Blog #1 - Feb 2020
6 weeks in, and the overriding feeling is... will people (team members, investors, advisers) understand, be as excited as I am, and ultimately join me on this quest...
To my delight, YES!
The mission of "making savings effortless" seems to resonate with many people. We all know it could and should be better and easier to save, but figuring out how to do it, is why we are here.
Many thanks for your support and time over the last few weeks!
Here is a summary of the first 6 weeks:
End Customers
The product and service that end-customers 'buy' is an "Upside savings account" with the key selling point that it automatically fills up over time.
The upside account fill up through three routes:
- The upside team identifying and unlocking 'lost money' (switching utilities, removing irrelevant services, and claiming back unwanted fees and charges)
- The user automating their own savings by agreeing to 'auto-save each week', and
- Retail partners paying auto-cashback to Upside customers
Team
The team is now 6 people, including myself, Kathryn on Business Development, Chris on Product, Barney and Alex on Engineering, and Tom on UX and Design.
Advisers
Paul Clark (ex-CTO of Tandem) has now joined Marcus East (Google) on our confirmed Advisory Board. This is great to help us cover both Product and Technology.
Funding
- A couple investors have asked me to change funding tactic to raise a small SEIS £150k round first to enable them to capture the enhanced tax benefits of SEIS. My aim is to open this funding round on 1 March.
- After which we will follow quickly on the larger EIS funding round in a few months.
Tech
- We completed our feasibility assessment on the various Open Banking providers, and we decided to progress with Plaid.
- Our cloud environments are up and running, with pipelines built, and
- We've had our first API call extracting real bank data from open banking. (just to triple check that it actually works ;-))
More to come, stay tuned!