Upshift pitched on Startup Camp, crosses $250k
We've raised over $250,000!
We just crossed the quarter million dollar mark in investment, which is super exciting! We feel lifted up by all of you and are super excited to have you all onboard for the ride. If you haven't already invested, or want to increase your investment, go to republic.co/upshift and do it now- help us trend today!
Upshift on Startup Camp
Startup Camp reached out to us to post our deal to their investor network and we had an interview with their founder yesterday over Facebook Live. They have a list of 2,600 angel investors who have invested millions of dollars in 2020 alone. This has resulted in a bump to investments on our page since Monday. In fact, if we close another $10,000 today from just 31 more investors, we'll be trending on Republic!
Mobile conversion screens are live
We rolled out our newly designed signup flow screens last week on desktop and they are now live on mobile! Next step is to roll out the new member account management screens for reservations, subscription management, setting car preferences, etc. It's going to be a 10x improvement over the current experience which will help with conversion, retention and referrals- as well as streamlining friction points in the current member experience. It should also help move more member activity away from high touch SMS and into a more scalable app based solution (with a secondary chat feature for support).
First member paid the $750 activation fee!
Even though we had interviewed many members (and potential members) about the idea of a big up front payment and a lower monthly payment and had gotten a positive response, it was still a bit of a nail biter to launch this new model last week. We released it on Wednesday and already had our first new member on this plan on Sunday, just 4 days later! This gave us $959 funds up front on a member with an expected LTV of $4,240. We also often see members bring in another 1-3 members through referrals too. We plan to add another ~100 members in the next 3-6 months. So with each new member paying ~$1,000 on signup, this new business model will get us ~$100,000 in non-dilutive funds up front we can leverage for our growth.
Slow Streets are taking off - fast!
Cities all over the world have been blocking streets to cars and opening up streets for people to bike and walk and for kids to play safely. We think there is no going back. Here in the Bay Area, cities are already talking about making these streets permanent. We think in San Francisco there are around 270,000 cars that only get driven a few times a week (or less!) that could be replaced with Upshift's service. If we replaced all of them with fractional car leasing, it would eliminate the need for ALL the street parking in San Francisco, meaning we could convert all that parking space into public parklets, bike/micromobility lanes, dedicated bus lanes, wider sidewalks for cafe seating, and tons of other ways to improve our cities that aren't a 4,000 pound hunk of metal that just sits there 95% of the time.