New member web application designs!

We have been working with the fantastic design team in Poland (tonik.pl) that designed and built our marketing website (upshiftcars.com) on new designs for our member web application. These are all the webpages members use to create and manage their account, including choosing a plan, entering their drivers license and payment information, requesting a booking reservation, selecting a Prius or RAV4 hybrid, changing their membership, and setting their personalized car preferences. The flow is now much more intuitive and begins to execute on our vision of a "two-car garage, in your pocket".

We expect this will improve our conversion rates and our member experience. The idea is to make it feel as much as possible like it's your own car in your garage that always shows up exactly as you left it with as little friction as possible to get it delivered to your door. We actually made them totally redesign it when it initial designs were too much like a "rental car, on demand" experience. For instance, now you will be able to save your preferred default home address, vehicle type, and personal vehicle settings (radio station, driving mode, phone charging cable, and temperature) and choose vehicle accessories (dog car seat cover, surfboard rack, or snow chains). We also designed mobile responsive versions of these pages which will form the basis of our new member mobile app (coming soon!).

I'm excited to share them with you now! We have a team of four remote engineers in India and Ukraine building the web architecture now and expect it to go live soon. Take a look and let us know what you think! Click the right arrow to view different screens. You can scroll down on mobile pages.

Web app designs

Mobile responsive web app designs 

Operating during the epidemic

San Francisco is currently under a shelter-in-place ordinance. No one can leave their home except for essential needs like grocery shopping. For most of our members, Upshift is their primary car- they do not own another car. Scooter companies have shut down operations and many people do not feel safe riding transit or rideshare at the moment. We are the only shared vehicle platform that sanitizes cars between every booking making Upshift the safest car service in San Francisco for our members if they need to get groceries or supplies, bring things to others who are sick or vulnerable, or just get out into nature to get out of the house or walk their dog. One of our part-time concierges has been with us for over 2 years and she lost her other income source- a bartending job. We've been able to increase her hours so she can get through these difficult times and we have implemented strict new car cleaning and sanitization policies to keep our concierges and members safe. We also found 14 N95 and N99 face masks that we had for our concierges to use during the smoky fire season here that we donated to a local ICU who is treating coronavirus patients and didn't have enough masks for their healthcare workers. Only one of our members has canceled their subscription due the virus. Booking requests have been down due to the ordinance but we expect them to bounce back up once the shelter-in-place ordinance is lifted.

$400,000 in vehicle debt financing & RAV4 hybrid SUV response

As a reminder, thanks to our $400,000 in new vehicle debt financing, we were able to add three new Toyota RAV4 hybrid SUVs last week. As a reminder, we do not use equity financing (eg, Republic investments) to buy cars. Similar to small rental car companies, we rely on substantial debt financing to scale our vehicle fleet. We expect to be roughly 50/50 debt and equity financing as we scale and for these to essentially be two separate funding streams: equity financing for software, operations, and marketing and debt financing for cars. Note that this $400,000 in debt financing cannot be used for anything but acquiring cars. As we scale, we plan to separate into two different companies to reflect the different investment opportunities and create a risk shield between the two (eg, so risk averse banks can invest in cars and risk seeking venture capital can invest in software). Not only was this vehicle debt financing incredibly hard to get as a small startup (almost as difficult as getting equity financing!) but the new financing terms are way better than the car financing we had before. We used to have to pay 10% down, 12% interest, and leased the cars. Now we have $0 down, 7% interest, and we are financing instead of leasing. This means we don't need to tie up capital in upfront payments, we pay almost half the interest rate, and we can make money selling the cars. Our members have started to try these new  RAV4 hybrid SUVs out and the response has been extremely positive. We think they are going to be super popular. As of today, we have eliminated CO2 emissions equivalent to taking 28 cars off the road for 1 year. Thanks for your support our our mission to improve our cities and reduce our impact on our environment!

Please note that because of the new debt financing, we had to file an amended Form C with the SEC so some of you will need to recommit to your investment by Monday 3/30 to be part of our round. 

If reconfirmation is necessary for you, you would have received an email from Republic asking for you to confirm your investment. Please note that clicking the link in the email, clicking on the link in the Republic banner, or just going to https://republic.co/portfolio/upshift and clicking on the “confirm investment” button is the only accepted form of reconfirmation. 

If you have already confirmed, thank you! If you did not receive an email, don’t see a bright red banner on the top of your screen, or if you click on the above link and do not see a button that says "confirm investment" then don’t worry, you do not need to reconfirm.

If you have any questions about whether or not you need to reconfirm, please reach out to investors@republic.co.