No, I’m not talking about Boris’ latest political agenda, but what June felt like as an Upsider.

On the back of May’s ‘new normal’ we set into a rhythm of delivery. Each day picking up  speed, getting more done. But as anyone in tech will tell you, the more you do, the more you realise just how much has to get done. Despite June being a full month with long days and weekends, we took some solid steps forward.

In summary:

  • Good progress on early adopters (we are only looking for a small number of lucky first users for our ‘by invitation only’ alpha launch in July).
  • Brian Dunne (Retail expert and investor) embracing the upside vision to the extent that he is diving in with his team to take an active role in helping us sign-up Retail partners for the October pilot.
  • Great validation of our vision by 11FS’s study of PFMs Jobs To Be done.
  • Operational and Business Readiness for launch confirmed and in place, and
  • Current funding round on track to go for crowdfunding late July / early Aug.

Here are the inside to Upside:

Enter Kathryn (Sales & Marketing)

Customers

We’ve stepped up our customer acquisition: getting sign ups for people interested in getting early access on alpha. We’re aiming to oversubscribe to allow for people who are not iOS users and for the conversion rate from download to connecting via open banking.

We're seeing great traction from Social media ads so far. And most encouragingly, the proposition seems to resonate well with people nationwide, not just those living in London. We’re excited to see which group of users complete the full sign up process.

We’ve also had some great conversations with survey takers who were happy to discuss their answers with us and also have a product demo. We’ve learnt a few things from this. Firsty, people aren’t fully grasping the value proposition well until much later on so we are addressing this as part of a UX review and, secondly, that they love the idea and can’t wait to use it once live.

Retailers

We’ve been developing our relationship with Brian Dunne (existing Investor and Advisor) further. Brian brings so much knowledge of the retailer space. We discussed the strategy with which to really appeal to retail partners and as such Brian has set up a prime ‘hit team’ to help onboard partners to the platform.

We're excited to continuously bring new partners onto the platform to provide more upside to customers and retailers.

Enter Andries (Product)

Product

The first version of the app is nearly ready for testing. Which sets us on a good track to launch to alpha users mid July.

As with the final stages of any delivery, June was intense. Learning from earlier discovery and tests in May, June was all about cutting code and getting it done. Integrating with 4 platform partners, nailing the UX and customer journeys and ensuring that we meet all compliance requirements was no mean feat.

That said, the team pulled off an incredible June build.

Aside from build activity, it was hugely encouraging to see a report done by 11FS (a consultancy that specialise in Fintech) in relation to PFMs (Personal Finance Management apps) calling out that the key services customers want, are exactly what we are focussing on: Helping customers find money to save for a ‘safety net’, experiences or long term savings.

It’s well worth a read: https://info.11fs.com/jtbd-pfm

{keep a look out for ‘jobs’, 6, 5 and 4}

Enter Paul (Tech)

Tech

Getting a product live for the first time is always intense, and Upside is no exception. In the last month we have:

  • Built new environments in Amazon Web Services for application testing, security testing and production.
  • Secured an AWS Activate startup package, providing us access to enhanced AWS support, guidance, training and probably most importantly, AWS Credits, meaning that for the time being at least, AWS are covering our infrastructure costs.
  • Completed the integration of 4 main backend systems and numerous smaller components.
  • Integrated our mobile application with our API for Alpha.
  • Made 1101 commits and completed 112 pull requests. Pretty impressive given the small size of the team!

All that work means we’re right on the cusp of being code complete for Alpha, and are now heading into a final testing and assurance phase before we can start using the application for real and getting feedback from our early access customers. We’re super excited to hear what they think!

Things don’t stop post alpha, so we’re already busy planning out our next release, scheduling the work and starting to make preparations for the future. Most importantly, we’re looking forward to hearing back from our early users on what they love, and more importantly what they don’t so we can start weaving that into our plans too!

Enter Steve (COO)

Operations

Regulatory

Further to baselining our operational business model last month, we have now completed all the required regulatory compliance and onboarding work – effectively – the doors are officially open.

Ready to respond to Customers

The structure and customer care categories for FAQ’s and the helpdesk is complete and can be viewed by visiting:- https://talkto.upsidesaving.com

During the last two weeks, we have had our first “live” customers talking to us via the website and facebook “chat” functionality. These interactions provided some valuable insight as to both the types of conversations and how, where and when people want to talk us from a customer care perspective.

These learnings are being fed into our business operations process engineering and will help us with our aspiration in providing excellent customer care.

Re-enter Andries

OTHER NEWS:

Funding:

  • We spent June running our Investment roadshow, meeting well over 100 potential investors on video calls. Feedback has been encouraging.
  • We plan to launch our crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs soon. Details will be shared over the next few weeks.