Iris Nova's Zak Normandin on scaling consumer brands using payments over text

Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I’m Zack Miller. The industry talks a lot about omnichannel payment experiences. Everyone wants to service the customer wherever he or she is. But what if that experience doesn’t look much like an experience at all. A channel that’s left pretty much unexplored is SMS. There’s one company, Iris Nova, that’s pioneered payment over text for its Dirty Lemon beverage brand. Customers pick up their phones, send an SMS to the brand, and order their products through a chat interface. Given how familiar SMS is to most people, there’s little visible architecture around the customer journey. Iris Nova’s founder and CEO Zak Normandin joins us on the podcast to talk about payment over text and why he thinks in the future, most big brands will have just a website and a phone number. We discuss the challenges of doing conversational commerce well and how he’s positioning Iris Nova to be a future leader in food and beverage using SMS as a transaction channel. Zak Normandin is my guest today on the Tearsheet Podcast.