Balanced will be adding a new feature to its arsenal of payments features in the coming months, allowing customers to push payments directly to debit cards. But this product development cycle comes with the support of a number of customers asking for the feature, who are backing the feature with a crowdfunding campaign.
This idea of “open source product development” isn’t exactly new to Balanced: The Y Combinator alum has long depended on customers and partners to help it determine which features it should build into its two-sided payment platform.
Using Github, the team discusses its product cycle and uses community feedback to help it prioritize resources around the development of features that are most requested or could prove most valuable to its clients. That led to the team building out features like the ability to do ACH bank deposits to its platform.
“We advertise ourselves as an open company,” co-founder Jareau Wade told me. “Our code is often open source, and our default is to provide transparency in product development.”
The next step for Balanced in determining demand was to seek crowdfunding for new features through a campaign on Crowdhoster. According to Wade, the money raised isn’t necessarily to fund development, since engineering salaries are largely a sunk cost anyway. Instead, the money is for lifetime support of the feature. And crowdfunding is also a good way to help determine actual customer demand.
When it asked users if they were interested in sending payments to debit cards, there was a groundswell of support. But before it decided to build the feature out, it wanted to determine how many would be willing to pay for the feature, and how much. After all, it’s one thing for customers to say they want a new feature — it’s a whole other thing to set a price.
That’s one lesson that came out of its development of ACH deposits, Wade said, as those who supported the feature via Github weren’t exactly happy with pricing when it was actually released. By having clients prepay to be part the initial beta run of the product, it’s essentially having them put their money where their mouths is and vote on how much volume and which pricing plan makes the most sense.
Since Balanced can’t rip out a feature once it’s been added to the API, the company has to be thoughtful about what it implements and how. While the typical Silicon Valley mantra is to move fast and break things, that’s not a luxury that Balanced has as a payments company.
“We can’t break things, but we still need to move fast,” Wade said. “So we’ve changed that to move fast and make things.”
Those who wish to support the campaign can do so for as little as $25 and get a t-shirt, marketplace customers also have the option of supporting in $1,000, $2,500, and $10,000 blocks, each with a different price per transaction. The $1,000 backers are essentially prepaying for 1,000 transactions, while those who spend $2,500 will be paying $0.75 per transaction. The cost for $10,000 backers goes down to $0.50 per transaction when the feature gets rolled out in May.
Balanced surpassed its $50,000 goal in about a day, with major backing coming from customers like Raise, Wanderable, Crowdtilt, and InstantCab. It’s received money from 24 different backers altogether, but still has several weeks to go in the campaign. With the greenlight from backers, though, it’s ready to move forward with the feature, which it expects to roll out in May.
Balanced has raised $3.4 million from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, CollabFund, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Brian Chesky, Ashton Kutcher, Yishan Wong, and other angels.
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Chances are you haven’t heard of Bolthouse Farms before, but if their new marketing campaign performs as they hope, that just may change. Bolthouse Farms is a purveyor of fruit and vegetable juice blends, akin to popular brands such as Nantucket Nectars, Naked Juice, and Odwalla. Bolthouse Farms’ drinks are sold nationally, are likely in your local grocery store, and its even possible that you’ve bought their products before. However, to date, strong branding and recognition has been an issue, hence a fresh, new marketing campaign. Instagram Image Recognition Beginning at the end of October, and with the help of ad agency Tiny Rebellion and RevTrax, a marketing technology company that drives in-store sales through digital coupons, Bolthouse rolled out a technology that identifies its products in images posted on Instagram, and rewards those users with coupons when they they’ve shared a product picture (on a non-private account) and used the hashtags #gotcoupon and #carrotfarmers. 
Tiny Rebellion built a tool that monitors the Twitter firehose, and anytime the Bolthouse logo is spotted in an image (generally on a bottle), it is flagged by their tool. In Bolthouse’s campaign, however, the coupon is only issued if the user takes the extra step of also using the two campaign hashtags. Once the system checks that the hashtags were used, it issues a $1.50 coupon and notifies the image sharer via a comment directly on their image, all in about 60 seconds. The coupon can then be printed off, but only by the image poster as the ‘print’ button is behind an Instagram login screen that validates that the user is indeed authorized to print the coupon. Although very clever, the system isn’t perfect yet. For example, the tool didn’t initially recognize my image when the bottle was posted to Instagram, so Bolthouse’s backup plan kicked-in and a coupon was manually issued about an hour after my test. Also, I was left wanting a little more than the auto-response of “Bottle Recognized!” before the coupon details were provided. But that is a personal preference and something easily changed as the campaign evolves. The Results I spoke with Pamela Naumes, Director of Brand Engagement at Bolthouse Farms, to get a better understanding of the program and its success. Naumes explained that prints of the coupon from this campaign are higher than all of their other current online marketing channels, including Facebook ads and paid search. And of the people who are invited to print the coupon, 65 percent actually do, a statistic the Bolthouse Farms team is quite proud of. Although exact numbers weren’t shared, a quick search of the hashtag #carrotfarmers on statigr.am shows that it has been used 5,697 thus far. Assuming those are all legitimate entries, that would put 65 percent coupon prints at somewhere around 3,700. Not bad distribution for two months. Overall, Naumes states, that, “What we love about this program is that, unlike TV or print, this does three things: It drives awareness that we own the farms. It drives trial of our beverages. And it’s driving engagement”. Are you following @BolthouseFarms on Instagram? We love all of their creative 15 second recipes: http://t.co/BlPHYy591z— Campbell Soup Co (@CampbellSoupCo) December 4, 2013 Because of this social success, Bolthouse Farms has decided to extend the campaign longer than originally planned, and invest more in January to promote the program more fully. About this article 
Article Author: Brian Patterson 
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