Innovation Spotlight:

UpsideHōM

As part of our new Reinventing Caregiving blog, we will be featuring different innovators from the caregiving space in our “Innovation Spotlight” series. This week, we spoke to Jake Rothstein, Founder and CEO of UpsideHōM.

UpsideHoM is a start-up company focused on supporting intergenerational living. The goal of the company is to allow older people to age in place inside multi-generational living communities, primarily apartment buildings that do not necessarily cater to the needs of older renters. To support that, they offer fully-supported units inside these apartment communities – bundling together furniture, maintenance, housekeeping services and so forth – to make it easier to age in place. The company launched in 2020 in the South Florida region.

The UpsideHoM team recently completed the Techstars Future of Longevity Incubator Program, which was launched in partnership with Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company created by Melinda Gates. Techstars is one of the world’s largest business incubators, seeding hundreds of companies, but this was its first foray into the longevity and caregiving area. In February, we featured the Techstars program in our caregiving podcast, When I’m 64.

What inspired you to start UpsideHōM?

Really, the idea came from my grandparents. My grandfather had just passed away and my grandmother was 87, living in a big house with stairs and four bedrooms. She’d had knee-replacement surgery and could not walk up the stairs easily, and we realized it was too much house for her. So, we decided that we would sell the house and get her an apartment, but in the same neighborhood, thinking-- she knows that neighborhood, she loves that neighborhood, her doctors are nearby, her grandchildren are nearby. The idea of “aging in place” is kind of antiquated, because why would you want to age in the 1920s colonial that you raised your kids in, that has a really narrow staircase and an attic and leaky faucets and all of the other problems that come with an older house, when you could age in the right place and in proximity to all of the things that you know and love? Aging in place versus aging in the right place is something that people really need to think about.

So, we moved my grandmother into this apartment in the same neighborhood that she had been living in forever. She was really healthy but didn’t like to drive at night, so I would give her rides to family dinners and things like that. She had bills coming from all over the place, you know, the power bill and the water bill and the rent bill, and all of these different things were very complicated, so I would have to log into her bank every month to make sure her bills got paid. It was just overwhelming for her.

Long story short, we realized that there are all of these little things, these supportive services, that aren’t true assistance-- my grandmother didn’t need help taking a shower or eating or cooking, but she didn’t want to cook all the time, she didn’t want to drive all the time-- so we started thinking about a way to bundle these services and give people like my grandmother an easy way to access them, a single point of contact that you have a trusting relationship with. A single bill that comes at the end of the month, housekeeping included, cable and Wi-Fi included, water already turned on when you move in, any maintenance issues ready to be dealt with without going to an outside company. We wanted to make it really, really simple.

What has the experience of building UpsideHōM been like?

As with anything that is a relatively new concept, it comes with challenges. You’re trying to educate the people around you, you’re trying to educate partners and vendors and suppliers and prospects. You’re educating the people you work with on all ends of the spectrum that you have something that is interesting and that can solve a real problem for people. So, there’s been challenges around that. What does our sales pitch look like? What is our value proposition? We’re constantly learning about UpsideHōM’s value from our customers and prospects as they tell us what they want and the things that are important to them. So, I think that listening first is really the way to overcome a lot of challenges that we face.

I’d say that the biggest challenge in this industry, of providing a service for older adults, is building trust. It’s one thing for me to move into an apartment and pack up my whole life because if I don’t like it, I can move somewhere else. But someone who is 82 and maybe less mobile than they used to be or has more restricted financial resources than they may have had in the past, it’s not easy for them to just pack up and move, and once they do, they don’t want to do it more than once. So, this decision is a very, very big one, an impactful one that affects themselves and the family members that care for them. Building trust throughout the journey is a real challenge, and probably one that traditional assisted living facilities face as well. No one wants to move out of a space that they’re really comfortable in, but what you have to convince people of is that this is a move that is going to improve your life. You deserve this move because you deserve to have access to all of these great amenities that will empower you to live a healthy life for longer. Educating people in order to build that trust is really the biggest challenge, I would say.

The education piece is a challenge that a lot of innovative companies experience as they create space for themselves in the industry. Have you found that some education strategies are more successful or effective than others?

An all-encompassing approach to education is essential, since everyone consumes information differently. And so you really have to have a strategy for educating everyone, so it has to include a few different things. It has to include content generation as well as press and media outreach so that when the company is reported on, people understand exactly what you’re offering. It also includes industry leaders, people who have already built trust and have credibility and market pull. You want to convince them that your idea is really good, so that they can talk about it in an informed way. The support of thought leaders is really important and we’ve been working hard to educate them, so that in turn, they can educate others.

Are there particular industry leaders who you have found to be really good partners throughout the process of building UpsideHōM?

We are finding really great acceptance of the concept and of the model from thought leaders across the industry, from large organizations to government to complex health systems to big insurers and payers. And of course, from the most important demographic, our current and future customers. Everyone is excited and willing and happy to lend a hand or give advice, so that’s really good. We’re excited about how UpsideHōM is being received.

Has working with Techstars changed your business? How has it transformed your experience, if at all?

Techstars was fantastic for us. We really had a great experience going through the program. Not only was it valuable to be among other companies that are in the longevity space, because we were able to share learnings across a variety of different topics-- customer acquisition and go to market strategies, you know, basically everything-- but Techstars is a real platform and they are connected to all of the thought leaders I mentioned before. Accessing those people would have been extremely challenging and labor-intensive had we not been able to utilize the Techstars platform, which has helped propel the business. And I think that, as with any program, what you put into it is what you get out of it, and so we put a big effort into Techstars and getting the most out of the experience and we believe that we got a really, really strong outcome.

Throughout your time in the Techstars accelerator, were there other people or companies who you were excited or inspired by?

Everyone in that program— we were all inspired by each other every day, which was really remarkable. The cool thing about this industry is that it touches everybody and every concept resonates with people because everyone knows and loves an older adult. Everyone knows about that relationship, so it’s extremely personal. Everyone that we were alongside in the cohort came into their business out of a personal need, out of something that they have experienced firsthand. So, that is different from a lot of other Silicon Valley venture-backed businesses. A lot of times it’s like, “Oh, I see a market opportunity and a chance to make a lot of money and change the world and scale, scale, scale,” but what we are doing and what our cohort companies are doing is really improving the lives of people that have trouble doing it on their own. The primary driver is helping people, and that’s a nice thing. And talking to other founders who have that same motivation and same spark of inspiration is extremely rewarding.