SMS Broadcast's Lee Gaywood, with his fiance Gemma Cooper. As a result of the late September SMS blast, around 20,000 people signed up to volunteer for Australian Marriage Equality and 170,000 people clicked through to seek further information. Mr Gaywood said a few weeks before the SMS was broadcast out, he reached out to the 'Yes' campaign to offer his company's services. After some back and forth, an agreement on the wording of the SMS, and legal approval, the plan went ahead. At this point, Mr Gaywood tasked a team of SMS Broadcast software developers to code a program that would randomly generate Australian mobile numbers. This process, he said, took a couple of days. In order to reduce costs he said each number was verified as being real, which meant a few additional days of work. It took between 10am and 6.30pm on the day of the SMS blast to send all 10,154,165 messages.

The text message sent to thousands of Australians on Saturday September 21. "The [limitation on the] number of messages that we sent out came as a cost thing to limit the expense to SMS Broadcast," Mr Gaywood said. "That's why we stopped". The commercial price SMS Broadcast would have charged if the SMS blast wasn't free, according to Mr Gaywood, would have been about $500,000, or roughly 5 cents per message. But in reality, Mr Gaywood's company would have paid wholesale rates of between 1 and 2 cents per text message, costing the company a total of between roughly $101,541.65 and $203,083.30. "We were quite concerned after the message went out about backlash against the company itself," Mr Gaywood said.

"The 'No' campaign had some quite vicious people, especially online, not from the campaign itself, but associated with it. So in our conversations, there was a lot of secrecy around us and I didn't want my staff to be confronted by people who have traditional beliefs about marriage. "Given the positive result now, we are certainly happy to put our name behind it and say that we played a small part in change." In June 2015, there were an estimated 31.01 million mobile phones subscribers in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The figure is more than Australia's population given that many people have more than one phone (for work and personal use). Given this, the text message reached approximately 32.75 per cent of Australian mobile subscribers. Mr Gaywood said he now planned to sell to political parties access to his service, which was designed purely for the 'Yes' vote and had not been used before. Asked if this meant he would allow parties of all political persuasions to send messages, such as Pauline Hanson's One Nation, Mr Gaywood initially laughed, before declaring that SMS Broadcast "wouldn't discriminate against any political party, as long as they followed spam compliance".

As has been previously reported, the 'Yes' campaign's message did not breach any regulations in sending the text because it was of a political nature and the law exempts such communications from being classified as spam. It also did not breach privacy laws, as the numbers were not acquired from a list but randomly generated. Asked if he believed those laws should be reformed, so as to enable citizens to opt out if they wanted, Mr Gaywood said this wasn't necessary. "I think political parties should be able to campaign in the best way they possibly can and that is going to mean getting their messages through to as many people as they want," he said. "I certainly understand that some people would prefer not to receive these messages. But if people are able to opt out of that, I don't think that would be beneficial to our political system overall. "I wouldn't agree that people should be able to opt out of that."