. It just sits there and quietly costs you money every single day. And you keep blaming your strategy.
What Changed When I Saw Both Halves At Once
The day I understood that these two companies were really solving one problem from opposite ends, everything about how I ran both businesses changed. I stopped asking, “How do we write a better message?” I started asking, “Are we even sure someone real is going to receive it?”
I stopped worrying about how we’re going to clean up a phone list abd started thinking about what happens after the list is clean and if we’re actually reaching people the right way. You can’t fully fix half a problem, but you can only make that half look fixed for a while until the other half quietly drags your results back down.
The Question Worth Asking About Your Own Business
If there is one thing I would want another founder or business leader to take from this is that it’s not about messaging or phone numbers. The question is: “What is the other half of my problem that I’m not looking at?”
Most of us are pretty good at solving the half we can see that shows up in meetings, complaints and in obvious losses. The other half is usually quiet. It doesn’t complain but shows up in your weekly report. It just sits in the background, slowly undoing your best work.
Take a look at where your efforts are going. Are you polishing the part of the problem that’s easy to see while the part you can’t see keeps eating away at your results?
Closing Thought
Running two companies that solve two halves of the same problem taught me that most problems are not one-sided. They just look that way until you step back far enough to see the whole shape.
You don’t need a fancy product or the cleverest pitch to make your business win. Businesses that took the time to ask what they were missing and then w0ent looking for it are the ones that often win. I didn’t learn this lesson in a classroom, but I learned it while running two companies that, in reality, were never two companies at all.
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