Back in 2017, we created a simple website to manage the fuzz we started generating with our innovative car wash service. The design was about the same level as GoogleMyBusiness offers you - lack of visual elements, a lot of text in your face, and you could tell within first 3 seconds that it's an early stage startup.  It was a MVP by the definition. Yet it did it's job at the time which was to be discoverable on Google search.
Design and development budget: 0€ - built in house.

Around came the "Ajujaht" and our website started serving a more important purpose - build trust and credibility. That's when we switched things up and put time into it - learning about SEO, having a digital marketing intern drive ppc traffic, collecting emails with witty little pop-ups, and providing more insight for customers that hadn't made their first order yet. Taking multiple steps forward and we called that website 2.0.
Design and development budget: 0€ - built in house.

Welcome to 2020! UpSteam is active on three markets, have raised over 1.6 million euros of capital in total, and is valued at 14 million. Building credibility and capturing new unique customers is still an important task of our website but there's more to it. We are striving for strong international brand and our old website just wasn't up to the task any more. We have always done things frugally and the startup way - doing a lot with little. Being frugal helps us navigate through bullshit and drive innovation which is important trait of UpSteam in every department.
(domain host and other subscriptions etc. are not included in the budget calculation.)

Design and development budget: 0€ - built in house!
​You should just check out our page yourself by clicking on the logo... after reading this of course. The main purpose for a redesign is our need for clarity in customer experience and connection in systems. New design provides most important information at the right time for the right person while making it easier to consume. We have gone from simply providing information (like wikipedia) to potential conversion machine (only time will tell though). 

• Business Customers with fleet can now actually understand what are the benefits of switching to a smarter car care solution. Page includes the much useful cost calculator, more insightful information, and is connected to our CRM system for faster onboarding time.​

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• New online booking page that explains the difference between Express and Van wash while featuring thorough information about our prices and services. Booking system and service names are now linked to our app making it easier to understand what you are ordering. Also available in Finland now for making ordering process more convenient.

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The new design is slowly rolling out for all our markets and will be fully implemented by the end of July (Finnish web is also up). Until that, we hope for your patience. You can still share your thought and needs about the new website in the comment section - maybe we are still missing something.

We have had great interest from customers all around Poland and decided to start accepting individual orders in Warsaw starting this month. Place an order through our mobile app and enjoy the hassle-free car care routine at a discounted price. App is ready and we finally launched the Polish language support. Alongside apartment and office pop-up pages, getting a car wash is easier than ever. There's a sweet-sweet offer for early adapters too!

​We are now available for Business customers with car fleet, office buildings with a parking lot, apartments, and individual orders across the city with the latest app release.  What did we update?

Meet the Team: Alex Panov, Country Manager for Estonian Market! Alex actually joined our team in March during the lockdown and hadn't been to our offices until last week. He used the time well and got to know all processes and even started tweaking them before getting back to pre-rona operations. Similarly to many of our founders and other high performers, he came through Southwestern book-selling summers ,too. But in 2020, Alex joined us from Thorgate, where he worked as a consultant in tech projects. Because of his thorough IT knowledge, he managed to improve the connection between our operational team and developers team in Tartu. As there's a lot to know about our new hire, we organized a 5 Question Interview with him to introduce the new lead for our home market!

What is this?
5 Question Interview is a post series in which we share unknown facts about our team members. UpSteam is growing fast and so is our team - we try to introduce each of our new hires like that. Many of our fans and followers have said that they would like to know what happens behind the scenes and who are the people making it happen - we hope this delivers. If you like this type of content then we will keep bringing you these posts while prioritizing the fresh faces.

Ps. What questions should we ask? Share your ideas in the comments!

​Your all-time favorite Quote? What does it mean to you?
- Maybe it sounds quite deep and/or cliche, but I really like the idea of a quote “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it”. I think it has to be reminded when we’re filling our basements, closets, shelves with the stuff we do not actually need... or we’re working ourselves to death just to achieve “material success”. In terms of wider society, I think it something that everybody knows but many do not acknowledge.

What is your unusual habit that not many people do?
- I eat enormous amounts of cottage cheese and I eat kind of plain food (without additional flavourings, spices). I just like unflavoured food :P

When we first founded this business we thought we were just saving time and the planet. Our customers don’t have to drive, wait in a line or wait for the service to be completed. On top of that we are doing all that with just ~1 litre of water per car. Washing people’s cars where they are parked can look like a comfort-service but in time we’ve learned that it’s a lot more than that. 

I’m pretty sure all founders have a “portfolio” of 1000+ cars washed individually and it’s just mesmerising to see your customer walk out of their office door and you see their face light up with surprise when they see their car. For businesses time means money so we’re cutting out the salary, fuel and amortisation costs that follow with the washing of your fleet. For our B2B customers it just makes more sense to focus on their core-business rather than sending their employees to a car wash.
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More into the industry, we now realise that we are improving the unit economics of car washing drastically. Since we don’t have unnecessary operational costs like rent, heating and payroll for down-time we are able to provide this service on a competitive pricing level and pay more to our washers while keeping a sustainable cut for the company.
So how did we end up here?

Finding a business idea may seem hard but if you really look at it then it’s quite simple. All you have to do is:

1. Find something that frustrates you;
2. Copy the good features of a similar solution that is already out there;
3. Improve it by eliminating the frustration.

Frustration
I remember having this old and rusty Mazda 323F for my first car. When I was a student I didn't have a lot of money so I washed my car every 3-4 months or so. I mostly used those coin operated pressure washers but it never did the job I wanted. Having a car as a student is cool. Having a dirty car as a student - not so much. You can’t go “rollin the streets with your pals" if your car looks like a swamp.
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So every year one time I did a birthday gift to my car. I took it to a professional car wash. So I went online, booked the cheapest voucher with the biggest list of services and for like 20-30€ I was promised a dream-wash. Most of the car wash places I went to were hidden somewhere deep in between the factory buildings. Sometimes even the final 100 metres of road to the car wash was a dirt road so after the wash I had to drive away like 1km/h so I wouldn't ruin my tire shine. But any car wash I went to, the most important thing was that the same sentence they tell you: “So come back in 3 or 4 hours to pick up your car.” Now, I’m in the middle of nowhere and I have to find myself something to pass the time.

I don't like to half-ass two things at the same time. When I finally picked up the courage and knew that I was going to build UpSteam I knew I wanted to commit to just this one thing. For that to happen I needed an A+ team. With no money to hire A+ I needed to sell the dream. As an ambitious but young guy without a huge network, that small devil on my shoulder whispered “Go to your friends or fellow students” but I didn’t want to pick the “low-hanging fruits”. I wanted to have the best people I could get.

So the most hard-core guy I knew very well at that time was Valjo Kütt. He was a role-model for me when I was selling books. He was a hard-working guy breaking sales records always with this funny smile on his face. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. Right after I sold books with him in the same team during my summer, I took my school presentation of SteamWash and asked to have a meeting with him.
It was a crappy school-presentation showing how we can make €1M in the first year, €10M next and so on. But pretty much the same as with VC’s - I guess he was not looking at the numbers as much as he was looking at the opportunity, the dream and my personal commitment to it. I guess that’s what "sold him". So after my first presentation I asked him: “Valjo, would you want to join me in doing a car washing startup?”. With a hippie-smile on his face, he said: “Sure, man! Let’s do it!’’.
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None of us had any experience in car washing, building wash vans or any technical parts that come with it. And a couple weeks later I get a call from Aleksis Anijärv. He was pissed at me and said: “Dude, why did you not tell me that you’re building a business!?”. I was surprised and said: “Well, I couldn’t tell you because you’re still planning on selling books. I need full commitment.”. Nonetheless we had a meeting with him and it turned out he was studying engineering. As we decided that we will not duplicate power-skills in our team, we saw that he could fit the last piece of the puzzle we needed in our founding team. Also, Aleksis was this analytical guy and a straight-forward thinker. He was doing awesome at selling books and also building teams for it. So we figured out the book selling thing and that’s how our dream-team was assembled. 

Then one day I had a call from a new customer - “Can you wash my Tesla today?”. I was shocked - I was responsible for washing that day and I thought to myself: “I’m not really sure if I can clean that car without scratching it. And if I do - with the revenue we have, we will have to work for 2 years for free to fix that paint. That will ruin our business!”.
So I arrived at the seaport parking lot and started cleaning that car as carefully as I could. Once I finished, the owner came out - a very friendly guy and he was actually surprised by how clean it got. It was Rain Rannu - the founder of Fortumo and a very well-known business angel. And he asked: “Are you guys looking for investments?”. I really had no clue what that meant back then but I said: “Yeah, sure!” and he gave me his card. Once we had our first meeting with him, I was surprised by how many of his questions we could already answer simply because we collected data from day 1. With a monthly revenue of a couple of thousand he invested €25K to help us build the next wash unit. He also gave us the idea to start building subscription-model into our business.

We had our doubts that when our competitors or “devilish people” see us there, they will just rip off our idea. But let’s face it - we had nothing to lose. At that point we were approaching 6-7K revenue but we knew that we can’t grow fast being a secret startup. We knew that even if our idea is the best in the world - if nobody knows about us then all that potential goes to waste. So we let the “TV-people” of Estonia be the judge of our business.
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We started off as the “Wash-van guys” and we spent a lot of time and money on building the best wash vans with the most advanced washing technology. The sizes and the construction costs of those vans went up and up. We knew it would become tough to scale a 40 000€ washing van.
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As we started seeing more businesses like Bolt & Wolt doing food deliveries using shared economy models to scale fast, we asked ourselves: “What if we tried to fit our car washing into that bag?” The biggest problem was that our steam washer weights 200kg and you need to carry an additional 200 litres of water for the whole day. As we always spend a lot of time researching the car washing industry, we found a technology that is not so popular yet but is being used in many countries already. The best part is that it uses approximately 1 litre of water to clean a car and with zero electronics needed.

We’ve been lucky (and brave) enough to approach top executives in different industries to ask whether they want to have lunch with us or even become our mentor. You would be surprised by how much they like helping other young entrepreneurs become successful and avoid the mistakes they’ve made. We’ve took learnings from AirBNB, Bolt, Fortumo, Wolt, Veriff, Vapiano and many more A+ heroes to combine them into something you see today.

​We have a long way to go but with each breakthrough we get even more hungry to learn more. We really believe that there is a “car-washing code” to break and with each day we solve a part of it, we open new opportunities which would never have run into our young minds a couple of years ago. I find that as the exciting part of building a startup. Today we are not “Car wash boys” anymore. We are here to build the future of car care.