Ballpark: Certainty over guesswork
Inside Ballpark's lean approach to finance, ahead of Series A
We sat down with Murat, co-founder of Ballpark, to explore the foundations of their fast-growing product research platform — and why building smart is key to their journey.
What is Ballpark up to?
Ballpark is a consumer and user research tool; soon to be raising its Series A, with a growing team and scaling user base. Murat says, "We’re still very nimble, but I’ve found a level of operational framework and process — without the big headcount — that allows us to keep building a better product as we go…"
"We’re just sort of laying the foundations for the future. So, you know…listening to customers, building out stuff they really need, getting really close to problems and spending time on those things that represent growth for us."
As such, Apron was an ideal solution and alternative to what Murat and the team had been using before on the finance side…"it allows us to have a finance person without having a finance person, which is great" says Murat alluding to the nimble and early-stage set up of Ballpark.
How does Apron work for what’s next?
Murat says that he’s thought about how Apron integrates into the current seed-stage operations and Ballpark and ‘doesn’t see how it doesn’t scale really well with us…For example, as our team grows and expenses and payroll increase in size, Apron feels like it meets us with all that we need in terms of having a platform of processes that save time spent manually doing administrative things.’
With the launch of the Wise integration, Murat says his life today has gotten even easier but similar to the way he plans to scale with Apron, he feels this integration is a ‘life-saver’ as a lot of Ballpark’s payments are international: "it was a real time suck before and now it’s just a case of approving the payment in Wise and then getting my co-founder to do the same on their Wise portal… such a silly thing to save time on but it’s making a difference."
Amid Murat’s focus on building the operating foundations for Ballpark to serve their customers with ease and scale into the future is a hyper-focus on product. In-amongst getting ready for Series A, he says: "It’s about finding gaps, wherever they may be; that might be great people who can help guide the vision for the product or new ways of thinking about a workflow… We’re just being very intentional with everything revolving around the product for now."