8 months since inception; 5 months since the team started; 1 month since live with real customers...

After launching to our first customers in July, August was all about close monitoring and ensuring that those customers can complete the tasks they set out to do.

Despite holidays making Aug a more challenging than expected month, we saw great progress!

In summary:

  • Customers: still in ‘only by invite only’ phase. Customer numbers stable from last month.
  • Merchants / Retailers: 49 live conversations; 6 demos in Aug with another 10 booked. 5 partners going live in Sept, to generate first revenue.
  • Product: 73% of users have received at least one upside. 24% have set up an auto-save.
  • Tech: 200k+ transactions processed in the first month, and stable.
  • Ops: 85.42% straight through onboarding with various customer engagements.
  • Funding: Reached £206k (69% of min target). Force Over Mass Capital offered terms & GroundFloor Ventures confirmed investment in Upside.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

As we are looking to push towards more customers in Sept; AND to close our funding round, I’d really appreciate it if you could help me with the following:

Invest:

Follow us on Social:

Spread the word:

  • Please tell everyone about our crowdfunding campaign
  • Please ‘reshare’, ‘retweet’ or ‘recommend’ any of our social posts that you come across
  • Please connect any potential investors directly to me.

Here are the inside to Upside:

Enter Kathryn (Sales & Marketing)

Customers

We’ve benefited from a great pool of initial VIP testers: they are active, engaged and giving us very valuable feedback (verbatim, via their usage of the app, and the data generated).

Now that we have had a month of clean running, we’ve ironed out much of the bugs. We aim to start growing tester numbers again.

Merchants / Retailers

We have a great pipeline of conversations progressing forward. Currently 49 live conversations, with 6 demos taken place in Aug, and another 10 booked.

As is to be expected, August was a quiet month. Many merchants have staff still on furlough and many more on holiday. So we’re pleased with the progress made.  

Enter Andries (Product)

Product

Onboarding

The focus for August was very much on engagement and retention (as our aim was to maintain numbers). We turn back to onboarding in Sept as we aim to grow customer numbers.

In app usage

The primary focus of engagement currently is to ensure users benefit from the app. Functionality is still limited so there is not much that users can do other than view their balance and set up an autosave. Despite this we observed:

  • 73% of users have received at least one upside, and
  • 24% have set up an auto-save.

We look forward to Sept as we release two key features: ability to link multiple bank accounts (currently you can only link one), and ‘push notifications’.

Enter Paul (Tech)

Tech

Since we went live, we’ve been focussed on adding some key features missing in our first release, eliminating technical debt, swatting bugs, and starting to lay foundations for the future.

Running the tech estate:

  • Processed 200k transactions, whilst remaining stable.
  • All incidents managed within acceptable turn-around time.

New features we delivered in August include:

  • Most of the infrastructure we need to deliver to support linking multiple bank accounts to the same upside account.
  • Capturing a broader range of open banking data to allow us to better understand our customers and improve our ‘matching’ algorithms.
  • Numerous small improvements to our Autosave processes.
  • Initial implementation of Upside’s new data platform.

Since improving our ways of working, we’ve seen a consistent improvement in our velocity.

Enter Steve (COO)

Operations

The one constant this month in Ops was “change”: The maturity and quality of the OpenBanking data is constantly shifting, and as such we needed to adapt, update and improve. The learning is proving invaluable as we scale and “teach the machine”.

Customer Care

  • KYC checks performed with 85.42% auto pass rate
  • Numerous Customer Care interactions

Operations Strategic Initiatives

Whilst serving our active customers, we also spent some time on improving our efficiency.

Re-enter Andries

OTHER NEWS:

Funding:

Seedrs

We’re up to £206k committed (69% of min target), with another £90k+ pending from conversations with Angels that said they will invest but not counted yet.

We plan to go live with the crowdfunding campaign on 1 Sept at noon.

Groundfloor Ventures (GFV)

GFV confirmed their investment in Upside. Currently, 8 syndicate members confirmed that they will invest, with others interested to join in.

Force over Mass Capital (FOM)

FOM Capital (http://fomcap.com/) offered terms to invest in Upside.