About Upmind
Our mission is to build the best possible platform for service businesses.
Upmind is a billing platform that ticks all the boxes. Aimed at any SME that believes in recurring customers.
Key functionality includes:
- A complete suite of business tools
- Data consistency and integration between those tools.
- Instant setup, and near zero management overhead.
- First-party integrations with a growing number of external services, gateways, and products.
- The ability to sell, manage and provision any product or service that has an API
- Low pricing and no setup costs or technical experience needed
Our business suite includes:
Client CRM
Billing and payments, including subscriptions
Product catalog and pricing engine
Marketing tools
Affiliate system
e-Commerce platform
Integrated widgets
Detailed reporting
History
Upmind originally began development as in-house software for a large web hosting group run by one of our founders, Seb. It was imagined as internal software to co-ordinate billing and management throughout a number of different brands and support teams.
In 2017, shortly after development work started, the hosting group was sold. Unwilling to let the work so far be abandoned, Seb bought back the foundations of the Upmind software and took on the development team himself. The scope was widened, not least in turning Upmind into a SAAS platform for others to use. However the fundamental idea - an all-in-one scalable business automation platform for online service businesses - remained.
Upmind Automation Limited is a UK business, and remains privately owned, funded and managed by the founders and management team.
Meet the development team
We are an experienced and dedicated team of developers working to build the best software platform we can.
Seb de Lemos
Founder & CEO
Chris Garner
Co-Founder & CXO
Boris Kolev
Co-Founder & CTO
Harry Lewis
Lead Developer
Matt Gardiner
Developer
Dominik Piska
Developer
Ibrahim Abtula
Developer
Nayden Panchev
Developer
Ivo Georgiev
Developer
Nicky Arsov
Developer
Bruce Taylor
Infra & Monitoring
Rob Whyte
Documentation
Is a career at upmind for you?
We are a diligent, hard-working team, committed to both the software we are developing and the many small businesses throughout the globe we want to empower. If you work at upmind you will be creating software that genuinely has the ability to transform millions of businesses, but also that we are immensely proud of.
Upmind is micro-serviced software utilising various technologies and architectures: our backend setup is based on the Laravel framework though where desirable various functions use Lambda, RabbitMQ, PubSub, DynamoDB and Node. Our frontend application is built using VueJS. Both frontend and backend are deployed using Kubernetes on AWS.
Our founders have intentionally avoided external funding from investors or venture capital. We are about as far removed from a glamorous tech start-up as can be imagined.
We have an extremely low turnover rate of staff and a high commitment to employee welfare. We are split between two locations: Stroud (UK) and Sofia (BG). However since the pandemic we have mostly worked from home offices and it suits us very well.
If you are a highly skilled PHP or VueJS developer with 5+ years experience and an understanding of the software we are building and why we are building it, please reach out via LinkedIn.
Other ways to help
Help with guides and documentation.
We really want to focus on user-driven guides. The better documentation we have, the more easily others will be able to get set up and using our platform. If you can craft excellent help tutorials please let us know.
Translations
Upmind is primed and ready to be translated into every language available. We have already made a start on a handful. But we have approximately 10,000 sentences and phrases that need translating, and many of them need understanding of context. This makes it quite hard for us to just give the phrases to a translator. If you would like to help out with translations please let us know - we use Lokalise.
Why is a service business different?
Most online ecommerce platforms are designed for selling one-time products. A traditional shopping cart is geared towards that single purchase. The product is front and centre.
A service business is about the customer. Yes, the product remains important, but the focus has switched to maintaining that ongoing relationship. Some examples:
| Traditional product business | upmind | |
|---|---|---|
| Order system | Designed for one-time sales | Designed for recurring subscriptions and later upsells |
| Customer interaction | At the point of order only | Ongoing and regular |
| Billing | One-time, low touch | Recurring with complex discounts or upgrade rules |
| Support and sales | Sales driven | Far more complex, involving account management, after care, tiered departments |
| Conversion and tracking | Purchase related | Lifetime value, churn rates, upgrade percentages, refund periods |
Our roadmap for the next two years
In late 2021 after a few years of development and alpha testing, we opened for beta users. Our initial focus is on building out functionality for the hosting industry. This is a market we know very well, and also where there is urgent need for a solution like upmind.
2022
Throughout 2022 we will be extending the functionality of upmind as required by hosting clients, including:
- Developing optimised shopping cart solutions and order flows for hosting, SAAS and domain resellers. We are working with a handful of partners on conversion rate analysis; our improvements will be available to all upmind customers.
- Adding large numbers of integrations with domain registrars, hosting platforms, and SAAS products; releasing frameworks so that custom solutions can be developed.
- Creating import scripts to bring data from external providers.
- Offering widgets (such as plan cards and domain checkers) which can be embedded into front-end websites.
- Building out affiliate functionality within the application.
- Making processes for industry specific needs (e.g. domain redemptions, abuse reports) simpler.
In addition, we will be adding some key features that significantly widen the ability to use upmind for non-hosting needs:
- File downloads
- Stock control
- Booking and calendar functionality
- Shipping
2023
Rather than upmind featuring a website builder, we want to leverage the power of online site builders and allow the upmind frontend to be embedded within these applications. Our first target is WordPress, as upmind is an obvious replacement to bulky plugins which clog up the WordPress system.