898 - Jonathan Fudem (OneText) On Building Text to Buy For Everyone

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Mat Sherman: All right. [00:01:00] How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders, where we talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future, and how the two collide. Today I'm very excited to be talking to Jonathan Fudem, who's the founder of OneText . Welcome to the show. How's it going?

Jonathan Fudem: Hey, it's going great. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. 

Mat Sherman: Yeah, excited to have you on, and looking forward to learning more about what you are working on. For people that haven't heard of your company, what is one text.

Jonathan Fudem: Absolutely. So we are one text and we help brands get incremental sales through text to buy. Or another way to put it is frictionless payments through SMS. Really though, our goal, the change we're trying to make in the world is we want all buying experiences to feel as effortless as what you get. When you're in a hotel and you pay with your room number, that's your North star. That's, you know, it drives us crazy.

If you check into a 100 year old hotel, you get a better paying experience than you do on a modern website. We're changing that. 

Mat Sherman: All right, so walk me through a little bit about how this works. Let's say I am a consumer and I like buy some. Walk me through [00:02:00] the whole journey, like how do I engage with your product and what does that look like?

Jonathan Fudem: Absolutely. , so let's say you're shopping on one of your favorite brands and we sell, you know, literally everything from deodorant to drones. We have a baby clothed brand, we have lots of supplements, we have apparel, all kinds of cool things. But let's say you're shopping on one of those brands at some point you give them permission to text you.

Maybe you. Don't order that day. But they send you a text message at some point and they say, Hey Matt, we have an amazing offer for you. We think you're really gonna like this product. Or maybe it's a bit of a quiz, and they ask you questions and you feel like you're talking with a personal concierge.

You have this nice two-way back and forth. At some point you are ready to purchase and you get an offer via text. Would you like to buy this product? And you can literally just reply, yes. So reply and buy with one text. That's why we're called One Text. You can send a reply and then we will confirm the transaction.

If you're already part of the One Text Network. And if you're not part of the Onet Text [00:03:00] Network, we send you a link to a one-time payment form, collect your details, and your next purchase is frictionless. 

Mat Sherman: So I have a question on, on the other side then. So can like any, so can any company like use one text to help, you know, distribute, you know, grow their sales, or what types of companies can work with you on that side of things?

Jonathan Fudem: Yeah. So our focus is business to consumer brands. So anyone who is selling to consumers, everyday people we want to be a, a really good solution today. All of our customers are direct to consumer. Although we worked with a university that was using us to collect tuition, payments.

We're talking to some sports teams that are thinking about using us for tickets. Last minute ticket sales as well. We want to want to. Expand beyond there, basically business to consumer payments. That's, that's really always going to be our focus. But we want to cast as wide net as we can. 

Mat Sherman: Imagine getting a text from the SUns an hour before the game saying, Hey, we have extra seats.

I live right across the street from it. That would be right. That would be great. You should, you should sell the Suns if you, if you aren't already. Well, I'm curious. [00:04:00] Where'd this idea come from? It sounds like a very obviously powerful solution, but you probably had a lot of like thought that go into like, you know, why, what problem you're solving and why, how you wanted to solve it this way.

So tell me about your origin story. Why did you decide to work on this problem? 

Jonathan Fudem: Yeah. And you know, I think for me, it all, it all comes back to the city that we wanna democratize payments. We wanna democratize card on file. It's really, really important for us that brands and merchants are able to have a payment token that they own, that they can charge and recharge at any times, so that there aren't any gatekeepers that are gonna get in the way of that.

In terms of my origin, I used to work. For PayPal checkout. So did my co-founder. So we are hardcore payment nerds. We love the payment space. And I'm, my mom has also had a small business my whole life. She was a wholesaler then. She was a retailer. So I've seen firsthand how hard it is to sell, how hard it is to get somebody to make that one extra sale to hand over their payment information.

And it just, it felt like There was not enough connection between the way that payment companies [00:05:00] were thinking about what's involved with a transaction and the problems that merchants are facing. And, and there also was, you know, we were seeing a PayPal when my co-founder and I were there, there was sort of the rise and.

Fall of one-click checkout companies. There was a lot of excitement in that space for a while. There were some companies building really interesting products, but no one really felt like they were solving the right problems, right? Everybody was thinking about payments as a last mile solution. We wanted to make something that would be integrated top to bottom.

So a tool that actually helps you do the selling, gets you that extra sale. We want to be able to tell all of our customers you are getting extra orders as a result of one text. So that those were kind of the melting pot. That was, that was what was going on in my head. But the aha moment was, Hey, what if your phone number was a credit card?

Right? What if you could allow a brand to treat every single phone number that it has on record, which is usually, you know, a whole lot. Everybody gives over their phone number at some point to a brand. If a brand could treat that like it was a payment token and run transactions against it in a way that was [00:06:00] safe, secure, and consentable, that would be an amazing unlock.

And so that's, that's what we do. And that's the vision that keeps us going.

Mat Sherman: I actually, excuse me. It's funny you mentioned one click checkouts. I had Dom on here before. Everything. Like before everything. Yep. Two years ago, three years ago, and Wow. The energy behind him is like, is like, I love it.

It does lead me to wonder though there's so much coming at you as an early stage founder. It's like, you know, you got a million people wanting your attention, you only got 24 hours in the day. What do you spend your time on? And like, more importantly, like how do you decide to spend your time on different things, you know, on an average day, although there's no average day in startups.

Jonathan Fudem: I think we're, or at least where I want to spend my time, the sort of the, the optimistic you know, sort of point is I wanna be as laser focused as possible on growth, growth, growth, growth. Helping get more brands to discover OneText helping more people to learn about the value that we can add spending time thinking through distribution, whether that's, Improving our marketing.

We're in the process of [00:07:00] redoing our website how we can get our story out in front of the right people, how we can make the right connections to, you know, to 10 x the number of brands that we have on board. So that's, that's really at this point in the journey. Where my, my head's at the, the allure, at least for me, is it's always, it's so much fun to focus on product.

We're building so many cool things. And you know, that's, that's what got me into this. I was, I was a product manager before I, I, I founded OneText, so, Product is a lot of fun. I'm so excited about what we're building. But the product that we have today is also, it's, it's in a good enough place that really it's time to get it in front of more people.

So I'm trying to spend as much of my time as possible closing calls, talking to great merchants, meeting people, going to events and, and thinking about what are, how do we get that flywheel going so that there's a, you know, a lot of people are, are trying one text for the first time. 

Mat Sherman: And you, you alluded to this a little bit, but I'm curious to unpack it slightly, like in 10 years, you know, if you were to think about the big vision [00:08:00] for one text, like what does the world look like in a decade?

Or in other words, you know, what direction are you rowing in every day? For, for what outcome? 

Jonathan Fudem: We want to be the number one way that consumers buy anything. It's a big goal. It's a big goal, but that's it. That's our, our North Star. We really do think that the phone number can be the best payment token in the world.

And so we, we want to get this as big as we possibly can. We think that, you know, we're still running payments on magnetic stripes. We wanna replace that with, with the phone number. And we, we want to be there.

Mat Sherman: In order to make that happen, you'll need some help. Right? It takes a village to make a startup work and scale.

Oh yeah. So my question for you is, how can the forward thinking founders community help? Are you hiring, fundraising, looking for users, beta testers? Like how, how can we assist here? 

Jonathan Fudem: The number one thing is if you are a merchant or if you know merchants or if you know really cool brands that are selling directly to consumer, and again, we, we say merchant, but really we're talking on any types of businesses.

If you know somebody at the Phoenix Suns who works in ticketing, we'd [00:09:00] we'd love, we'd love to chat. That's, that's our focus. And then also, if you enjoy. Building cool text-based things or if you're interested in designing conversations and thinking about how you can automate really powerful one-to-one conversations at scale hit us up.

We'd love to chat with you on the, on the hiring side

Mat Sherman: cool. And for my last question where can someone find you online? Do you have a website, social media presence, email address? How can someone learn more? 

Jonathan Fudem: Absolutely. Well, actually, I should say, you should text us if you text 6 2 0 1 text and say hello. We'll, we'll be in touch and you the letters spelling out one text. But you can also, you can check out one text.com. There's a really cool demo on the website. The whole website's getting completely redone, but there's a, the, the demo is neat. So if you, if you start the demo, you can have a two-way conversation with us and, and see the tech in action.

And then also, I'm j Fudem, J F U D E M, on Twitter. Cool. 

Mat Sherman: Well, thanks so much for coming outta the podcast. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. 

Jonathan Fudem: A real pleasure, Matt. Have a great day.