Founder Profile: Streamlining Enterprise Collaboration

Amanda Greenberg

Before founding Balloonr, I was a public health researcher developing national behavior change programs for federal agencies. I translated research and science into messages, campaigns, and brands. But I started noticing something important, which was my ideas got lost in organizational communication and we were never able to reach a consensus.

 In focus groups that we conducted, I learned that a lot of the work that’s done for companies doesn’t align with how our brains actually function and much ends up being unaccounted for. I became really interested in how to solve this problem.

Amanda Greenberg

With the help of Noah, we did more research into proper organizational practices that were simple and approachable for users. From start to finish, you begin by collecting anonymous feedback on an idea or problem and narrow it down to a prioritized list that cuts through bias, groupthink, halo effects, etc.

 With anonymity, identity is removed preventing its influence on the idea review. What you end up with is a focused set of executable ideas that have been determined to be the best by the whole, rather than a few influential figures or voices.

Amanda Greenberg

A lot of this is status quo stuff. They’ll create meetings and try to have a third party ensuring no one is overly bias or anchoring the conversation. If the initial feedback is negative, for example, it can lead to further negative feedback from the rest of the group.

 There’s also the collaboration suite of tools, but they don’t take into context how humans actually make decisions. Other options are post-it notes green dot exercises, which many of our customers have used in the past.

 Unfortunately, none of these solve for the issue that Balloonr is solving for by providing an easy-to-use sourcing tool for ideas that is anonymous and can enable people to be open and honest in the decision making process.

Amanda Greenberg

We target large enterprise industry leaders who want to grow their companies and stay innovative. We also look for companies that are product or project-focused and need productivity to drive their efforts.

 It also can be for a company with system breakdowns that needs to restructure how they’re responding to internal feedback. There’s many different examples, but the pain point in most is usually management looking to improve diversity and inclusion or their people operations.

Amanda Greenberg

Often times, because its new, there’s many questions. However, to mitigate that we focus on the use cases. We approach organizations with a list of use cases to help them understand how it can be beneficial for their organization.

 When we bring on a new customer we will utilize an onboarding webinar and a pilot, which we can do multiple times depending on the company. Most importantly, we make sure they’re comfortable with the product and then finalize the initial use case. We let the customer lead according to how they need it.

 To date, we’ve seen our product used in so many different ways because it’s applicable for any industry or organizational department. Once companies start using Balloonr, it’s impossible for them to revert back to the old way. One of the great things about the product and the company is that everyone has experienced at least one element of the problem.

Amanda Greenberg

The majority of our pipeline has been inbound through media, pitch events, and customer referrals. That has really driven most of our sales and that’s gotten us to the top of the market.

As we start outbound, though, we’ll cover all use cases and buyers. We are focused on targeting specific organizational divisions and going use case by use case. More customers are the strongest point of reference for us.

Amanda Greenberg

We’re doing paid pilots for larger enterprises, which is a 2 to 3 months pilot which will then convert into an annual program. Smaller companies with a specific understanding and need of a use case will typically opt for an annual contract upfront.

Amanda Greenberg

The majority of our 15 to 20 customers have been inbound leads, so the cost has been very low. In addition, we’ve averaged a 400% increase in seat count over 7 months, which shows that our value proposition is coming across to our customers.

Amanda Greenberg

It depends on the use case. Product teams will typically have a budget, whereas C-level teams have more insight on all the budgets. We’ll often see that overall budget spread out across multiple use cases in different divisions.

Amanda Greenberg

We’re a very lean team right now of 4 full time employees and 1 part time, so we’re eager to scale the team. With the release of V2, we’ll be able to kickoff these additional features as well.

 We’re planning to build out the development and customer success team. We’ll also bring on a data scientist to build an AI overlay on top of our system. I anticipate we’ll potentially raise additional capital outside of Republic too.

Amanda Greenberg

I’m a Forbes contributor and met the Republic team through that. I talked to them and was really interested in them and their business because it was unique to the investment landscape in their focus on diversity and inclusion. Their idea was that great companies could come from anywhere and shared a vision of meritocracy.

 Then the opportunity to be on the Meet The Drapers came up. A lot of our customers wanted to be able to invest, so I wanted to open up the option for evangelists and champions to fuel our growth.