As the largest child care marketplace in the US, Upwards helps its customers make very personal family decisions - so it requires genuinely personalized, flexible and changeable messaging. Using Vero, it has built a tech stack that meets its own unique needs, creating whole new use cases along the way.
A small team provides personalized messaging to a huge customer network
Vero as a base to build a custom tech stack
Real-time information delivered to customers in their preferred way
Child care
Marketplace
Los Angeles, US
Founded in LA in 2017, Upwards is the nationwide child care network that provides access to 260,000+ vetted and licensed caregivers. Upwards’ tech-enabled marketplace pairs families with the providers that best meet their needs, works with employers offering child care benefits, and supports government partners in making child care assistance programs more efficient.
For daycare centers, Upwards assists with marketing, filling vacant spots, finances and billing, while also offering access to curricula, plus photo and video updates for parents. Upwards has been a Vero customer since 2018. With its vast network of customers, requirements around sensitive information, and the personal nature of the service it provides, the startup has unique messaging needs.
Using Vero, the team has been able to build its own custom tech stack to suit those needs.
As Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Matt Reilly says: "Parents are making one of the most important decisions of their lives when they choose child care. We understand that deeply. It's not just about finding a spot, it's about trusting someone with the person they love most in the world."
Before Vero, the Upwards team used Autopilot for its messaging. However, according to Matt, the lack of flexibility made it "a complete non-starter".
Once a customer had started on the journey, it was very difficult to change any details about them, he explains.
"This was a massive limitation, because our customer properties are changing constantly."
Upwards required a tool flexible enough to adapt to the changing status and needs of daycare providers, in real time.
Equally, front of mind was the fact that finding the right daycare is an incredibly important and personal decision for families. Messaging had to be genuinely individualized - on a massive scale, while being managed by a relatively small team.
Director of Marketing Nikki Nilan explains: "We're working with families making deeply personal decisions, and small business owners who have poured everything into their work. That means we want every message to come from a place of genuine understanding — not just an update, but a reassurance. When you're managing relationships at the scale we are, the challenge is making sure no one ever feels like just another customer in the system."
Upwards uses Vero to connect with customers via email, while an integration with Zapier allows for messaging through its mobile app, and a Twilio integration enables SMS communications.
"We need to be able to connect with users based on whatever is their preferred mode of communication," Matt says.
"Sometimes pushing people to install the app - depending on which level of engagement they're at - it's just not the appropriate time."
According to Nikki, about 95% of the time the team utilizes Vero's workflow features, rather than newsletters. Newsletters are reserved predominantly for one-time communications, such as holiday billing reminders — anything that doesn't require a follow-up.
In fact, looking across all of Upwards's communications, Nikki estimates that only 10–15% are designed to engage new customers. The vast majority are keeping existing families, caregivers, and business partners informed and supported throughout their relationship with the platform.
"Vero has become the engine behind every touchpoint we have with families, providers, and partners," Nikki continued.
Upwards also uses Vero for internal messaging, including via Slack integration. Through this, certain customer events trigger alerts for the relevant teams, allowing them to act quickly.
For the Upwards’ team, one of the key benefits is the all-important flexibility to tailor messaging to a customer at any given time.
"If there's an urgent need to change something or create something, it can be live for our customers in a matter of minutes to a few hours, depending on what it is. That's pretty big for us, as a scale-up."
Upwards also has multiple integrations with other tools, effectively using Vero as a base to create its own tech stack to perfectly suit its unique messaging needs.
For example, when parents visit daycare centers on a tour, they're invited to give feedback. Upwards can leverage those responses to support the individual daycare provider.
It can alert them if they receive a certain amount of sub-three-star reviews within a certain timeframe, and automate a protocol to help them improve in that area.
Historically, this would have been done by analysing a spreadsheet, Matt explains.
"This tool allows us to be on top of things in the moment. That wouldn't have been possible without a significant amount of engineering work."
Elsewhere, when matching parents with care providers, Upwards collects as many preferences from parents as possible, while constantly gathering data from daycares on their availability and what they're offering.
"Based on real-time capacity at the daycare, we are able to let parents know when opportunities become available, in real time," Matt says.
"That really helps them find the right place for their kid, and we can do that with a relatively low level of effort."
Given the complexity of Upwards's use cases, there is still some input from engineering required. But Matt says it's still "far easier" than having to build everything in-house, from scratch.
"Vero 100% saves us engineering time - it's not completely engineering independent, but it is far more flexible."
Generally, the marketing team only now work with engineering when another team has a request they can't yet execute themselves - and as Vero releases new features, even those moments are becoming fewer. It's a shift that frees engineering up to focus on what they do best: building.
Today, Vero touches almost every part of Upwards's business.
Crucially, it allows for personalized messages, at an enormous scale, while taking into account the fast-changing nature of its customers' journeys.
Matt explains: "We have a pretty complex customer management system. The lifecycle of a customer can change multiple times throughout the day, so being able to create complex workflows that allow us to look at a customer based on their specific journey is really important to us."
Campaigns are being built by one, two or three people, compared to multiple in the past.
Equally, if a notification has to be distributed to team members, "most of the time it takes 15 minutes tops to create the whole thing, and include all of the customer's information," Nikki says.
"Vero is definitely a core part of our toolkit," Matt adds.
"It touches every part of the customer lifecycle; it touches our internal operations and our quality control - it's pretty important to us."
“We have a pretty complex customer management system. The lifecycle of a customer can change multiple times throughout the day, so being able to create complex workflows that allow us to look at a customer based on their specific journey is really important to us.
