About
You can think of Expressive Money as Zapier or IFTTT for payments.
💸 ➟ IFTTT ➟ 🧑🏽
You can send money to any person, company, or non-profit organization using only their email address. But that money is held temporarily, and they can only cash out that money to their bank account if certain conditions are met.
Conditions can be affirmed and decided by popular consensus (voting) or by automation (software programs). If a condition is affirmed by popular consensus, that means that humans, such as the payors, vote on whether a condition has been met or not. If a condition is affirmed by automation, then that means that payments can be connected to API's, datasets, and software programs that trigger conditions to be met or rejected without human intervention.
Below are some examples of how Expressive could be used in ecommerce, enterprise, charitable, and P2P contexts:
Examples
Fundraising
Conditional political donations and high-resolution campaign financing
Incentivize politicians and political campaigns to meet specific goals or deliver on specific promises before you support them.
Ex: IF my local representative votes for the Inflation Reduction Act, then I will donate $500 to his next election campaign.
Ex: IF Donald Trump runs for president in 2024, then donate $400 to Liz Cheney's presidential campaign. But do not donate to her unless he does.
Conditional charitable donations based on measurable data (Effective Altruism)
Make more effective, precise donations to causes and campaigns you support, based on verifiable conditions and incentives.
Ex: IF SendIt4TheSea reaches 100,000 lbs of garbage removed from the oceans, then I will donate $1,000 to them.
Contingent investing / High-resolution fundraising
Set precise incentives, targets, goals, for your startup portfolio or create co-investing and follow-on plans with other investors.
Ex: IF Startup X reaches 10,000 unique visitors per month by December 1, 2022 (as measured by Google Analytics), then invest an additional $700,000 into their Seed Round.
Ex: IF Index Ventures leads the Series A for Startup Y, then I will invest $500,000. But IF Andresseen leads the Series A, then I will invest only $250,000.
Crowdfunding
DAO's, Go-Fund-Me's, and Kickstarters can raise money for a project, but then use Expressive to set specific conditions that must be voted on by the group in order to release funds to various recipients or applications.
Ex: Susan created a Go-Fund-Me for mother's medical expenses. IF Susan submits the hospital bill or receipt for funders to see, then release the $10,000 in contributions to Susan.
Enterprise
Enterprise bill pay approvals and budgeting
Allow multiple decision-makers in an enterprise to sign off and affirm specific conditions before releasing a payment to a vendor or service provider.
Ex: IF every team lead in the company tries and approves Slack as a new messaging option, then redirect our budget towards Slack and away from Microsoft Teams.
Ex: IF our company-wide usage of Heroku reaches $100,000 / month, then release $200,000 to the finance team to open an AWS enterprise account.
Predefined accounts payable
Schedule payments ahead of time and make them contingent on various internal or external conditions, with varying degrees of complexity.
Ex: A remote web designer has been contracted to redesign our website and mobile app. IF the designer completes the website by November 1, 2022, then pay the designer 50% of the agreed-upon amount, then continue paying them 5% of the remaining 50% each week thereafter.
Purchase orders
Car manufacturers can outline all the raw materials, parts, sizes, quantities, and specifications they require from a supplier, and only release funds if all the criteria are met.
Ex: IF Supplier X provides 4,000 sheets of copper, 5,000 sheets of aluminum, 10,000 sheets of titanium, and 7,000 sheets of fiberglass, then release a lump-sum payment of $300,000.
Supply-chain incentivization (preorders)
Many enterprise businesses are waiting for solutions, products, and services that simply don't exist yet because of the technical difficulty of inventing them. These businesses can create RFP's and anticipatory purchase orders with bounties attached, in order to incentivize inventors, researchers and would-be entrepreneurs to solve their problems.
Ex: We're Coca Cola or Starbucks. IF someone invents a biodegradable water bottle that has the same or better compression strength, boiling and melting points, and color ranges of traditional PET water bottles, then we will preorder $1,000,000 worth of this material and potentially invest $10,000,000 in your company.
Ex: IF someone can recommend a corporate password manager that allows us to leverage our private database of biometric employee data for passwords and authentication, then we will pay a $25,000 finders fee and sign a 5-year contract of $300,000 with that company.
SaaS productization
SaaS companies can create an infinite number of new products and revenue streams by creating custom Expressive Payment options for their customers based on granular feature usage, number of account holders, geographies, and more. This can help companies convert more self-serve customers to enterprise, by spinning up custom offers.
Ex: We're Google Cloud. IF your company receives 1m unique monthly visitors, but they spend less than 5 seconds on average on your site, then you will not be charged for an enterprise account. But if time-on-site reaches 30 seconds or more, then we will collect $2,500 for an enterprise account.
Referrals and sales commissions
Companies can set up automatic referral programs, where a referrer gets paid automatically once a new customer signs up.
Ex: We're Notion.so. IF your startup refers another startup on our list of targets, and they sign up for an enterprise account using their corporate email account, then we will pay your company $1,000 per referral.
Social media campaigns
Define simple and automated social media campaign agreements between influencers and brands, with precise and measurable targets.
Ex: IF this influencer's tweet gets 1000 likes, then I'll pay the influencer $2000.
Programmatic investing
Automate investment purchases and sales based on any verifiable real-world data sets.
Ex: IF the tempurature in Lubbock, TX reaches 105 degrees fahrenheit, then purchase 500 bushels of wheat.
Bug bounties
Create bounties for open-source developers to help monitor, fix, or test your company's software programs.
Ex: IF an any independent developer fixes this bug in our open-source repository, then they can claim a $5,0000 bounty.
Ex: IF any whitehat hacker can penetrate our firewalls, then they can claim a $5,0000 bounty.
E-commerce
Preorders and product waiting lists
Prepurchase out-of-stock products and demonstrate to brands the demand for sold-out product lines. Brands can also alert their customers automatically via an Expressive API.
Ex: IF the Men's Salomon XT-6 sneaker in beige is back in stock AND IF it is less than $140, then send $140 to Salomon automatically.
Ex: IF tickets for Shania Twain’s reunion tour go on sale, then send $150 to Shania’s tour manager to pre-purchas a ticket
Feature Requests
Make more effective, precise donations to causes and campaigns you support, based on verifiable conditions and incentives.
Ex: IF Twitter adds a temporary mute button, then sign me up for a Twitter Pro account for $20 / mo.
Ex: IF SaaS Company X fixes this bug in their streaming API, then send them $10,000 from our company's sales team as a thank you.
Collaboration Requests
The streetwear,sneakerhead, apparel markets are predicated on one-off collaborations between well-known brands and up-and-coming artists and designers. Fans and enthusiasts can request new collaborations, or support their favorite artists by pitching them to large brands via collaboration requests.
Ex: IF The North Face does a collaboration with designer Nicole McLaughlin, then I will pre-buy $100 worth of the collection.
Customization Requests
Often clothing customers cannot find products they love in the correct sizes. Or, they may love a product except for one or two features, such as the color, fabric, pocket placement, or overall shape. Customization requests can empower customers to get the attention of brands by creating public conditional payments that other customers can add support to.
Ex: IF Madewell starts making these overalls in plus sizes, then I will buy 3 pairs of them for $800.
Ex: IF Levi's starts making these jeans in pants sizes shorter than 30x30, then I will buy 3 pairs of them for $600.
Personal shoppers and finders fees
Often times customers are willing to pay large amounts of money simply for help finding a rare, hard-to-find, or yet-to-exist product. These are often big-ticket luxury items, such as cars, homes, furniture, or vacation rentals, for which the search can be crowd-sourced to the public for a finders fee.
Ex: I can’t find this vintage 1992 BMW in gold. IF someone finds one for sale and if test drive it, then I will pay them a $500 finders fee.
Price drops
Pay other people to monitor products and services for price drops, or enable brands to alert their customers automatically via an Expressive API.
Ex: IF the price of a new Tesla Model 3 in red drops below $40,000, then purchase one.
P2P
P2P social payments
Have fun sending payments to friends and family with special conditions. It's like Venmo or Cash App but with conditions and media attached to each payment.
Ex: IF your steal our high school rival's mascot costume then I'll pay you $50. Post a photo to prove it.
Ex: IF you ask Sarah to the prom tomorrow on Zoom in front of the class, then I'll pay you $20. Record the Zoom call to prove it.
Prepayments
Businesses and customers can set up simple pre-payments of recurring bills. This can be useful for vendors and service providers who don't accept credit cards as payment.
Ex: IF the date is the 30th of the month, then pay my landlord $3,000. Do this every month for 1 year.