Launching self-serve payments at Podium

When I joined Podium, a new feature called text-to-pay was rapidly gaining adoption as a powerful tool for our customers. Despite requiring a fairly technical setup, Podium merchants were eager to use the feature to request and accept payment by text. To support this business growth, I joined the payments team to lead the design effort. Our primary focus was making text-to-pay easy to discover, trial and onboard into with Podium. 



Our key business goals were to shorten the time it took to try text-to-pay and to grow the number of active text-to-pay users in Podium.


Growing payments

Payments started with a few simple surface areas.

1. A UI to build invoices for customers

2. A view of all transactions



As the product grew in adoption, our goals sharpened towards self-serve growth. To make this possible, we instrumented a 1-click account creation flow that allowed merchants to try the product without the hassle of upfront friction or onboarding. The original flow required 90 clicks to enable payments.

Key learnings

Opening the top of the funnel with 1-click activation successfully grew customer adoption of payments. Within 6 months, self-serve adoption of payments increased by 400%. Podium has processed over $7B in GPV with payments.

Friction is bad.
Also bad: fraudsters.

New users are predictably impatient with new software. Reducing friction is usually the right move in most cases. For payments, it was equally important to ensure our users were not fraudsters or bad actors. To reduce financial risk, we added withdrawal rules and identity verification measures. Building this into the UX and making it easy for merchants to receive their money was an important detail of the project.