Selling into 95% market concentration | John Taylor Garner

Odynn is an AI-powered, fully modular platform that helps fintechs, banks, card issuers, and travel companies launch embedded travel, loyalty, and rewards programs. The company's flagship product, Awayz, gives financial institutions a white-label travel portal where cardholders can search, plan, and book hotels and flights with side-by-side points, miles, and cash pricing.

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with John Taylor Garner, Founder & CEO of Odynn, to learn how the company is taking on a market where Booking, Expedia, and Hopper collectively hold 95% market share by offering financial institutions a personalized, modular alternative to their monolithic competitors.

Topics Discussed: How John's background as a points and miles enthusiast led him to identify the gap in embedded travel Why John shut down his first startup, Card Curator, and how that experience led to founding Odynn How Built Rewards became Odynn's first customer and what they saw that other banks had not yet recognized How the market shifted from requiring heavy customer education to prospects who arrive already understanding the problem Why US customers immediately understand the cardholder retention problem while European markets require more education Where the term "embedded travel" came from and how Odynn uses it to define the category The critical marketing decisions John made to reach six different types of buyers How Odynn structures its approach across personal banking, business banking, BaaS, credit card affiliates, card issuers, and corporate travel management What selling to tier-one banks actually looks like in terms of sales cycle length What John learned transitioning from direct-to-consumer to enterprise financial institution sales Tactics that have helped shorten long enterprise sales cycles Advice for founders selling technology to banks

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

Solve a problem before customers know they have it: Odynn launched in January 2022 with the hypothesis that airlines and hotels moving toward dynamic pricing would cause points to become less valuable, which would hurt cardholder retention. As John put it, "fixing a problem that nobody really knew that they had was a hard thing to do." The company had to wait for market timing to catch up with its thesis before the sales motion became straightforward. Let customers tell you what product to build: Odynn originally focused on the loyalty layer of the problem. Customers like Built Rewards pushed them toward building a full travel portal. "It wasn't just the loyalty space that was broken," John said. "It is the entire experience of redeeming points or just booking travel with cash, either way, on the embedded side was really bad." The product pivot came from listening to customers, not from an internal strategic decision. Land a lighthouse customer who already sees what is coming: Built Rewards was Odynn's first customer and remains one today. John credited Built with being "one of the few customers that were savvy enough to know that this was going to be a big problem and ultimately in their favor, because they got ahead of it." Built had team members from airline and bank loyalty backgrounds who could read the trajectory of dynamic pricing before most banks could.