Instant Payouts

Boulevard serves self-care businesses — salons, spas, studios — where cash flow and tight margins are a daily reality. The standard two-business-day settlement window wasn't just inconvenient. For some merchants it meant missing payroll, delaying supplier orders, or simply not having the liquidity the business needed to keep operating.

Faster Payouts was Boulevard's answer: give merchants the ability to pull their funds instantly, on their terms, for a small fee. I led the design end-to-end — from the brief through merchant research, scope negotiation with leadership, processor advocacy, and a React prototype that doubled as the engineering spec.

Self-care businesses operate on thin margins and short cash cycles. A Monday's revenue sitting in settlement limbo until Wednesday creates real cash flow gaps — especially around payroll cycles and supplier payments. Merchants weren't just annoyed by the delay; they were making operational compromises because of it.

On top of that, Boulevard merchants had no visibility into when funds would arrive, no way to accelerate them, and no recourse when timing didn't align with their needs. Meanwhile, competitors had begun offering instant payout features — and merchants were starting to notice and ask questions.

I inherited a defined brief — build an instant payout feature — but internal alignment around what that actually meant fell apart early. Executives wanted to match a competitor's offering. When the initial designs did exactly that, the feedback was that we hadn't pushed far enough.

The tension wasn't really about design. It was about scope ambition. What started as “copy the competitor” kept quietly expanding into a much broader question about what payout control could mean for a Boulevard merchant. My job was to hold that space — explore the bigger vision without letting it block something real from shipping.

To get the team aligned on what was worth building, I mapped out and designed the entire payout control experience — not just the MVP. That gave leadership something concrete to react to and gave engineering a clear picture of the tradeoffs between what we could ship now and what could wait.

Laying the full surface out side by side turned the conversation from opinion into sequencing. Everyone could see what was inside the launch, what was intentionally deferred, and why the deferred pieces still mattered to the roadmap.

With internal opinions pulling in different directions, I went directly to merchants. Their feedback was the clearest signal we had, and it cut through the noise in ways no amount of internal discussion could have.

What I heard reframed the scope question entirely. The broader vision was still worth building, but not at the cost of holding up something merchants were already asking us for.

Our payment processor's initial terms — one payout per day, capped at $30,000 — would have made the feature nearly unusable for a meaningful segment of our merchants. High-volume salons processing more than $30K in a single day would have hit the ceiling immediately and walked away confused.

Rather than argue the point abstractly, I designed the full experience under the constrained terms so the friction was visible — not as a hypothetical, but as a real walkthrough of what a merchant would face. That artifact gave leadership the evidence they needed to take the conversation back to the processor, and the terms were revised before we shipped.

Given the complexity of the payout flow — multiple states, error conditions, processor edge cases, and timing logic — I built and hosted a functional React app rather than relying on static Figma prototypes. The app modeled every state a merchant could encounter, including the ones that would only surface at 11pm on a Friday.

Where I spent my time. Design lead · Merchant interviews · Scope advocacy · React prototyping · 0-to-one

Within the first 14 days of launch, merchants initiated 52 instant payouts totaling $106,244 in gross payout volume. The speed of adoption wasn't a surprise — the need had been there all along. We just hadn't given merchants the tool to act on it.

Two weeks in, the behavior pattern was already clear: high repeat usage, strong early sentiment, and a credible runway to roll the feature out to the full 3,800+ merchant base.