UpKeep is a mobile first group collaboration and productivity application for maintenance teams. We were part of YC W17. Shoot me an email at [email protected] if you're interested in joining an early stage startup with amazing growth potential down in LA
So full disclosure: I just started YC and we are only about 3 weeks into the program out of 12 weeks. So.... What I am about to say is without the full picture, but here's what I can say so far.
It's not too different than before :P. YC is very very hands off. I went to a pretty large public university and it sort of feels like that. There's a bunch of really awesome people, but there won't ever be anyone to hold your hand to make sure don't jump off a cliff. You or I need to seek out the right people and make sure to connect to those that would be best suited to help the business!
So, with all of that being said, I guess what I can say is that the experiences of being a solo founder are pretty identical to the experiences of being a solo founder in YC.
I'll elaborate more about some of the challenges I went through and some that I still do go through! But if I have bored you by now you can stop here hah.
I think as a solo founder you just go through different set of struggles, some easier and some more difficult than having multiple cofounders. At the end of the day we always just make the most out of our situation regardless of what that is (ie. don't force yourself to have cofounders or not have cofounders if the stars aren't aligned). To give you an idea of some of the struggles... I worked completely alone in my mom's garage for almost 2 years! I had a remote offshore team helping out with some of the work as we grew, but for a long long time it was just me. I actually hired my first in-house employee 2 weeks ago and he's been super awesome so far--what a game changer!
Anyways, going through this path was the first for a lot of things for me. I made a ton of mistakes that sometimes I wished I could've just bounced ideas off of someone else with from time to time. It was the first time I had ever programmed, so even getting my development setup took way longer than it should have, trying to market, sell a product, price a product, set up HR, design, legal, omg I am getting overwhelmed just thinking about at all of the stuff that I learned. But anyways, it was super rough at times just not knowing.... and having conversations with myself about whether or not I am making the right decisions. But the caveat to all of this was that I learned a tremendous amount in a short period of time and I made really quick decisions without ever feeling paralyzed by discussion. A lot of the time I made the wrong choice, but I learned! And for that... I am super grateful :)
Yeah.... I get that it sounds a little bit gimmicky. But the main point is to really give people a quick 5 word summary so people have a good idea of what it is we do!
Thanks and don't worry 1 bit! I love this conversation and the insightful questions you are asking.
1 - Email blast! And it depends on the type of company. If you are a property management company with lots of employees you're right a lot of people won't use it. Then UpKeep becomes a more internally facing tool for admins to enter in requests and dispatch jobs out. BUT if you are a maintenance heavy company (industrial, manufacturing, etc) you are used to submitting work requests and tickets in every single day.
1b - Yes! So basically the requester normally has the most information. If they can take a picture and send it in with the work order, it is soooo much more descriptive and helpful to the admin user. They can also call it in, and UpKeep works in both ways. But it adds additional overhead to the admin users to be manning the phones at all times.
At the end of the day, UpKeep works in both scenarios and it really depends on the workflow of the company! :)
Employee A notices that there's a broken piece of equipment and wants to submit a work request. This is typically someone who is not involved in the day to day maintenance of the facility. Instead this is normally a employee, cashier, executive, marketing, operator, etc.
For companies that have a lot of employees, we provide them with a dedicated URL, what we call their "Company Request Portal", to submit work requests. So, like you said, they don't need to create an UpKeep account for every single user which would be super prohibitive. Instead they take this link and either embed that web-page in their company website, or have that link saved somewhere all employees know where they can submit a work request.
Regardless of whether the request was made via the "portal" or through the application, the tickets get funneled into UpKeep. It sends a notification to the "Admin" of the group which then has the option to "Approve" or "Reject" the request. When they approve it, they are typically assigning the work order to one of the their maintenance technicians. When the maintenance technician updates a work order, both the admin and the requester are notified about the new status of the request :)
Awesome Q. Believe it or not, this is a pretty crowded industry with a lot of legacy solutions that have massive marketing budgets. I knew that I couldn't compete with them on a dollar per dollar basis trying to buy clicks through adwords and marketing towards managers, so I haven't bothered to go down that route... yet. Instead I have been playing to UpKeep's strengths. We created a tool for technicians and have a beautiful easy to use mobile application to go with that. So... We've been trying to drive all of our traffic to our mobile applications and encourage bottom-up adoption (technicians tell their boss there's this awesome new app called UpKeep! We should use it). I think marketing it this way, just out of the nature of our strategy, led us in the hands of lots of small-medium sized businesses, or smaller silos into large enterprises where they get more governance over the tools they use. We've seen a lot of successful users in the facility management space from coworking spaces, restaurant franchise owners, and smaller manufacturing groups.
A common use case for UpKeep is that someone sees a broken piece of equipment, pulls out their phone, opens up UpKeep, snaps a picture, and sends it off to the technician for repair. The technician now has a prioritized list of his/her tasks for the day and can easily follow up with requests!
In terms of how did I both build and market with a full time job... I didn't do any marketing for UpKeep in the beginning. I had the most common misconception that "If I built it people would come". In the beginning, UpKeep was a free application for everyone, and I viewed it more as a hobby as I was learning to program. It slowly started gaining popularity in the "free to use" category for business applications and it was fueled all by what a cool app that's completely free.
Now... If you ask about the transition from a free product into a paid service... I felt so so bad doing it because we actually upset a lot of users during that transition. But yeah that's a whole new story :)
Yeah I think the most important thing I am hearing from everyone on HN (and it is very much appreciated) is that we need to do better on our pricing page.
I love the feedback though! I always feel like I want to keep adding details to try to make it more clear, but I can see that we've come to a point where it may be having the opposite effect.
That's awesome. I am always skeptical of putting big brand names up there because I feel like it really takes away from our product. I get that we need some market validation, but I've always had this thing where I just really want people to try out UpKeep themselves to tell for themselves how awesome it really is!
I actually only applied once and got in. I still had a full time job when I applied, I had no connections to the YC community prior to applying... and I don't know if the YC partners know this, but I actually did the entire application + video in <30 minutes.
I remember doing the app from my mom's garage when my girlfriend was like, "hey Ryan, don't you think you should spend some more time on this before you send it in if it's important?" My response to her was that there was probably no way I was going to get in so I didn't want to put that much effort into the application.
I might be speaking for YC, but I think the thing that was more interesting was our actual product and where we'd gotten it to more than a beautiful polished application and video.
Thanks! Being a solo founder definitely has its positives and negatives. I think everyone's situation is different and we always make the most out of it regardless if you're a 1 person operation or part of a big big team.
This is an awesome comment. Maximo is pretty much the gold standard for asset management in enterprise. I don't see Maximo as a direct competitor today, but we'll get there! Watch out IBM :)
While I've never personally used Maximo before, I've seen it be used by several of my colleagues and friends in the industry. Whenever I see them use it, it hurts a little bit to be honest. I have a friend who actually works for LA county and she is their Maximo manager. She basically takes calls from technicians out in the field and inputs it data in for them. I recently asked her to pitch UpKeep to her boss about trying out a mobile solution (apparently IBM stopped developing new tech for their mobile solution for some reason). The response she got from her boss was that field techs are aren't tech savvy enough and the only reason she has a job is because of that. Definitely upset me a bit to hear that, but it also gives me motivation to see how much more there is to improve in this industry.
I think our most direct competitor in the small to medium sized business industry is Fiix software. I think they have a great platform, but I am hoping we'll win out because we are almost fully invested in creating a mobile-first product for field technicians. At the end of the day if field techs input better data into the system, managers will have higher quality, more reliable data to make informed maintenance decisions.
Regarding our product roadmap, we do 1-2 week sprints given the need at the time. Right now we are still focused on making a better tool for field techs. The next big thing on our list is making inventory management within UpKeep seamless. I think we have a great work-management tool, although we are constantly improving, but there are some things on the inventory management side that I think we can improve a lot on. In regards to industry, my background is in manufacturing, but we actually have a pretty diverse market for UpKeep. Right now we fit really well with small to medium sized facilities. Restaurant franchises really love us, clubs, and smaller industrial manufacturing is our sweet spot!
Our goal for UpKeep was to really streamline the request process. We hear from a bunch of our customers that they are tired of receiving a request via email, phone call, text message, whatsapp, what the so many different ways! So we tried to consolidate that all into UpKeep. A requester can open up UpKeep, go to the requests tab, and hit the big "+" button to create a request, they can set up email forwarding so emails they send go directly into UpKeep, they can go to a URL that links to the company's UpKeep account, and more!!!
Anyways, thanks so much for your comment and thanks for the plug on the Maximo LinkedIn discussion group! Would love to chat more and hear your experience with Maximo and your thoughts as a Maximo user and what we can do to improve!