New member app with telematics, $220,000 in new financing, and extending our Republic campaign
Here’s what’s new at Upshift.
New onboarding funnel and pricing
We’ve been working with a behavioral psychologist to help us with our pricing and onboarding funnel. In August, we created a simple funnel of Google and Facebook ads leading to a simple landing page and Typeform questionnaire. We got 118 new leads at a cost of $36 each, which was honestly better than we expected given we did almost no optimization and had no professional designers or marketers help us with it. People are hungry for a fractional leasing solution. In fact, 69% of the people who filled out our questionnaire said they wanted a car to drive 1-3 days/week. We also discovered that while many people are looking for a “flexcommute” solution driving in to work a few days a week, almost no one wanted a car 5 days/week Monday-Friday only. If they did want it Monday through Friday, they were more likely to also want it on the weekend, in which case they were better suited to a full time car lease or subscription. Now we’re focused on unpacking the needs of this midweek “flexcommuter” to grow our midweek demand and balance our load. We also have been seeing such great results from this new onboarding funnel with exponentially more information about prospects- and much stronger conversion rates- that we now plan to rebuild and redesign our onboarding funnel this fall. This will enable us to better understand what people want and to design personalized subscription plans- which we can also A/B test to further optimize, rather than static pricing categories people need to fit themselves into on our current website.
We trademarked “Upshift”
With legal help from one of our investors on Republic, we applied for a trademark on the Upshift brand back in December 2019. In July, we received our official trademark from the US Patent and Trademark Office! You can now find our trademark at the USPTO here.
We integrated telematics into 3 test vehicles
After a lot of support work with our vehicle telematics vendor, we got our first Prius and RAV4 test mules fully up and running this week. We can now lock/unlock them via an admin console via SMS, or locally using a test mobile app or RFID card. We have one other telematics vendor we should have installed within a week to do a side by side comparison of the systems. We’ll make a final decision next week and then integrate the winning vehicle hardware solution API into our new member mobile app and concierge delivery logistics app by the end of the month. This will finally enable us to do deliveries without needing to meet in person to exchange keys which has been the single biggest barrier to streamlining and scaling our delivery operations.
We added engineers and a delivery concierge
We now have a team of 5 remote engineers working on Upshift. We also added another delivery concierge to our roster and are working on hiring another one. Next hire is someone on Operations to help with all the little things that need to be done to keep our growing fleet running smoothly!
We are almost done building our member iOS and Android app
Our native iOS and Android apps are under development and on track for launch towards the end of the month. Our new member mobile app for iOS and Android is now live on our testing server and we expect it to be ready to start integrating it with the new telematics API by the end of next week. We have worked hard to improve our backend systems and made them scalable. We are continuously working to remove operational inefficiencies and build the infrastructure needed to support more vehicles.
We got $220,000 in new debt and car financing
We got $150,000 in new car debt financing, at even cheaper interest rates than our previous car financing, to add 5 cars in July (3 RAV4s and 2 Priuses) to our fleet. We also got almost $70,000 in an EIDL loan from the SBA at 3.75% APR with 12 months of deferred payments to help us grow faster.
We are renewing our custom insurance policy
Getting custom insurance is never a sure thing in the new mobility space. You can easily get your coverage dropped (eg, if you have a lot of losses) and without it it’s difficult if not impossible to operate. You can’t just go to a standard consumer insurance company and get a policy, we need a custom insurance policy and an insurance broker to go to bat for us to find a market willing to underwrite our solution. We’ve been lucky that our broker (one of the biggest) and insurance underwriter believed in us at a very early stage and that they have offered to renew our custom policy for the third time this fall.
We are staying safe through the wildfires
We have been inundated with smoke and wildfires in the past month with a record wildfire season. This past weekend, the smoke was so bad that it turned the sky dark orange last Wednesday and the entire bay area was covered in a thick smokey soup for days with air quality staying in the “unhealthy” range. We suspended our delivery operations for a few days during the worst of it and saw a big drop in usage. No one had any issue with us pausing operations - in fact they were happy we were taking care of the health and safety of our delivery concierges. We provide them with KN95 masks but it was still too dangerous for them to be out. We are assessing our strategy for fire season which we expect to continue into November, but we plan to limit or even suspend services temporarily when air quality is unhealthy. Now that we will have telematics, it will give us more options to deliver cars in advance (before smoke rolls in with the wind) or offer “self service” pickup on bad air days (so members can get to the car themselves and unlock without meeting anyone). Our aim is to get everyone where they need to go- and to keep everyone in our community safe.
The summer was great, the fall is going to be awesome
We had a strong summer with our cars heavily used and we expanded our fleet significantly. Lots of our members went on big road trips. With concerns lingering about air travel, many of our members used our service to visit distant relatives in LA, Utah and even Kansas! Our shared fleet of hybrid cars and SUVs have now eliminated over 300,000 lbs of CO2 (equivalent to taking 32 cars off the road for a year). Now with wildfires spreading across the west and air quality taking a severe hit, it’s made our mission of eliminating carbon emissions and improving air quality by reducing both vehicle miles traveled and vehicle emissions even more urgent. We are very excited for what the fall will bring with major new upgrades to our technology, our marketing funnel and pricing model, our operations, and our team.
We extended our campaign
We have been truly blown away by the support from the Republic community. You all are now our biggest line in our cap table, which is so incredibly exciting! We’ve decided to extend the campaign to allow more people to join with the goal of maxing out our campaign at the full $1M. We’re halfway there!
If you missed the reconfirmation deadline and your investment was automatically cancelled, you will need to click here to re-invest. This link will only work if you already invested. If you haven't invested yet, you can do so on our campaign page at republic.co/upshift