Bug Hunt: Bugcrowd Uses Trolley to Make Daily Payments to Ethical Hackers
Security bugs are almost unavoidable in the swarm of digital interconnectivity. Most businesses lack the focused teams and breadth of experience necessary to find and swat every single digital issue. Luckily, thanks to Bugcrowd, a distributed, international crew of hacker-researchers with diverse backgrounds, experience, and expertise is readily available for hire.
Bugcrowd’s platform-powered approach to crowdsourced security connects businesses to the right researchers and manages operational details. Bugcrowd has grown steadily since 2012; they have received series D funding and, to date, have amassed hundreds of thousands of researchers. But the larger Bugcrowd grew, the more cumbersome it became to pay their burgeoning roster of researchers.
Without Trolley, there would be many more choke points in processing our volume of daily payments without problems. It would require almost double the bandwidth from our teams to keep an eye on payments.
The challenge
Before Trolley, reconciling payment issues with finance took me six to eight hours a week, and losing a full workday started to be an issue. And any errors we missed in our manual process cost me a considerable amount of time at the end of the quarter and year.
- Abigail Nguy, Product Manager, Bugcrowd.
There was a lot to be desired in the process. “It was not fun,” Nguy states. “It was cumbersome, and there was double and triple checking to avoid errors.”
While Nguy’s weekly task took her about 30 minutes, there were hours—and at the end of a year or quarter, sometimes weeks—of manual reconciliation.
“We had hundreds of programs running, thousands of researchers, and it was getting difficult to scale the payments,” Nguy recalls. Some bug bounty competitors paid researchers daily, but Bugcrowd’s process made it almost impossible to meet that cadence. Add to that the bank fees and conversion fees that applied to their numerous international researchers, and the process was just too complex.
And when it came to taxes, all Nguy could say was, “Taxes were horrible, and it was challenging for the team. One year, end-of-year taxes took up three weeks of January.”
Nguy and Bugcrowd teams knew: Something had to change.
The solution
“Trolley has helped us reach payments parity with our competition and has even allowed us to create competitive differentiation around what we can offer researchers.”
- Grant McCracken, VP of Operations at Bugcrowd.
Using Trolley also meant Bugcrowd could pay out researchers every day. “Wire transfers were a nightmare for our researchers before Trolley,” Nguy says. “Our researchers had told us those daily payments and covering conversion fees were important to them.”
After onboarding with Trolley, Bugcrowd now makes payments every day. When researchers reach out to Jones with questions or issues, he has visibility into payments and notifications, so it’s easy to resolve issues.
“I appreciate the Trolley user experience,” Jones shares. “The dashboard is simple and straightforward, so we’re always able to find answers for our researchers quickly.”
The end-of-year tax pressure has also eased significantly since Trolley. “To be able to ensure we’re collecting tax forms, that we’re compliant in storing them, that we have the correct researcher information is a huge relief. We used to have to check all of that manually,” says Nguy.
“Using Trolley has been essential to helping us catch up with competitors and gain a competitive advantage. I shudder at the thought of our processes without Trolley.”
- Abigail Nguy, Product Manager, Bugcrowd.
The results
“Before Trolley, we had to do manual tax forms for hundreds of researchers. It was difficult, to say the least,” says Jones.
Jones and his teams still review researcher tax forms, but collecting information and ensuring it’s compliant is much easier. Even better, Bugcrowd knows that with Trolley, they are compliant in storing researcher information.
“Trolley has helped us make our clients and researchers happier. Our support team spends less time doing payment runs and supporting payments in general, which creates better morale and reduces the probability of human error.”
— Chris Jones, Lead Support Engineer at Bugcrowd.
The future
"The Trolley team is so collaborative; it’s my favourite part of working with them. I feel supported, and I know that at the end of the day, Trolley will do whatever they can to help get us where we need to be.”
“Before Trolley, we spent more than 20 hours weekly on payment-related tasks. While we still have to track down recipient information, Trolley has helped us more halve the hours we spend on payments.”
- Grant McCracken, VP of Operations at Bugcrowd.
