TextWay began the way a lot of small software companies begin — with a founder annoyed at his own phone.
Our founder, Peter, was helping run events and kept watching the same scene play out: someone would try to send one update to fifty people, and within minutes there'd be a reply-all free-for-all, a handful of strangers now had everyone's number, and half the group had muted the thread out of self-defense. The information still hadn't gotten through.
The existing options weren't really options. Enterprise platforms wanted annual contracts and a compliance call. Free group chats ate replies alive. Spreadsheets of phone numbers weren't something you could text. So he started building the thing he wanted to use — one number, one message, replies that came back to him alone.
What came out of those first few months was less a product than a set of stubborn opinions: a member's phone number is nobody else's business, an organizer shouldn't need a tutorial to send a text, and pricing should fit on one line. We've kept those opinions and built around them.
From the beginning, we believed messaging software should respect privacy, consent, and the people on the other end of every text — the same standards that guide how we build TextWay, protect customer data, and operate the business.
Today TextWay is run by HashCo Holdings LLC out of San Diego, California. We're still a small team. We still answer our own support emails. And we still measure a good day by how many organizers got their message out without thinking about the tool at all.