Articles written in October, 2009

Using Venmo to Collect Money

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

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.

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Venmo SMS Payments Tips And Commands

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

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.

Tags: SMS
Posted in Product Team, Venmo SMS | No Comments »