Make Balanced easier to find

[jkwade]

Reasons Balanced is difficult to find:

• "Balanced" is an ambiguous name, poor for finding by searching. "Balanced Payments" is better
• Very little press or blog posts on the web (a few here, and here)
• Few resources dedicated to SEO
• $0 marketing/ad spend

[taylorbrooks]

Has there been a post on HN yet?

I found about Balanced through a friend.

[jkwade]

We've been featured via our partnership with Gittip and I think once more, but haven't really given it a real effort to stay on top. We have done two blasts on the YC alumni listserve.

@taylorbrooks do you know how your friend found out about Balanced?

[taylorbrooks]

Not sure, probably the YC listserv. It was Lloyd Armbrust, founder of OwnLocal. The Crowdtilt guys also rec'd Balanced.

I work out of Capital Factory here in ATX. There's a number of financial services / e-commerce startups that I'm pushing to take a hard look at Balanced.

[jkwade]

Yeah, Lloyd's been great sending people our way, as have James and Khalid at Crowdtitlt. Just trying to make it so developers spend less time searching.

Where did you try looking for payments solutions before Lloyd told you about Balanced?

[taylorbrooks]

Stripe, Auth.net, Braintree, and Chase Paymentech.

[taylorbrooks]

And BancBox, but they were unreliable in support.

[jkwade]

No, sorry. I meant, what sources. Like google search, HN, etc? Or better yet, how did you find any of the payment solutions you considered? And let's move this conversation over to #103.

[matin]

Blog post on status page: http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page/

Submitted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877643

[matin]

Funding announcement on TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/balanced-marketplace-payments/

[jkwade]

Bitcoin slam-piece on Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/26/payments-startup-balanced-innovates-in-wrong-direction/

Mentioned as one of Ashton's investments: http://bankinnovation.net/2012/12/ashton-kutcher-for-banker-of-the-year/

Justin Benson, CEO of Spreedly re: marketplace payments: http://blog.spreedly.com/2012/11/01/marketplaces-and-payments/

BizeeBee on why they selected Balanced for payment processing: http://bizeebee.com/2012/04/bizeebees-process-picking-payments-processor/

Open Partnership w/ Gittip: http://blog.gittip.com/post/28351995405/open-partnerships

Unglue.it on Stripe, WePay, and Balanced: http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2012/09/stripe-balanced-wepay-for-payments-not.html

[jkwade]

Chad's blog on "Why I love Balanced" http://whit537.org/2012/12/why-i-love-balanced.html

[jkwade]

Press/HN seem to be working a bit: https://twitter.com/ajhekman/status/276757635200610304

[matin]

Quora: Why did Yishan Wong invest in Balanced?

PandoDaily: Balanced is in a dogfight for peer-to-peer marketplaces

[jkwade]

Zaarly's blog post on their payments system: http://blog.zaarly.com/post/37651532440/zaarly-payments

[jkwade]

Fiestah blog post: http://blog.fiestah.com/2012/12/11/fiestah-hearts-balanced-the-best-payment-solution-for-marketplaces/

[jkwade]

PandoDaily article about BizeeBee. Mentions Balanced: http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/31/bizeebee-adds-payments-but-the-transaction-fee-may-sting/

L'Atelier - a French innovation blog: http://www.atelier.net/trends/articles/un-meilleur-systeme-de-paiement-ameliore-relation-plateforme-e-commerce-vendeur

SC Magazine - an Australian technology security magazine: http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/322118,fraudsters-launder-cash-though-grants-startup.aspx

[andrewmbenton]

Seems like general press is ok. If you want to market to developers through HN then getting some more technical blog posts about how you use x technology to scale payments for n-thousand users might be good. Having engineering write about technical challenges usually works pretty well for us at Twilio.

I did find this which is reasonable: http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page/

[jkwade]

thanks @andrewmbenton!

[jkwade]

Marty Bauer, CEO Ridepost on Balanced + Fraud: http://bauermarty.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/on-fraud/

[jkwade]

Josh Holtz co-founder of Tappr, blog, re: uris vs. ids: http://joshholtz.com/post/37888297008/balanced-payments-screw-id-use-uri

[jkwade]

Appvita Cloud App of the day - 12/19/12: http://www.appvita.com/2012/12/19/balanced-a-payment-system-for-marketplaces

[jkwade]

Betakit article about SellSimple mentions Balanced: http://betakit.com/2013/01/04/sellsimple-launches-app-to-enable-selling-everywhere-in-one-go

[jkwade]

Mahmoud posted Balanced Payouts (ACH credits) to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026802

[jkwade]

Jareau asked a HN question re: 1099s: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033628

Related blog post: http://blog.balancedpayments.com/1099s/

[jkwade]

Spreedly adds gateway support for Balanced: https://spreedlycore.com/manual/payment-gateways/balanced

https://twitter.com/mahmoudimus/status/290924835398365185

[jkwade]

Cloudswipe adds gateway support for Balanced: https://cloudswipe.com/payment-gateways

https://twitter.com/CloudSwipe/status/285599871342354433

[jkwade]

Balanced an ActiveMerchant supported gateway: https://github.com/Shopify/active_merchant#supported-direct-payment-gateways

[jkwade]

TC post on Balanced Payouts: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/balanced-payments-ach-api-omg/

[jkwade]

TNW article on Balanced Payouts: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/14/balanced-releases-its-payouts-api-as-a-standalone-offering-giving-access-to-next-day-ach-deposits/?fromcat=all

[jkwade]

TWN article on same-day payouts: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/25/balanced-payments-brings-same-day-payouts-to-wells-fargo-customers/

[jkwade]

Balanced becomes trending company on Angellist: https://twitter.com/balanced/status/306191782637617152

[jkwade]

TNW article on Bank Payments: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/28/balanced-rolls-out-a-new-bank-payment-option-for-merchants/

TC article on Bank Payments: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/balanced-bank-payments/

[jkwade]

YC payment companies profiled: http://ycuniverse.com/balanced-wepay-stripe

[jkwade]

GroupTalent on why they switched from Stripe to Balanced: https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-balanced

Related HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5305494

[jkwade]

TC article about Split with GroupMe: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/chatting-is-great-but-groupmes-mobile-apps-now-let-users-split-payments-too/

[jkwade]

GroupMe blog post about Split: http://blog.groupme.com/post/44796541529/groupme-4-1-just-in-time-for-our-third-straight

[jkwade]

Pando article about alumni donations: http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/06/launch-the-case-for-an-alumni-donations-model-in-investing/

[jkwade]

Jareau attended SXSW. Engineering team attended PyCon

[jkwade]

Balanced raises $800K from group of FB alumni http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/19/balanced-raises-a-rapid-800k-on-a-little-known-fundraising-platform-called-facebook/

[jkwade]

WeFunder launch article on TC mentions Balanced: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/19/wefunder-launch/

[jkwade]

Chad wrote a blog post about Balanced doing real-time merchant underwriting via API: http://whit537.org/2013/04/balanced-third-generation-payments.html

[jkwade]

@mjallday attended HTML5 Conference

[jkwade]

VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/02/balanced-adds-2m-from-andreessen-horowitz-collabfund-into-its-checkbook/

PandoDaily http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/02/balanced-adds-andreessen-horowitz-and-collaboration-fund-as-investors-and-opens-up-about-opening-up/

Techcrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/balanced-andreessen-horowitz-collabfund/

AllThingsD http://allthingsd.com/20130402/payments-startup-balanced-raises-2-million/

Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/evankirkpatrick/2013/04/02/how-the-balanced-co-founders-went-from-meeting-on-craigslist-to-raising-millions-from-famous-investors/

TheNextWeb http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/02/balanced-closes-3-4m-seed-round-to-help-it-expand-its-payment-fraud-solution-worldwide/

Dow Jones http://pevc.dowjones.com/article?an=DJFVW00020130402e942atxpt&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fpevc.dowjones.com%3a80%2farticle%3fan%3dDJFVW00020130402e942atxpt

[jkwade]

Silicon Valley Biz Journal http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/04/02/payment-startup-balanced-adds-2m-to.html

[jkwade]

Made it into Dan Primack's Fortune Termsheet (private email distro, no link) http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/02/venture-capital-deals-318/

[jkwade]

San Jose City Press http://sanjose.cityandpress.com/node/6078503

[jkwade]

PaymentsNews Mention: http://www.paymentsnews.com//2013/04/02/index.html

[jkwade]

PaymentsSource http://www.paymentssource.com/news/balanced-payments-gets-new-funding-3013706-1.html

[matin]

Balanced has made a lot of progress, but there's still that can be done. This issue is more important than just marketing and growth for Balanced. For a customer to be happy, they need to know about Balanced first.

The existence of Balanced doesn't matter if the customer doesn't even know that Balanced exists, which means this issue is a critical part of improving the product.

[jkwade]

Profile in PaymentsSource: http://www.paymentssource.com/news/balanced-targets-marketplaces-with-a-white-label-payments-product-3013745-1.html