How Jest uses RCS messaging to replace the app store download, with sign-up, account recovery, and retention handled in a text thread, in 7 minutes.
Watch the Demo
Want to reach users but having a hard time cutting through the clutter on app stores? What if you could turn messaging into a platform for distribution and retention?
Welcome to One Amazing Thing About Jest. Today I’m talking with Deyan Vitanov, Co-founder and CEO of Jest, the texting-powered app store, about how Jest uses RCS messaging to let people sign up for apps and games by sending a text, with no download required.
What You’ll See In This Demo
Jest is a texting-powered app store that uses RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging to distribute and retain mobile web apps and games. In this episode, Deyan Vitanov, Co-founder and CEO of Jest, browses Jest.com in a phone’s web browser and opens a game instantly, with no app store download. He then registers by tapping a deep link that opens the phone’s messaging app and starts a conversation with Jest’s agent. The branded RCS reply lets him log in and restore his account, progress, and purchases, and the same text thread is where Jest sends future notifications about new and favorite apps. It’s most useful for mobile marketers, growth and lifecycle teams, and app and game developers looking for a lower-friction alternative to app store acquisition and push notifications.
Key Takeaways
- Jest is a texting-powered app store: people find web apps and games at Jest.com in a mobile browser and sign up by sending a text message.
- Jest has two audiences, mobile app and game developers who publish on the platform and consumers who play and use what’s published.
- On Jest, registration starts with a deep link that opens the phone’s messaging app and begins a conversation with Jest’s agent, and the reply logs the user in and restores their account, progress, and purchases.
- RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the messaging protocol that adds a verified brand name, logo, images, video, and buttons to text messages, none of which SMS supports.
- Deyan Vitanov says Apple’s adoption of RCS on iPhone is one of the biggest reasons Jest was started.
- Installing a native app requires choosing it, confirming, waiting, and downloading, and each step adds friction that Jest removes by opening web apps instantly.
- After sign-up, the text thread becomes the retention channel: Jest sends notifications about new or favorite apps there, and Deyan says Jest takes care not to spam users.
- Any app or game with a web version can run on Jest, and Jest provides a developer console, SDK documentation, and publishing support.
- Jest consumer accounts are available in the United States, and developers from anywhere can publish.
About Jest
Jest is a texting-powered app store that uses RCS messaging to turn the phone’s messaging inbox into a distribution, identity, and retention channel for mobile web apps and games. Users sign up with their phone number by sending a text, and developers publish any web build through the Jest SDK and developer console. Jest is operated by Textclub, Inc. and was co-founded by Deyan Vitanov (CEO) and Petar Dobrev (CTO). The company announced a $7 million raise in February 2026. Learn more at about.jest.com.
About The Guest
Deyan Vitanov is the co-founder of Jest, the first marketplace for messaging games, and a programmer turned entrepreneur who has been building at the intersection of gaming and technology his entire life, starting with modding games on his first PC at age nine. Before Jest, he served as CMO of Playco, where he spent four years partnering with the world’s largest social and messaging platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and Telegram. A serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, Deyan brings a rare combination of technical depth and platform-scale distribution experience to a category he believes will redefine mobile gaming. Originally from Bulgaria, he is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Deyan Vitanov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deyan/
Resources
Jest: https://about.jest.com
The One Amazing Thing with Greg Kihlström website: https://agilebrandguide.com/the-agile-brand-podcasts/one-amazing-thing-about-with-greg-kihlstrom/
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From the creators and host of the award-winning The Agile Brand™ with Greg Kihlström podcast, comes One Amazing Thing About… with Greg Kihlström, a show that puts the spotlight on the latest and greatest MarTech products and platforms by showcasing one feature that makes them… amazing.
Transcript
Greg Kihlström (00:00)
Wanna reach users, but having a hard time cutting through the clutter on app stores? Well, what if you could turn messaging into a platform for distribution and retention?
Welcome to One Amazing Thing About Jest. Today we’re talking with Deyan Vitanov, founder and CEO at Jest, and he’s going to be sharing one amazing thing about their platform with us today. Deyan, welcome to the show.
Deyan Vitanov (00:30)
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Greg Kihlström (00:32)
Yeah, looking forward to seeing this in action in a second here. Before we do though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Just?
Deyan Vitanov (00:41)
I’m the co-founder and CEO of Jest. We are a texting powered app store. Of course I’ll show it in just a second. I’m originally from Bulgaria, but I’ve been here in the San Francisco Bay Area since two thousand and seven. It’s long time. And I’m a serial entrepreneur. This is my fifth company.
Greg Kihlström (00:56)
wow. Okay. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Great. So before you do share and walk us through it, why don’t you tell us a little bit about, you know, what what’s the what are we going to take a look at today? Who’s the audience and and why is it important to
Deyan Vitanov (01:09)
Jest is a texting powered app store. What that means is that we have two audiences that kind of meet on the platform. On the one hand, we have mobile game and app developers. They’re obviously looking to create, you know, a product to offer it to consumers. And then on the other side, clearly there’s consumers that are consuming, hopefully enjoying these kinds of apps and games. And we’re an app store. What that means is that we work with the developers to offer them the infrastructure to be able to offer their products and then
you know, we we serve them to to consumers. And the special thing for us is that everything is really powered by texting. and I’ll I’ll show you what that looks like.
Greg Kihlström (01:48)
Great, great. Well yeah, let’s let’s do it. Why don’t you share your screen and let’s take a look.
Deyan Vitanov (01:52)
Absolutely. Let me go ahead and do that.
All right. So what you’re looking at here is Jess. The first thing I’ll show you just before doing anything else is that this is just a recording from my phone and it’s in a web browser. Jess.com is where Jess lives. And like I said, it’s an app store. What that means is that there’s different kinds of apps and games, and you can see here me sort of browsing through them. A consumer can engage with any of them and they’re all different. This is just a simple word game for demonstration purposes.
And it’s what you expect. You know, every game and app is different, and and hopefully consumers enjoy it and and and you know have fun with it. The interesting bit is right here. This is the point at which a consumer, if they enjoy the app or game, can decide to register. And the way that works on Jest is through texting. Specifically, we have this button right here, it’s a deep link. This deep link, if you trigger it, it opens messaging, and the consumer can initiate a conversation.
with our agent. there’s a few things already that perhaps look a little bit different than most people are used to. I’ll just point out a couple. This right here is the Jest logo and brand name. The reason why you’re seeing this is because of a new protocol called RCS. You can see it right here in the middle of the street. This is a a next generation messaging protocol. It basically supercharges texting, it gives you things like you know, you know, logo and brand and
images, videos, buttons, things that we may take for granted, but they don’t exist in SMS. And Apple adopted RCS last year and that is very much one of the biggest reasons why we decided to start Jest. Anyway, a consumer initiating the conversation here receives a reply and in this reply if they obviously they click on it, they are able to then log back into their system and and obviously restore their account and and you know
save off their progress, their purchases and so on and so on. And what this also means is that going forward, they can receive you know, the notification about another app or their favorite app right inside of this messaging thread. So that is probably the single sort of biggest encapsulation of what makes Jest interesting, that notion of texting being so familiar to consumers and being at the core of how Jest works.
Greg Kihlström (04:11)
Nice, nice. That’s great. Yeah, I mean definitely seems like it a lot nicer interface and and an interface that a lot of people are are very used to using as opposed to trying to navigate through I guess what’s the so what would the alternative be? Good like navigating through the app store and trying to sign up through that or something?
Deyan Vitanov (04:31)
That that’s pretty much it. In a typical scenario, you’re going to the app store, you are obviously choosing to install something, you have to confirm, you have to wait, you have to download. While these are normal things, they are creating friction. They are creating you know, just waiting until it’s completed. In the just universe ecosystem, that’s not a thing. you you saw this earlier, I’ll just show you back again. The moment a consumer sees a product that they like, they just tap and they’re
instantly in it’s instantaneous there’s no waiting or downloads and if you ever want to go back you go back to you know the the the surface area that you’re very familiar with you know we text with our friends or family obviously all the time and jest is right there without burning you too much we take great care to make sure we don’t spam consumers but instead be part of that inbox so that if ever if you ever want to go back it’s just a quick tap away and it’s instant and and and really frictionless.
Greg Kihlström (05:25)
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, other otherwise, yeah, you’re trying to remember a name of something or you’re searching an interface and there’s a million apps in the app store and all that, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, no, that’s that’s great. Great. So
Deyan Vitanov (05:38)
That’s right.
Greg Kihlström (05:40)
for those that want to learn more and what’s what’s the best way for them to do that?
Deyan Vitanov (05:45)
The best way to learn more about Jest is to go to about.gest.com. It’s our corporate website, if you will, that explains what I showed you. Maybe some some greater detail shows you how Jest works, how our developer console works, our documentation is there. So if you’re able as as a as a developer, you’re able to take advantage of those to publish an app. And as a consumer, we’re live in the United States. Just go into Jess.com and you can experience it right away.
Greg Kihlström (06:12)
Nice, nice. So so app developers, there’s there’s somewhere for them to go as well.
Deyan Vitanov (06:17)
That’s right. app developers have actually sort of a lot of resources, if you will, just because publishing is as you can imagine, quite involved. We have developer console, we have documentation, we have quite a quite a bit of help to get them up and running. The good news is that we’re not asking for something new, let’s say AR or VR, which is a completely new paradigm. In our case, if you have a web app, a web version of your application, it will work on Jest. Integrating with Jest is the is very easy.
Greg Kihlström (06:46)
Nice, nice, love it. Well, again, I’d like to thank Deyan Vitanov, Founder and CEO at Jest for joining the show. You can learn more about Deyan and Jest by following the links in the show notes.
