Why join early?

In a two-sided marketplace — with buyers and sellers — the marketplace becomes more valuable when there are more product buyers (users) and more sellers (retailers). Upside limits how many retailers can participate within different categories like fuel, convenience, and grocery on a first-come, first-serve basis; the platform is growing quickly to fill up those quotas and bring more users and retailers onto the platform every day. 

Existing retailers on the platform wanted to know: If I’m already on Upside, how is my business affected by new retailers in my area joining the platform?

Upside-funded advertising 

To answer the question, we analyzed retailers across all Upside purchasing categories in 50 different markets — large and small — across every region of the United States.

When Upside is just getting started in a new market, the number of transactions that it drives to participating retailers seems minimal. That’s because we need to hit a “critical mass” of fuel retailers (20% of sites in a market) before we can unlock millions of advertising dollars to grow our user base and drive them to participating retailers. In fact, each year Upside invests more than $100 million in advertising to deliver customers to retailers on the platform. That investment is well above the industry standard, and compared to some competitors who invest between $2 million and $10 million, it’s exponentially higher. 

We wait for critical mass before spending these advertising dollars because of the Marketplace Effect — more retailers makes the Upside product more interesting to users, which attracts more of both. If Upside deploys these ad dollars before there is enough inventory to serve an influx of users, users have a negative experience with the app, delete it, and are then more difficult to re-acquire. That means lost volume for retailers. 

When we hit that critical mass, Upside advertises across a variety of national channels to reach consumers wherever they are — in the car on the way to work, listening to their favorite podcast, scrolling on social media, or reading the news.