Written on January 27th, 2010 by kortina
Monday, we got a chance to present at Mobile Monday Demo Night, where we shared Venmo with a great crowd and helped the Relief Foundation raise some money for their project to build an orphanage in Haiti.
Here’s a photo we snapped with the winner trophy (which we took home!) and an official press release.
For Immediate Release
Venmo Inc.
27 Jan 2010, 2:17 PM
Philadelphia, PA
On January 25th, Venmo presented at Mobile Monday Mid Atlantic Demo Night, a gathering of the top mobile technology companies in the region.
Venmo won this annual competition by engaging the audience in the most interactive presentation of the evening. The founders, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, spent only 2 of their 5 minute presentation explaining the company, which allows anyone to send or collect money by sending a text message. Citing the recent campaign by the Red Cross that engaged thousands of people and raised millions of dollars for relief efforts in Haiti in only a few days, they explained that now anyone can collect money in a similar way via Venmo’s text message payments service.
For the remaining 3 minutes of the presentation, Kortina and Magdon asked the audience to try the product by making live donations to the Relief Foundation, an organization sending a delegate of 120 people to Haiti to build an orphanage. Audience members texted “pay relief 20 to help haiti” to the Venmo number (646.863.9557) and were able to contribute hundreds of dollars in a matter of minutes. In less than a week, the Relief Foundation has raised over $15,000 through Venmo text message donations, $600 of which was raised in the 3 minute demo during the presentation.
In order to engage communities around organizations and businesses accepting Venmo mobile payments, the service also integrates tightly with social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, allowing people, businesses, and charities to share their favorite donations and payments to favorite local spots with their friends on these networks.
To learn more about accepting Venmo as a non-profit or a business, please send an e-mail to info@venmo.com.
Learn more about Venmo for Non-Profit organizations here: Accept text message donations for non-profit organizations
Posted in Press Releases, Venmo | No Comments »
Written on January 15th, 2010 by kortina
We created a Venmo account, /VenmoCares, and anyone can donate by sending a text or web venmo payment. We’re then donating the money here:
Unicef donations for Haiti
These are the tweets we created to get people moving:
http://bit.ly/8Bbhtc
http://bit.ly/8NxYoU
We have raised $506 so far, just by asking a few of our friends to help out.
Donate on the web to /VenmoCares UNICEF donations.
We want to raise as much more as possible, so please ask all your friends do donate and let them know they can help just by sending a text message. 100% of donations are going to UNICEF. Please help!
Youtube video with instructions on how to donate as much as you can/want to UNICEF relief for Haiti
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Written on December 10th, 2009 by kortina
We want to make this faster, too! Here’s a video explaining the way cash-outs currently work and why they can take a long time:
Speeding Up Venmo Withdrawals
Here’s the summary in case you prefer reading to watching the video:
Verifying a Bank Account with Venmo
1. Add your bank account information (account number and routing number) to your Venmo account.
2. Venmo issues a small deposit to your bank account using an ACH transfer, which takes 3-5 business days (so 5-7 actual days) to reach your account.
3. As soon as you see the deposit in your account, confirm the amount on Venmo.com. Once your account is verified, you can request a withdrawal from your Venmo account to your bank account at any time.
Withdrawing Money from Venmo
1. Once you’ve verified your bank account, request a withdrawal from Venmo.
2. Venmo immediately issues an ACH transfer to your bank account for the amount requested. This transfer takes 3-5 business days.
Here’s the annoying part: if you wait until you want to withdraw your funds to verify your bank account information, first you have to wait 3-5 business days for the account verification deposit, then, once you confirm the amount deposited, you have to wait another 3-5 business days for the transfer your requested. That’s a long time, and there’s unfortunately nothing we can do to speed up the ACH process!
So, here’s what we can both do to make this faster:
1. We’re working on a solution that will enable us to instantly verify your bank routing and account numbers, which will cut your cash out time in half! We hope to have this done in January, 2009.
2. Verify your bank account information as soon as possible, even if you have nothing to cash out! This way, when you do cash out, you’ll only have to wait for the ACH transfer of the amount you requested.
3. If you forget to do (2) before you decide you want to cash out, email us to schedule a call and we’ll confirm your bank account information over the phone.
Why do you need to “verify” my bank account at all?
Good question. Suppose we did not verify your bank account, and you made a typo when you entered your account information. Then, you request a withdrawal of $100, and we transfer it to the bank account you entered with a typo–someone else would get your $100 in their account! Neither of us wants that (though, it might make someone else’s day), so that’s why we verify all bank accounts before allowing withdrawals to them.
So, we’ll keep working on speeding up the verification process, and in the mean time, please make sure to verify your banking details as soon as you can.
Posted in Venmo EDU | No Comments »
Written on November 25th, 2009 by harish
We’ve been working hard at listening to your feedback and adding new features that make Venmo easier to use. Rejoice– we’re getting closer to being able to completely eliminate cash from our lives.
- Alert preferences- In your account settings, you can now control how often you receive notifications from Venmo– weekly transaction summaries, payment notifications, and Fav notifications.
- Invite your friends- You can now invite up to 10 friends to Venmo. Give the gift of Venmo to people who you frequently exchange money with– roommates, friends, and family members!
- Tweet your payments- Connect to Twitter, and post your Venmo payments automatically to Twitter by adding “#tw” at the end of each message you send to Venmo. Use our Twitter Connect to share payments, invoice your friends who owe you money, and share items you’re selling with your friends!
- Fav spell check- We all make typos (yes, even this guy). If you try to make a payment on Venmo to one of your fav’s, and accidentally type in the wrong name, we’ll make sure you had the correct user.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and comments. Think of a killer feature we need to add? Let us know! Talk to us at our support forum, on Twitter, Facebook, or just leave us a comment below.
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Written on November 24th, 2009 by harish
We’re excited to announce that Venmo is now being accepted by the following food trucks serving up delicious meals on Penn’s campus! Next time you’re hungry or want some coffee, stop by at one of these fine establishments and Venmo them for your food.
- Hemo’s on 38th and Walnut- username hemos
- HubBub coffee on 38th & Spruce- username hubbub
- Don Memo’s on 38th & Sanson- username memos
- Coup de Taco on 40th between Spruce & Locust- username coupdetaco
View Venmo food trucks in a larger map
Tweet us about your meal, or write on our Facebook wall!
Posted in Venmo | No Comments »
Written on November 10th, 2009 by harish
If you’re a vendor with multiple employees staffing your location at different times (for example, a food truck, small business, coffee shop, or campus organization), you might be wondering how you can use Venmo with an account named after your business. After all, isn’t Venmo tied to your phone number? How can an employee at the register verify that a customer has paid if they don’t personally get a payment receipt?
Introducing group receipts, a new feature that lets multiple employees get access to a single account’s invoices!
Here’s how to set it up:
1. If you’re the admin or manager of the business or group, you register a main account named after your business, for example: johnscoffee.
2. Let’s say you have 1 employee staffing your store apart from you, named Brian. He sets up an individual Venmo account, for example with the username brian.
3. To give Brian access to your receipts, you send Venmo a text with the prompt “ping [username of employee]“. For example, you’d say “ping brian” in a message to Venmo.
4. Brian will immediately get notified that you gave him access to your invoices. He needs to reply with the prompt “sub johnscoffee” to subscribe to johnscoffee’s receipts.
You can repeat this process for as many employees as you want. Each employee simply has to respond with “sub [username of the main business account]” (in this case, it’d be “sub johnscoffee”).
What are the benefits of using group receipts?
- You make it easy for customers to pay you, since they only have to remember the Venmo account named after your business (e.g. johnscoffee).
- You don’t need a dedicated device or point of sale system.
- Anyone on your staff can man the register or checkout line– you don’t have to be around all the time.
- You can keep track of your receipts and payments from one central account.
Get started using group receipts today! Got any questions? Let us know in the comments or send us an e-mail!
Posted in Venmo | No Comments »
Written on October 21st, 2009 by harish
You know that one friend who never seems to have cash on him? The one who says he’ll “pay you back” every time you go out for dinner or drinks, but never actually follows through? With Venmo, he now has no excuse not to (unless he loses his phone, that is).
Collecting money from someone using Venmo is easy! If your friend already has a Venmo account, send a text message to Venmo at (646) 863-9557 with the message “$5 from johnsmith” (for example, if user johnsmith owes you $5). Your friend gets a text message asking him to confirm the payment with a code, and you instantly get your money!
If your friend isn’t already on Venmo, collecting money is just as simple. Just send Venmo a text message with the from command and your friend’s cell phone number, for example “$5 from 2158098099″. Your friend will receive a text message notification of the payment request, and will then get a phone call from Venmo where he can securely enter his credit card information to process the payment.
So next time you’re out with a friend and he says he’ll pay you back “when I go to the ATM”, just collect money from him easily and quickly using Venmo!
Venmo: solving national debt problems since 2009.
Posted in Venmo | No Comments »
Written on October 13th, 2009 by kortina
On the main site, we just added a set of tips for sending and collecting money using Venmo SMS. If you login to the website as infrequently as I do (I only really use the SMS interface), you probably haven’t seen and won’t see these tips, so I figured I’d post them here as well.
These are the most popular Venmo SMS commands.
Send a text to (646) 863-9557:
BAL
To check your account balance.
Pay jenny $1 for good advice
To send money to a friend named “Jenny.”
$1 from (111) 111-1111 for coffee
To send an invoice to any phone.
Favs
To view your payments buddies.
Fav harish
To add Harish to your favs list.
HELP
For help on the go.
Addenda: We are keeping track of all the failed commands, and when we see enough people expect Venmo to behave a certain way, we adapt the system to their expectations. For example, the “$” is now optional, because it’s kind of inconvenient to type and people often leave it out.
Finally, we just want to add a thank you to everyone helping us test right now–you all are the ones defining the product, really. Our job is just to study how you are using Venmo, ask you questions, and respond to your needs. So please let us know when something doesn’t work as expected, when something is inconvenient, or when anything is not intuitive. As I said, we see a lot of things bubble up, but we also want to give attention to and understand all of the use cases and ways you want to use Venmo to simplify the way you pay for things.
Posted in Product Team, Venmo SMS | No Comments »
Written on September 29th, 2009 by harish
If you’re like us, you probably live in your Gmail inbox. Read on to learn how to set up a filter to automatically label and archive all Venmo receipts, so you can easily organize and keep track of all your transactions, all from within Gmail!
1. Go to Gmail settings.
2. Go to the “Filters” tab, and click “Create a new filter”.
3. Under the search criteria, enter “Venmo receipt” in the “Has the words” field. If you want, you can do a test search to see all your Venmo transactions highlighted in the search. Select “Next Step”.
4. Select “Apply the label”, and create a new label with a title like “Venmo receipts”, or something similarly simple. Optionally, if you like to archive your inbox (why archive?), you can choose to automatically archive all Venmo receipts by choosing the “Skip the inbox” option.
That’s it! You’ve just set up a filter to automatically label and (optionally) archive all your receipts for Venmo transactions. It’s the simplest way to keep track of your Venmo history if you’re a heavy Gmail user.
Posted in Venmo | No Comments »
Written on August 12th, 2009 by harish
Using Venmo To Accept SMS Text Message Payments
- Ask your customer for their cell phone number (let’s say it’s 215-678-9010)
- Compose an SMS Text Message to the number 646-863-9557 (Save it as Venmo in your phone book),
- In the message body type, the following command “venmo $10 from 2156789010” (eg: venmo [AMOUNT] from [PHONE-NUMBER])
- Ask the customer to follow the instructions in the text message they receive.
- You’re done!
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