Paloma and YouPay, another rocket ship?

By Toby Cox

May 24, 2023

Imagine a service that integrates at the checkout of an online store, allowing customers to create a link for someone else to complete their purchase. That's YouPay. It was a great idea, and one that saw a significant uptick with consumers. However, one issue with the early versions of YouPay was the need for each merchant to integrate YouPay into their checkout.

YouPay's customers were raving about the product, but they wanted more. They didn't want to be restricted to only the stores that offered YouPay directly. They craved the freedom to use it everywhere, especially at major stores like Kmart, JB Hifi, The Iconic, and EB Games.

For Matt Holme, the founder of YouPay, the gears started turning, and the idea of a YouPay mobile app began to take shape. This app would enable customers to browse any online store and dynamically hook into the checkout flow to offer YouPay.

Matt knew this would be a game-changer for YouPay's customers, but his team was already stretched thin building out the core of their product. He shared this challenge with a couple of his advisors and investors who happened to be former senior executives from Afterpay. They both recommended he speak to Paloma.

We’ve worked with Afterpay since the early days of the company’s growth — and still work with them today, even after they were acquired by Block for $29 billion in 2021. Just like YouPay, Afterpay had seen tremendous adoption by customers and was stretched thin responding to the demands of building out their core product. They turned to us to build out their mobile app, which saw immense growth and became the primary channel of interaction for Afterpay users.

When we started speaking with Matt, he mentioned that he'd recently seen a QR code on the back of a can that brought up a native app experience without requiring any download. Our engineering team gave Matt a rundown on iOS App Clips and Android Instant Apps. We began discussing how this technology could help overcome the hurdles faced by YouPay. The promise of App Clips was exciting: quickly providing a native experience, facilitating YouPay Anywhere on merchant checkouts, without forcing customers to undergo a full app download.

The idea was compelling, but YouPay needed a quick and low-risk way of validating its potential. We deployed a principal engineer to create a proof of concept for this solution in just two weeks. We proved it out in under a week, and quickly transitioned to helping YouPay build out a full mobile app solution.

Over the next six weeks, a small team from Paloma collaborated with the YouPay team and we successfully launched the app.

In the first few weeks since launch, YouPay has seen an overwhelming response from their dedicated Facebook community of YouPay users, with over 1500 people downloading the app, 4467 carts created, and 608 converted. They’ve achieved a total of $31,000 in sales and an impressive conversion rate of over 13%, exceeding the industry standard of 10%.

This story is a classic case of how Paloma loves helping startups. We drop in small, highly performing teams, who come from startup backgrounds and can move fast and iterate quickly. There’s always a million things to do at a startup — we can come in and help move the needle with that initiative you might not have the capacity to do right now, but could have huge impact on the success of your business.

We’re pumped to see where YouPay goes from here. This month, they're planning to enable 20 major US brands and officially launch the app in North America. Stay tuned, to see where this rocket ship goes!

“Working with Paloma was a very smooth and easy experience. They quickly and seamlessly integrated into our team, working alongside our engineers and designers to quickly get a product to market.”