Launch (MVP) to Relaunch (Initial Scale)

Six months ago we launched our initial Upside prototype to prove out novel business model that we dreamed up in the global remote KERNEL accelerator program back in July 2020.

Today, I’m lucky enough to work remotely together with a team of 6 (from six different countries no less) who are deeply committed to build the future business model of premium content monetisation for creators and businesses all around the world.

We began this journey with the goal to provide a simple, safe and fun way for your average person (including your mum) to be able to support their favourite businesses and creators for free without losing a cent whilst also gaining the chance to win great prizes and consume premium social content.

It sounds too good to be true, but the great thing is that it is possible! At Upside we were inspired by the concept of Prize Linked Savings (PLS) which is a US$100Bn industry in the UK alone. This is a long established product where instead of earning interest in a bank account (yes, that exciting 0.001% p.a) you have the chance to win random prizes without losing your money. The cool thing is that it’s been proven by Harvard & Oxford research that this mechanism actually helps you save money!

“Prize linked savings is more effective at increasing savings than high interest rates…A key message of our paper is that prize-linked savings increased net savings” — Harvard & Oxford study

We believe that implementing this business model (rather than subscriptions or advertising business models) is a far superior model for creators and their fans to work together because it encourages a healthy long term and mutually beneficial relationship.

How is that possible? Well, we’ll dive into that in more detail in another post (coming soon) but for now you’ll just have to trust us that we’ve thought deeply about this ;).

At Upside we serve to act as a bridge for users between the existing financial and social infrastructure where rewards are disproportionately funnelled to only the ‘top 2%” of users and everyone else ‘loses’ financially; and a new one being built to share rewards co-operatively with all participants with no losers built with the highest grade security and total transparency.

To that end we’ve made quite a bit of progress, not all of it obvious from the outside but for starters in a few short months from our initial launch we have:

• Generated up to $600+ in value a month to creators and run competitions profitably for 4 out of 7 months
• Awarded over $2,000 in prizes including 3x PS5’s and $200 in gift cards in 4 different states
• Almost 500 users have entered competitions and no one has lost a cent
• Built our own Customer Advisory Board which has helped us shape the product and build a product that is both educational and valuable

This has been invaluable to us and we want to thank all our current users (and our awesome team) as it’s helped us put in place a stable and solid foundation for us to scale and grow our infrastructure and business to serve more businesses and users going forward.

What you can expect going forward

We have a lot of work still to do to get to the point where we’re a trusted and valued household name but we’re working to make sure that happens!

Our first 6 months since going live with our MVP has been towards getting the right infrastructure, legal and regulatory frameworks to build a globally scalable product for the general public. To date we have focused largely on providing a no-loss prize competition product for users however going forward we are accelerating our product roadmap to providing free content + competitions for users so our product will evolve with those changes in mind.

We’ll still focus on providing a simple, clean and easy way for users to receive content and win prizes whilst saving money and for businesses to make their marketing expense a revenue driver.

If this sounds interesting for you we encourage you to join us on our journey and join our app! We are always looking to work with businesses and creators who are regularly running trade promotion competitions and if that sounds like you please reach out to us on team@upsidecomp.com, we’d love to learn and work with you to build and increase your engagement with your audience.