Confounded
A high energy podcast with its own video channel featuring interviews with amazing people who have overcome adversity and life’s challenges to be successful in unique and wonderful ways.
Confounded
Meet Kathryn Wright, Queen of the Upside
News Flash ! – Quinoa isn’t pronounced the way you think or why you think… That’s one of many amazing things I learned from Meeting Kathryn and the most trivial.
Listen to this episode as Kathryn tells the story behind her success at Discount Vouchers and her amazing new startup Upside Savings , a single app that can save money in your bank account based on what and where you shop while you do nothing!
Since our recording their Seedrs campaign is now live and as of 19/09/2020 is at 87% of target – have a look and find out more at Seedrs as they “Reinvent cashback through Open Banking to build a nation of savers.”
Other subjects covered including maximising your email list open rates and being smart about which providers to use and why, how Honey won the toolbar / extension wars and ways to save while shopping online.
So, hi Catherine, Welcome to Confounded TV.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me, Anne.
Speaker 2:And I'll do it on as ConfessionCy. We've actually been chatting for five minutes. I'm in the record. We were just talking about Silicon Valley and the difference in cultures between what sort of happened here in the work at home, and we were just basically going through all the parts that people were getting at companies different from the US and probably Europe not just in the UK in that work-eat-house thing. You were just saying that somebody you'd met, the staff, all had equal shares in the company. So if everyone's been diluted, therefore, the focus to deliver is across everyone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah, it was actually really with a view to working out what it is that makes all of the startups that are successful in a couple of things. Paired coding seems to be really normal out there rather than all, but we just need everything done quickly. They're actually looking at how can they build with no technical debt, and the other thing was that I asked why is everybody wanting to stay until midnight to get this done? And the answer was that they all had a really equal share of equity, so not just 1%, and by the time it will get diluted, it's not going to really be worth much. Yeah, it was interesting to see the work-eat-house. Obviously, there were other startups who were literally. There was one in particular that I met and I was asked to see what he was doing on behalf of somebody else to see if they should invest, and he was having a party every night because he was waiting for a particular designer to be available.
Speaker 3:So he was just using the investor's money on a very expensive flat in San Francisco and, yeah, partying all the time.
Speaker 2:So they do get more money as well. I think the after-life risk is higher. Just the sheer amount of capital is higher. You've never listened to any of the VC podcasts, some of the money they get for like, I've got this idea, here's some money here. It's like, yeah, it's a shit idea. And then you know and risk, risk, risk, risk, risk. Everything's nothing you know. Remember when I left Carstam and one of my investors said you must come to Silicon Valley. I love all that kind of yee-haw. Get on with it. Here's a new idea, try it, see what happens thing. You can't imagine that in this country.
Speaker 3:No, no, I think I definitely agree with that. I've worked now a couple of companies trying to raise and yeah, it's, it's a little bit like pulling teeth. It used to be oh, it's a great idea and it stands up a great team. Yeah, you know, put some money in and see where it goes. And now it's like well, we want you to already have a revenue stream and approve a business model so we can see the sausage machine works. And now we're going to fit in some money.
Speaker 3:But, at that point you don't need it. You know you can go to a bank and finance it if you know what your return on your money is. So, yeah, I definitely think it's a little bit different people investing in ideas, unless you've got the terms FinTech and AI in your deck.
Speaker 2:I love the AI, as I call it. If, then yes, I suppose I mean literally had a call, was only wanted to come on this and is like yeah, we're using AI to do it, and so how's it working? What does it actually do? And, of course, the answer is not AI.
Speaker 3:Is it she learning the only child?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's the if. Then Okay, and there's some interesting stuff in LinkedIn, it's logic. Then yeah, it's just logic. Well, it's not. I'm going to get slated for saying that. I'm sure there are some very clever and actually no one who's actually coming on a few weeks to be Bitcoin stuff that he does, but there is a lot of people who can do it, but I think most people just stick it in the title and if an investor falls for that, then you've got to ask the quality of the investor, because most of them are not using AI to make any logical decisions whatsoever.
Speaker 3:A friend of mine went to an AI conference and he had printed off on a piece of paper AI doesn't exist yet. He just went ran, had his picture taken in front of lots of different stands. It was quite funny.
Speaker 2:But it's just one of these things FinTech, ai oh well, that'll revolutionize banking, you know, because we will know what ours is going to spend before he spends it. So we'll just get that spanner delivered to him from from Halfritz, because we know he won't, and it's just like some of the stuff is just it's the just amount of data you need to make it work, and I just think some of it is just a little nonsense.
Speaker 3:But you know Amazon has started to do that. I have a friend in London who went on to Amazon to buy specific toothpaste that she likes to buy and they said thank you, this is in the locker at the end of the road.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 3:There, and then it was already there, yep.
Speaker 2:But is that AI? Or is that because she's bought?
Speaker 3:that toothpaste? Well, it's just not.
Speaker 2:It's just for Friday, it's not 16 years. I mean, you know, it could be as simple as that.
Speaker 3:Well, a segmentation, isn't it? Clever coat of water analysis, and even if you haven't yet, you're likely to, because all the other people in your street have bought this, so we'll put it in there as a test. So, yeah, I mean that. I think, that was pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:That's actually quite smart. More likely, you live in the street with these kind of people and you all keep buying quinoa. So here you know, we'll just left some bags in the locker at the end of the street. Not saying that that's obviously what you buy, because I certainly buy quinoa, as I call it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't have it either.
Speaker 2:I went to a video investor, actually in Mayfair, as you do, because you have to go to them or you used to, of course, and I actually I'm a heathen. So I said, oh, that looks quite nice, I've heard of that on the TV, and I saw the kind of the quinoa please, and he just went. He didn't say anything. There's only after I saw and he has oh, I've just done that thing.
Speaker 3:But you haven't. It's actually a scientist created it. It's completely genetically modified and the strain that it was named was quinoa.
Speaker 2:I was actually right. Yes, you're a superstar. I'll take the email and tell me he was actually wrong in the end.
Speaker 3:You know, the only comments you're going to get on this is people contesting that. But that's actually wrong. But that's what I've learned about it.
Speaker 2:It may actually happen that because, remember, when I asked you to come on here, I had six subscribers.
Speaker 3:Yes, eleven, wow, amazing, high and eleven subscribers. High and eleven people.
Speaker 2:You're all so lovely. There's fifty something followers, and LinkedIn, though, right Getting there.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, what is it we want to tell them about today? What do you think would be the most interesting thing for?
Speaker 2:you. I think we should run through discount vouchers and then go on to the new thing that you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:You've been running discount vouchers for seven years. Yeah, you were really early into that game, because that must have been at the beginning of the voucher code type life.
Speaker 3:Well, so it had already been running for a while as an arbitrage project. So a dog who had started it up noticed that during, I think, the recession of kind of 2009, that vouchers were taking off in a big way. I was listed, basically drew all of the vouchers and codes from across the web and aggregated them all on discount vouchers, and then we had an overlay to harvest somebody's email address. We actually built up an email database of around two million. There was an attempt of buying and selling their own daily deals, but I think that just didn't go as well as-.
Speaker 2:Well, like that agency top level, like do you hello, mr Retailer, do you want some adverts on here?
Speaker 3:Well no, in terms of actually buying the stock. Ooh, so, rather than just sending traffic through to group on watch and living social secret estates, you know actually saying, well, why don't we just try and do this ourselves and make a bit more margin? But that is a very tricky space to be in because there's a lot of forwardsters in the space, and so I think and it's not the challenge- of.
Speaker 2:why would you do that? It's not real retail. Well, yeah, it's like ooh.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that when I came into it they had just finished, I think you know, the last of the customer service issues of Forts product were on their way out and I think there was a team of about 12 in the office still, and so when we just kind of sat and looked through the figures, it looked like the email marketing was the strongest, you know, the strongest return on investment there. I think AdWords, you know the spend was basically equaling you spend a pound and you get a pound. So it was almost a little bit of a vanity metric. So we turned that off and just doubled down on sending email.
Speaker 3:And the first year that I was there, one of the girls in the office said oh there's this thing in America called Black Friday. I wonder if we should do something for it. None of us had heard of it. But I said well, it doesn't hurt, it's interesting to see what happens. And it was an incredible day. I think, you know, by lunchtime we'd already made £9,000 in commission from just one merchant and we haven't even really, you know, tried as hard as we would do now. So that first year was absolutely incredible and I think I mean right now we still have 1.2 million GDPR fully compliant email addresses on our list, but we only email people who are engaged and at the moment we're emailing really engaged people, so people who have opened, clicked or purchased in the last month. Just because people get so much email. We're trying to make sure that we email people who are really engaged.
Speaker 2:She tried that. Yeah, I think you should use that and I think you can predict emails. You wouldn't have to think about it, you just send it to them.
Speaker 3:So strangely, you should say that we were using Sail Through, who do have predictions, and they have something else called Horizon, which will order the email based on what you've clicked on before.
Speaker 2:So, again, it's just logic. Just wind back a step for those of us who don't know what to Sail Through.
Speaker 3:Oh, sail Through, and they're an email sending service. Okay, so a lot of people don't realize you can't just use Gmail. If you're going to send thousands of email, you need to send it through a reputable, trusted ESP. So at the moment we're an active campaign. We were on Sail Through. We've tried Mail Jet. Wouldn't recommend it to anybody, to be honest, but it's so that when you send bulk to Yahoo or Gmail, they recognize that you're sending promotional email rather than somebody sending spam, and Sail Through did a good job of that. So you would have the same offers in you and I, for example, but you would perhaps have somebody else at the top of your email than I was, and making changes like that. They never give you a sudden boost. You never get 10% extra open rates, but you might get an extra 1% open rate. That's good.
Speaker 3:If you personalize the subject line, you might get another 1% increase in your open rate. So, yeah, there's a lot of interest in things being done like that. In terms of emails, the reason why we changed was simply cost basis. If I could have stayed in Sail Through, I 100% would have done. But there's actually another company called Sol who are offering very, very similar technology, but it's not tied to an ESP, so I can go to the cheaper ESP and use this very clever SQL.
Speaker 2:It's just distributing all the different parts to make something expensive, isn't it? Yeah, you see this, yeah.
Speaker 3:And it Sol works on your own AWS server, so you don't have to. The data is yours. Basically, every time that we thought about leaving Sail Through, we thought we're just going to lose all this information. We're using it as a database and tool. So yeah, if we can get the cleverness of it, the database.
Speaker 2:And they'll keep that and eventually the prices will go up and they'll have all your data.
Speaker 3:Basically, that's what happened as they've become. We were their fifth customer. We went out to New York, saw their offices when they were only maybe about 20 people and then obviously, as they've grown, they've become more and more expensive. They have some huge companies with them and so we ended up being quite small fry in the end.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we've changed, but it must be still one of the biggest in the UK.
Speaker 3:Discount batches. I think it's that we're competing with some loyalty sites now, like Top Cashback and Quidco, and nobody ever knows what their engaged databases. They're all saying that they have 6 million email addresses. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's got mine. Never use it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I do believe that they're probably getting at least a million on their list to email every day. So, yeah, when you just look at the affiliate space, we're noticing that tracking is really changing and conversion rates are going down massively and that's across the board. And that's because people have things like Honey plugged in and Honey right. Everybody had tried a toolbar. We had a toolbar, top Cashback had a toolbar and that's what Honey is. It's a Chrome extension, but they marketed it really really well as a different way to buy online. They didn't call it a Chrome extension or a toolbar.
Speaker 3:Exited 4 billion is kind of frustrating when you think, oh, that's all we had to do. So, as we said earlier about a different project, it's all in the marketing.
Speaker 2:That whole Honey thing that's on both my girls and my wife's laptop. There's an extension where Quidco wasn't and it has a nicer name. It sounds like it's doing your favor. It doesn't sound like it's like a cheapy thing and of course the amount of money that was spent and of course the valuation was because of PayPal looking like it cut into the transaction as well can't be certain. That's where we're talking about Silicon Valley. That huge depth of money and capital comes in and then you can, because what they're basically saying is we will dilute and dilute and dilute as founders and we'll have not very much of this. We probably won't even be involved in it. So it gets to that size, by the way, but it's worth it because we'll dominate the world and that whole win or all cost dominate everything and it's a very.
Speaker 2:When I look at some of my experiences and think that's what I thought I would do, it's just like it must have been insane, because it's 12, 15 years of your life and even if you're, even if you get a third right, you still got some four or five years of your life and then you can still go pop at any time. And I look at some of the founders and they've got one, two, three percent and three percent of a billion dollars is a lot of money. But when I do my presentation at the Notre Dame University I say take a smaller example. Do you want 5% of 100 million or 100% of 5 million? Because either way it'll take you five to seven years to get there. But if you take the second option, you don't have bosses and investors, equity options staff, asking how much they're worth. You could just build something and sell it. My favorite guy is a guy who built a solar panel company and notting it. You know 20 million quid. Seven years later they've never had an investor, just profits. We invested all the way.
Speaker 3:But it's not trendy, is it Just to say do you know what? I'm a really good business person, yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to be an entrepreneur, which means you have to be doing something disruptive. Yeah, because I get upset in an industry or something Rather than just you know. Well, yeah, it's great, you know you've never had somebody's never had to get investment, lift, share and knowledge like that. Yeah, just never, never had to get investment from anyone, which is a very nice tradition to be in.
Speaker 2:So, on that note, you can tell us about UpSight. Sure, because let's start with the difficult questions Are you raising money? Yes, Okay then so then we'll have an interesting. We'll have to get back to them. So tell everyone what. Tell all 11 people maybe 12 by now what UpSight is.
Speaker 3:Sure. So, in a nutshell, upsight is reinventing cashback through the power of open banking, and what that means in real terms is, instead of having to go to Quidco or you know, go into the email from your bank and then the app to activate and also, before you purchase, to get your cash back, we just look straight into your bank and, with the relationships that we have with partners, automatically pay cash back within 24 hours. The idea, end goal, is that the cashback will be paid directly into an ISA, so because you get it sooner, you'll start building up your savings earlier, rather than waiting in the kind of 90 days that you have to do on a cashback site at the moment, and the aim overall is to end up being a B2B to C. So obvious question is you know there are a lot of challenging banks out there. There's Clio, plum, moneybox they're looking to plug into all of those services as well as Revolute and similar, Because a lot of them have tried to have perks, but they all end up going down the affiliate route and that's really friction for a customer. Yeah, you always have to click to drop a cookie and actually, you know, a lot of them have teams that are there just to try and find out why somebody's cashback didn't track, and so we're looking to just remove all of that friction for everyone.
Speaker 3:On the performance marketing side, for a retailer, they can actually look. We get 36 months worth of data when somebody collects their bank account. So when we have lots of people signed up we'll be able to baseline as they do, say, a grocer Okay, at the moment the average order value with you is 50 pounds. The average frequency is that people shop with you once a month, but as a percentage wallet share you're getting 30% of your industry spend Because they all know what happens in their garden. They all know, you know.
Speaker 3:Oh, yet this person shops on me frequently.
Speaker 3:We know what they buy, down to a skew level, but they don't know if that person is going and shopping at the local butchers for their meat or if they always go to waitros for when they have dinner parties. So they don't get the view of what people are spending everywhere else. So what we can offer them is a whole customer view, essentially, so they can say, okay, I want to offer different amounts of cash back depending on how frequently or how recently this customer last bought with me, and with that we want to change the conversation. So you'll probably notice, at the moment, if you go to a website and you don't purchase you put something in your basket and don't purchase you then get an email offering you 10 pounds off. If you leave it a bit longer, you might get 20 pounds off. So what that company is doing essentially is buying a very poor customer for less and less money each time, whereas the customer who shops all the time just puts it in their basket really regular shopper probably doesn't get rewarded very much for it.
Speaker 3:And that affects something else in the company Customer acquisition cost, frequency of purchase, new customer count is totally skewed, so not ASOS. Aldo at the moment probably think I'm five customers because I know that I get 20% off every time I register a new email address for them. So I'm not going to buy something at full price.
Speaker 2:There's a few of them I use. I just use my personal email address plus retailer name one gbilcom, and then I use plus retail name two, and then, of course, what I do is get on the basket, go to check it, get right to credit card bit and then just close the browser and then, guaranteed within the hour, here's 10% off. So go back to that and go there to meet a shop browser 20% off and then you just change it every time. So then, because I don't really care about buying from them, the ones I like buying from, but then they don't the only one is really good at that, probably the whiskies change, I know, and treads is quite good. Treads will send you like 10%, you know, if you, if you've bought something and they'll get random, this will arrive a few weeks later, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And actually I have to say Bodin are very good at that as well.
Speaker 2:If you're rigging a customer, they seem quite rigged and they send Factures out, but you know it means that there's a marketing manager sitting somewhere in those companies that, oh, we've got five new customers today and you know this cost per customer and it's all completely inaccurate and you can't even do the maths really, if you're doing that, because if you say, well, we got these new customers we never had before because we offered them a discount, you know, and a lot of the discounts must be the most of the margin, and maybe not in some some things like clothing, but the narrower margin stuff must be getting down to we'll not make any money, a bit like your Google ad words thing you saw earlier, but we'll spend a quid to get a quid and then we'll ask the customer, can we hang on to them? And then, well, do they retain for long enough?
Speaker 3:But it means that their retention metrics are wrong as well, so I look like I've churned four times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course, but I'm not.
Speaker 3:I've been a repeat customer five times. So so the whole, the whole, not is it's really back to front and I don't think it's the same worldwide. I think you know there's an obsession in the UK with buying a discount and not wanting to give anything at full price.
Speaker 2:As my mother would say buy cheap by twice.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, there is a real problem if you were buying cheap. I never quite understand that I'm going to go to this shop and buy this cheap thing which isn't as good as that thing. That's twice the price over there. We'll last a third of the time and there's half the problem. The landfills are full. Right, we will, we will, we will, we will come back onto upside. But it is half the problem because people buy cheap shit and I get it right now. Today you're saving 50 quid. You're not the six months time when that coffee maker goes into bed and you go and buy another cheap coffee maker, or if you go on by the 200 quid one, it might last you 10 years. You know, we've got a dishwasher that was the most expensive one Sam could find. Sorry, sam, but we've had it now for three houses and over a decade. I know people who go through three dishwashers in that time because they bought the cheapest thing they could find at Amazon.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and actually it does play quite nicely into upside. So really you know there's what upside does, which is the reinventing cashback, but there's the kind of why behind it. So the founder of upside, andres, is from South Africa and when he was growing up they had 17.5% interest rates. So you know, his parents got them a savings book and he and his siblings would fill that in and just watch their savings add up. So it was really normal for him to, you know, always have savings and when he came to the UK he was quite flabbergasted that people here just do not care about saving.
Speaker 2:The Germans don't understand either. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 3:So to that. You know, yeah, just spend it, just buy something. You might kind of save money at the point of sale. I've got 50 quid off that or I've got 20 pounds off my car insurance, but there isn't this overall. You know, having a savings pot and actually so we did a survey of discount vouchers users to try and get some data for upside and what's really interesting is that people born in the 70s and then 90s seem to be saving. It says 80s children that seem to be really bad at it and I don't know why. But you know, when you kind of look at the co-borts, it's quite nice that Session, children is it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, maybe. Well, it's the younger generation seem to be saving again, which is brilliant.
Speaker 2:They've got to, otherwise they're never going to have a house to live in.
Speaker 3:There is that, there is that and it's. I mean, the statistics are quite scary. So before COVID, almost 12 million households in the UK had less than 1500 pounds of savings, and after COVID, so as we stand right now, those 12 million households have well less than 100 pounds. So we're talking one fancy meal out and that's their savings gone. So that means no money for car problems, boiler problems, anything like that. So it's a scary place to be and it also probably means that people will be very easily pushed into debt. And it's strange because during COVID, loads of people paid off their credit cards, but the same number of people went into debt by the same amount and just level that across the UK. So we want people to be able to build up their savings, but in kind of researching what else was available. There are things like round up apps, but they don't really give you that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it might be up to £100 or so in year. And then there's other ones that are just trying to make you change your habits, and we know how unsticky those are as a product.
Speaker 2:And also lecturing doesn't work right. It's obviously important. No, we're having another coffee.
Speaker 3:You spent £10 on coffee last week we got that by
Speaker 1:a piece of cake as well, that's what I would do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you've got this 90 days to form a new habit and all those kinds of things. So we weren't really interested in doing that either. And we know that if you went to most people and said you realise there's loads of money in your data, you know every time you're doing a comparison on a car insurance, your data is being brokered and it's making money everywhere. I think that would be pretty unnerving to the vast majority of people. So it's much easier to say look, you know, we're just going to find you money in your current spending. So all of that money that would normally be affiliate revenue, we're actually going to, you know, give 85% of that to the customer and the business model of Upside, as we keep 15% of any upside that we find for the customer.
Speaker 2:So talk me through as a consumer. The app is. Is the app built?
Speaker 3:I should have asked that before we started and we only have 100 alpha testers.
Speaker 2:No, you didn't invite. I could have done that before we did this. I don't know what I would have done. That's the next question.
Speaker 3:There are people who signed up very early on to get early access and they've been great actually, the feedback we've had so far. You know, they're just kind of helping us find bugs. We call them our kind of VIP Upside as because we just want to make sure the product is the best it could possibly be in terms of usability, in terms of it, you know, not having any friction. Lots of people are buying lots of Costa, yeah, and obviously the data is all anonymized. But what we want to be able to see is like how can we baseline this and of the hypothesis testing is going to be, you know, if we have a cohort that's shot more at one grower than another, can we change that behavior over time by offering an incentive to shop somewhere else?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But yeah, if I.
Speaker 2:So just talk me through as a user. I download the app. I literally connect my Monzo or my NatWest or other banks available account to it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when you have connected with your bank account and you know you can connect any, we normally recommend that people connect the bank account they most regularly save with, spend with. Sorry, you know, if you're going to just connect Monzo that you use for kind of spare change, you're not going to see much saving. So you really need to connect the bank account that you're spending and most with and then we will have a look through your kind of 36 months of spend and give you an estimate of how much we think you can save in a year. And that's working out to be on average 250. Some people it can be as much as kind of 1300 pounds and that depends, you know, if you're really going to leverage.
Speaker 3:you know bill swapping car insurance, all those kinds of things. 250 is a back average.
Speaker 2:So I download the app. You've done the background research. You can predict and say you're going to you effectively earn 200 pounds into a savings account or an ISO. Yeah, how does so when you say you know if you're doing the bill swapping. So I presume the stuff where okay, I spend a lot of money in Starbucks and Starbucks can go there as 10 pounds cash back as an example.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so once you're connected, every time you spend with one of our partners the next day we'll see yeah, you've got, you know, one pound 88 upside from the Marks and Spencers or one pound 88 upside from Tesco. You know, you'll start to see those add up and it's quite nice because for the merchant, every time somebody looks at their savings they see those brands all the time. So it's just that re-information, yeah, and it's just that those brands are investing back into their customers.
Speaker 2:Because I think there's little things that make it more like Monzo.
Speaker 2:I was with NatWest for you know too many years and opened a Monzo account and then set up a one of the pot things they suggest to set up and actually saved like a hundred quid in a few months just by rounding up from seven, nine, nine to eight quid.
Speaker 2:And I was actually quite amazed because it's free money, because, like it's not, it's just moving from one bank to another, but you do sort of separate. So if you, what you're seeing is, I can kind of do that, but the brand takes the credit for building it. Like you've had 18 quid back from brand Y and 27 quid from brand Z and therefore I kind of feel an affinity to them because they're giving me something back for being a customer and therefore I'm probably more likely to be loyal and a long term. So is that what the brands are paying for Effectively? That awareness in my front of mind when I look at my bank balance and also giving something back for being a regular customer. Is that why they do this? Or are they doing this because it's cheaper than trying to get your interest with the discount vouchers than with someone else?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, if we're honest, everybody in business is interested in one thing and that incremental revenue. They're not really keen to just pay for a customer that is their customer anyway. You know this is about being able to move customers from your competitors over to you. But yeah, you know, for the consumer it's super easy. You just connect and then never even look in there again. You know you're going to get push notifications telling you when we have a new partner on board or if there's a specifically strong offer with a particular partner.
Speaker 2:But other than that you know because we're regulated by the FCA.
Speaker 3:we can't say connect and you just get free money. But essentially, you know that's kind of what's happening. We're just removing the need for people to have to click and there's been lots of surveys done, and especially around millennials, that they said. You know, 75% of them said if I was going to get immediate cash back for somewhere without any hassle, I would definitely I think you're 100% right.
Speaker 2:The biggest things that put you off and I'll remember it as we go on I had one the other day. You know cash back if you do whatever, and it was so. It was such an R I couldn't be bothered in the end.
Speaker 3:Stand on one foot, jump through this hoop. That's on fire, it's.
Speaker 2:Tuesday and the sun's out and it's 42 degrees Celsius in the Cairngorms. You can have 12 pence, you know because?
Speaker 2:the NatWest actually do it very well. To be fair to NatWest, on the NatWest black account you don't have to pay something a month for it's actually free because you actually get that back. They're actually very good at automatically dropping money back into your account. They hide it under, like submenu section six, because you actually have to claim it and then ask for it. So you know they don't make it easy. What you're saying is I'll make it easy, transparent. So will you offer me? So? If I'm obviously you know if I upstict and move to France, would your system notice that I'm now buying stuff from different retailers let's assume the cross border thing's not an issue and then give me offers relevant to my change of life? Or if I bought a shiny, faster car and we're doing more miles, would your system then give me relevant offers to what's going on in my life?
Speaker 3:At the moment it's that when a merchant comes into the system they can search people based on location how frequently they spent average order value and they can target them specifically. We are UK only at the moment, so if you're in France, no.
Speaker 2:That song's been, but no upside.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Obviously, the idea is for this to and part of the raise that we're doing so we can bring on board a data scientist, because we've already got 60,000 records just from having a few people on the Alpha, so there's going to be so much data that it's really going to be picking through that and working out. Basically it's also to work out how we can serve customers best and get them to build their saving.
Speaker 2:I'm just trying to think it's brilliant for retail. I've sat on the other side of the affiliate as a retailer and gone. It's not working, or it is sort of working. Then how do I talk to the publisher? Then? Hello, mr Publisher, do you have the audience I'm looking for? Oh yeah, definitely we do. Definitely. They were just doing who they are. What you're seeing is I can literally say look, I want this kind of. We're opening a new branch in wherever we need this kind of person with this kind of spend level, who normally shops at these other kind of shops, we need them in Norwich. Then your assistant goes that's these 3,000 people. They go for these 3,000 people. I'll give them this offer because it's actually perfect For our early testing partners.
Speaker 3:What we are really looking for them to do is to say, okay, we're going to do a 1%, 5% and 10% offer to see where does it really start to become interesting to people. I don't know about you. If I look at Trainline or somewhere through Quidco and it's 1%, it's almost not worth my time to open that link and click it.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 3:Might as well. I'm in the app anyway. Might as well carry on as you say. There's no point for 18 pence or something. There's a lot of inertia around saving. I think that's the main phrase that I put with. Saving is it's hard and unless people start to see enough, we want to get people to that 300 pounds mark really soon, because that seems to be the kind of psychological switch where people think, oh, this is actually worth something I could save for a holiday out of this kind of thing.
Speaker 3:That is one of the main things that people want to be able to save for actually is a holiday.
Speaker 2:Holiday and a house.
Speaker 3:Essentially, one of our advisory board is actually a CTO of Tandon. It's been really great having him on board because he also supports my belief, which is we're not going to have a problem on the customer acquisition side of this. We've seen that just from the Alpha test. We've had so many people sign up We've actually had to throttle the number of people who we allow in. We've had a lot of very disappointed people who weren't quick enough at using their test flight code. We're asking quite a lot of people. They've got to install test flight first, so then access the upside, which is really clumsy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a hammy journey, but there's a lot of people doing it and they're giving us some really great feedback, even down to just kind of saying having to put in a six-digit pin is actually really long. I've got pins for so many things, so there's something shorter that you can use instead. So some really great feedback from those guys On both sides. I just think this solves so many problems. I think for the merchants, it's a problem they just don't want to open a can of worms with at the moment. In their mind, they're like look, we've got this person who sits there and they take care of the affiliate and they know they've got a budget. Once it's exhausted, it's done. I think we discussed briefly the other day it's crazy that they will spend so much more on Facebook and AdWords ads, where you're paying an unacost public and you don't have any guarantees that that is going to convert on your site.
Speaker 2:The best thing I think the best thing I ever learned in my brief oriente affiliate was when unnamed comparison site ran a new retailer and I spent their entire month's affiliate budget in two days and the retailer switch it off. My brain, having run businesses, that's insane. Why did they do that? They ran out of stock, no just to use the affiliate budget, but the company when they get to a certain size, because the affiliate is run by the affiliate guy who's underneath the digital marketing guy, who's underneath the overall marketing guy, who's underneath the guy who sits on the board. If they go back and say we could spend 50 grand a day and get this many sales, we just need to change the budget and everything goes. No, no, no, no, until next year for the board meeting Turning down money.
Speaker 3:We've literally had conversations with people who spend one pound and make 13. So they return on their spend. So really, one pound they spend with us, they were seeing a 13 pounds return. And bear in mind, you know, at discount vouchers email we don't brand bid. We're not buying anybody's clicks. We can literally show people, open that email and bought within one minute 42. And we hit them at a time they weren't on your site. It's not like a checkout tax and for people who are listening, you don't really understand what we mean when we say affiliate. That is that we get a cost per acquisition. So you know, we send somebody through to Mark's as fences and we'll get one pound in every 100 pounds that they spend.
Speaker 2:On upside you're fundraising now.
Speaker 3:Yes, so we're in pre-registration actually for CDIS, so people can pre-register to be on the first.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you're sending that link on the show notes. Put it up on LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:Sure, so it's just a pre-reg page at the moment. We're looking, then, to go into private and then obviously into public launch. You've got a meeting team.
Speaker 2:The team is like you know yourself included, obviously but the team is a really really strong team and some of your advisors, when you've got Google technical director experience, apple and M&S National Geographic, you've got Paul Clark, you know the Neobanks, you've got the savings experts one name them all You've got some really really good people in this company.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean so. Even the CEO, andri. You know he headed up the general manager of Aviva Digital, so the my Aviva platform, which you know, if you take insurance out with Aviva, you then got all these other perks. That was, yeah, one of his projects and he had two other huge digital projects that he delivered to them. And then he went out to work with Dollar Dex in Singapore and so they were doing something similar, you know, helping people there to save money, but you know they were high net worth individuals, so they were looking more at the kind of 5,000 pound savings marks.
Speaker 2:How much did I save by my super yacht? Well, we'll give you cash back you know five grand. Or we'll just give you some bottles of crystal. You can stick it in the fridge.
Speaker 3:And it's funny. So they still apparently had the same problem of inertia. You know if it was any less than that, it was like pocket change, so it didn't matter. But as soon as they tipped over this 5,000 pounds, they sat up and took notice. And so the psychology is the same here. You know everything. You know if you're on an upward spiral with it does well, so you can just help people to get over that first hurdle of saving. So of course we've got features being built into upside like auto save, so you can say, yeah, I want to conservatively or really aggressively save and work out how much you think I can save out of my wages and put that aside each week for me.
Speaker 2:You think that really happened in Britain? You really are trying to do and just here is here's our new app and it's great stuff and you get some cash, but you are talking like a fairly significant cultural shift here.
Speaker 3:I think COVID has made people really realize that they need to save for an emergency fund. The numbers of people even connecting we know a lot of people in space people connecting their bank accounts with open banking just to be able to understand their spending went up massively. I think most people who downloaded an app about 40%, would connect and that went up to over 60% during lockdown. You're always going to have the people who can't save Really. Definitely they live hand to mouth and can't save and we could definitely help them. But really where we're focusing is almost that cash-rich time pool People who could save but they just don't want to spend time with their money. They don't want to look in their bank account and go, oh, I'm subscribing and haven't used it for a while. There's all these other things that I should be doing.
Speaker 2:Do you actually do any of that? You do know you've been paying for Netflix for 24 months. Do you even know that Because I was posted on LinkedIn yesterday, I should have sent it to you? I thought of you when I saw it. Then I didn't send it to you. It was something like it was some crazy stuff. Like 60% of people, if they go through line by line and it was a business bank account obviously LinkedIn but if they go through the business bank account line by line for three months, they'll probably find X amount of relevant spend or they're just stuff that has always been spent because it always was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, continue to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for a lot of people, if you attribute a cost to your time, they think, oh, it's not worth my time doing it, it's going to cost me money to sit and go through it. So we don't have that functionality yet, but certainly the functionality it's on the roadmap to be able to say well, it looks like you've been to the cinema five times in the past six weeks and you could have saved a lot of money if you'd had an Odeon card or a premium or something card.
Speaker 3:That's the idea not necessarily AI, but is to be intelligent and make you really worthwhile suggestions about how you can save money, because we see our main USP as the automated cashback. That's really where our focus is, because there are other apps doing offering all of those other solutions in their individual parts, so we do want to do all of those, but we're just focusing on the cashback for as far as initially On CDERS, the registration page, then it goes private, then it goes public, the app is actually built in, running with alpha testers, beta testers.
Speaker 2:Now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're all connected with Played. We're authorized and regulated by the SCAs. Yeah, it's all working. People are earning cashback already.
Speaker 2:When can the rest of us get access to it?
Speaker 3:We can sign up on the website, which is wwwupsidesavingcom, and you'll get an invite as soon as we can open it up to people. We've got a target to hit by December and I think we're going to really comfortably overachieve on that if we want to. I think we're looking at Starling Bank for an example. They grew slowly but surely and made sure that they had the right people on board and that they really built a product, not something that just satisfied investors, but really that put the customer first. And that's what we want to do. We want to build this new generation of savers. My parents were always great at saving and then there just seems to have been this kind of chasm of people feeling like you only lived once and spending all of their money.
Speaker 2:It was the 80s, it did it. If you were a teenager coming out in the late 80s, it was all kind of boom and it just felt I think there was a whole the previous generation felt like there were four generations ago that whole kind of house, stayed and boring and life for living, and everything was fast and flash, wasn't it? And it kind of broke the back of that generational education of saving. And then now, of course, the kids never get taught any of this stuff At last. My kids were the 40 quid a game for all of these, because the profan have left it at home and I'm a Victorian dad and I'm quite strict and they still wouldn't have the money with them. Oh, kind of some more. It's just this.
Speaker 3:And there's something about it not feeling real, almost, I think, because you're spending it on a zone as well.
Speaker 3:Sometimes I live in my bank account and think someone's nicked my car. I don't know that was me, so have that and so have that. Yeah, it's really just to try and help people to save, help them to get to a really better place than they are now. So when we surveyed people about what would make them feel comfortable in terms of savings, it seemed to be equal to about one month's wages that people wanted to make sure that they had. Is that a home? Yeah, when you think if they put less than £100 now.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's just me. I just look at the whole thing going just now and just I'm genuinely concerned for myself, never mind everybody else, and I just think starting this podcast is an act of madness, not just because it's a podcast and he's doing one and all that shit. It's just that's just persistence and carrying on, but it's a waste of time and that I'm not getting paid to do this. I don't get sponsored. I haven't even asked anyone for sponsorship, mate. I'll wait until it happens. But I mean I enjoy doing it because I like meeting people like you. But really in the back of my mind there's a little Scottish voice going oh, I want to say you can be working for an extra hour today and getting paid for it. And I kind of think, yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right. And I just know so many people who are kind of going yeah, I'll be fine, vaccine, vaccine, you know it'll all be cool. You think, but what, if not?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's, yeah. It's really sad, and when you see how many big brand names are starting to lay people off it makes you feel very nervous.
Speaker 2:I'm not an expert in this right, but so many of them are shit, right, so many of them have crap products, right.
Speaker 2:So many of them make stuff in China and have used virtual slave labor and the you know. If you look at so many of them, some of the stuff they sell I won't name the shop my children go to and they bring the stuff back and they're all happy that the skirt they cost 90 pence. It's terrible, right, and it's all going in landfill and it's destroying the world. They're rant again. Second rant you know, it's cheap, it's crap. And then if you look at how a lot of the big restaurant chains are going to go under, yeah, they're fine, they're safe, they're reliable. If you're in London you can take the kids there.
Speaker 2:But they've all been swapping by equity partners for years and years, loading up on debt being switched out so that you could buy a super yacht and live in Monaco. These business, they're not sustainable. I sort of linked in yesterday. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I'm mentioning the same the chain, the same women's clothing brands and the same restaurants. Oh, they're all going to the wall, isn't it terrible? Covid is, these were shit businesses anyway. Hugely indebted, you know, brought up debt, sold business land off, sold, turned into leases instead, just to make a few people buy bigger yachts and I am a capitalist and I still think that's that there's Uber capital.
Speaker 3:It's wrong. It's wrong. Yeah, I mean, for me it's like I'd scroll and scroll and scroll. I've never done so much window shopping as I have in COVID, but most of it I wouldn't have if you gave it to me. You know there's nothing different, nothing designed interesting. You know there's a couple of really nice companies doing some nice things. That's for the most part. Shopping used to be something where you're lost after an item and we had to be on a discount and you'd keep an eye on it and be gutted if you're so sold out Right now.
Speaker 3:You know I had stuff to my basket. I couldn't care less if somebody else ends up buying it because I was like, well, never mind, it just wasn't that interesting. And you know I've had a lot of conversations. I'm not the only person who feels like that there's just too much stuff and it's just not interesting Literally. So I saw sites like Etsy and New Monday are doing really well.
Speaker 2:Bingo.
Speaker 3:Because they actually, and all of you know, in Norwich we have this thing called the lanes. There are lots of smaller boutiques, stores, and, yeah, they're just a bit more creative in the way that they're doing business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like you know, Brighton is going to be the normal way of shopping. The Brighton lanes are a case in point All that great, unique stuff and you go down and it's all gray and then most people but most people around the core of the shopping centre put their money into an unnamed rich person in Monaco's pocket.
Speaker 3:Well, they won't do that shopping centre anymore, because the shopping centre is just a small business.
Speaker 2:Probably will be flat in five years and it's why people are discovering the countryside, right, because they're not going shopping as a hobby, right? Shopping was a hobby by cheap shit. Take it home, take it to Oxfam in six weeks, six months, six years time, whatever, yeah.
Speaker 3:Who knew that all the government had to do to get really healthy was to tell them they couldn't go out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're going to die if you go out.
Speaker 3:We mustn't go out. In that case, I'm going to take up jogging, yeah and by a magic way, jogging and cycling everywhere. Yeah, I've never seen so many people out of breath in my life. I was on the lockdown.
Speaker 2:Which is unfortunate, really, isn't it?
Speaker 3:It was. They've run past me.
Speaker 2:It's a bread out. My sister was in Southampton. She was from Hamburg, I think it was Southampton, of course all these people was jogging and she was like literally hiding her face as she walked up the promenade because everyone was jogging in the course, everyone was like 12 sizes too big and quitting everywhere. It was gross Because one thing in Hamburg, of course, is everyone's very trim and lovely and Germanic, so we didn't have that problem.
Speaker 3:I've been to Hamburg. It's a lovely place.
Speaker 2:It is Very, very Polish Hamburg very nice.
Speaker 3:I'm afraid I didn't bring my charger in here with me and I'm on 6% battery.
Speaker 2:Oh my God. Well, I was just going to wrap up, so you're all good.
Speaker 3:Okay, great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think once we get on to like Rantz and Hamburg, we're probably done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I feel like we could chat for hours, though.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, catherine. It's been an absolute joy and a pleasure to have you on Catherine, as she was saying, is launching upside, if you just want to give us a URL again and we'll share that, and also on LinkedIn, I will share the CDOS registration page.
Speaker 3:Sure, that would be great. Yeah, so wwwupsidesavingcom.
Speaker 2:So keep an eye on that, and then also I will, on my LinkedIn, update it when the CDOS goes live as well.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:No worries, and when the site is actually live for the rest of us who aren't the privileged alpha users to join, I'll put it on there as well. Thank you very much, catherine.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much, Al All, right stop.
