Balloon

I would like to introduce you to one of our investments, Balloon, a platform that eliminates groupthink so that companies can get the best ideas, feedback and insights from all team members in order to beat competitors, reduce product churn, and win. Balloon is one step that leaders can take to facilitate conversation, build out a structure within their teams to discuss what hybrid work will look like, and co-create the future with their teams to get maximum buy-in. Today Balloon launches 100+ templated sets of questions co-created with preeminent business leaders, experts, and researchers—including Adam Grant, Daniel Pink, Dick Parsons, Matt Mulllenweg, Kat Cole, Arlan Hamilton, and 20+ others. Templates ensure you are asking the right questions to unlock insights from your team. These templates span across 25+ categories and can be used for meeting replacement, strategic planning, retrospectives, and team brainstorming - just to name a few. Managing and inspiring innovation in your team is brutally hard and the Balloon team has made an elegantly simple, research-backed (and category-creating!) solution to this ubiquitous and costly problem.

Hi! I'm Noah, co-founder and CTO of Balloon. Excited to share more about what we’re building. Balloon uses a collaborative flow called a flight. Flights are sets of questions posed by a leader, allowing them to gather ideas, insights, and feedback from their team and make the most informed decisions (with more buy-in). Today, we are releasing Flight Templates: Templated, editable flights that are pre-populated with the sharpest questions to best engage your team in any collaborative effort. We’ve partnered with some of the world’s preeminent business leaders, researchers, and experts to create 100+ templates. Some of template authors include @adammgrant, @danielpink, @photomatt, @arlan, and 20+ others from organizations like HBO, GitHub, VICE Media, Morning Brew, and more. Here are some popular use cases and templates: 💡 Ideation + Innovation - Creative Problem Solving - Refine Your MVP - Build Your Brand Story 🔊 Feedback + Team Alignment - Evaluate Feedback Mechanisms - Team Culture Audit - Personal Development for Teams 🗓 Planning + Pre-Mortems - Strategic Goal Setting - Meeting Management and Agenda Setting - Pre-Launch Check In 👀 Retrospectives + Post-Mortems - Sprint Retrospective - Decision-Making Retrospective - Culture Retrospective

Thanks for hunting us, Jason! Hi everyone - This is Amanda, co-founder and CEO of Balloon. Super excited to launch Balloon (including 100+ templates!) on ProductHunt today. We’re fixing the largest, most costly problem in the workplace. Meetings and tools don’t address how humans actually collaborate, share information, and make decisions. They don’t account for systemic, organizational issues that cost companies billions. Groupthink plagues decision-making. People don’t share their best ideas or most accurate, honest feedback. Loud voices dominate conversations, and leaders don’t know what they don’t know. Before founding Balloon, I was a public health researcher, translating science and research into national behavior change campaigns for the CDC and EPA. My research focused on engagement, listening, and community-based decision-making, and it was in that work that I discovered this problem. We built Balloon from the ground up to align with research for how to unlock the highest quality and quantity of information from a group...and how to do it in the most productive way possible. Some stats: ⏰ Balloon reduces meeting time by 70%. 🎙 On average, participant engagement on Balloon is around 78%. (In traditional meetings, it’s around 35%—and a few people tend to do most of the talking.) 💡 More than 80% of the information surfaced on Balloon is brand new—it’s never been seen or heard within the company before. Thanks for checking out Balloon - excited to answer questions!

This looks super interesting, can’t wait to use it!!

I've been working with the Balloon team from an investing and advisory standpoint over the past few years and am amazed at how the team has found such a practical solution to organizational problems faced by every company. It's absolutely incredible what asking a few questions can do to eliminate bias, drive insights, and get the most out of your human capital. Sky's the limit for this Balloon team and product! (No pun intended ;))

This looks super interesting and helpful. Do you see this being a tool for enterprise clients and smaller (5-50) person companies alike?

This looks awesome, really excited about this new feature. Congratulations for the launch!