11 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F1

This post marks the start of a new stage of StartingUpAgain. I still plan to post weekly. Starting with this post, I’ll be writing updates of the progress, problems and plans in building Mayday. I plan to write these fortnightly, hence the F1 in this post’s title. In the intervening weeks, I plan to write reflective posts about my learnings on a specific topic or set of connected topics.

Progress

This being the first of these posts, I’m going to summarise the Mayday State of the Union as of today:

• We’re building Mayday Recharger as our first product. It will automate the process of calculating and processing intercompany recharges. More info on Mayday Recharger as our entry point into transfer pricing, which in turn is our entry point into expert knowledge, is in Deciding What To Build;

• Mayday Recharger will integrate with accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to get and post information. We are building an integration with just Xero, as an SME focussed accounting system with a very well developed app ecosystem, for now;

• We’ve just completed a round of demo feedback for our initial concept for Mayday Recharger. We haven’t written any lines of code yet. We presented a pseudo product, a collection of connected screenshots built using Figma, on 16 calls over the last 10 days. The feedback was incredible, in two regards: 1) how useful it was in terms of what target users would need Recharger to do that we hadn’t previously conceived of, 2) how positive it was about the broad concept we presented and the validation we got about the value we can deliver with Recharger;

• A friend is helping oversee the technical development of Mayday Recharger. He has a full time job. Having got the demo feedback, our big limiting factor was development capacity to build version 1 of Mayday Recharger. We’ve just found a freelance engineer, William, that we’re going to work with, initially for the next two months on building version 1. He has extensive experience of working with accounting technology and we’re really excited to start working together. Massive thanks to Stuart Kemp for the introduction here;

• We have our name in Mayday, our domain and our logo. Huge thanks to the fantastic Rory Macrae for your brilliant and generous help on the latter;

• We have £32k of residual cash in the company’s bank account from consulting work I’ve done over the last 15 months. A big chunk of that will be allocated to the development of version 1. And a small proportion will go to payments for the domain name, which are being staggered, interest free, over 24 months.

Problems

• From a Mayday Recharger perspective, there aren’t any significant ones. We’ve got to be really disciplined about the scope of version 1. And then execute really well in building and launching the product. But having addressed the engineering capacity need, it all feels like stuff that is in our power to control;

• Looking ahead to next year, our second product will be focused on transfer pricing policy creation. Then we will need transfer pricing skills and experience that we don’t currently possess as a team. Whilst this is not a bottleneck right now, it will in due course be a pervasive one. I’d love to find the right person as early as possible so that we can start building a relationship now before hitting the ground running next year.

Plans

The goals for the end of the year are:

• Have a sellable version 1 of Mayday Recharger live. There will be the host of enabling activities to complete as part of this:

  • Specifying, building and testing the product;

  • Getting a website live with our terms and privacy policy;

  • Deciding on a pricing and trial approach;

  • Having a billing system;

• Have an initial go to market plan for Mayday Recharger and activities for Q1 of 2022;

• Have a long term technical leader/Co-Founder in place (or in notice period);

• Have an initial advisory board in place;

• Have at least one potential candidate for our future transfer pricing team member we will need for our second product. This person will help shape the product development of our transfer pricing policy creation product as well as engage with customers around it. My current hypothesis is that this is someone with 3+ years of experience of working in transfer pricing, who loves the discipline, but who wants something more than working in a traditional professional services firm or a big corporate in-house transfer pricing role can provide. I’m currently getting out ahead of this by connecting with anyone I come across who works in transfer pricing on LinkedIn. This on the hypothesis that the right person will be curious, follow the breadcrumbs to the information I’m posting about what we’re doing with Mayday, and then make contact;

• Have written version 1 of an intro guide to transfer pricing for startups and SMEs that can serve as a pillar piece of content for us.

The goals for the next two weeks are:

• Refine the designs for a couple of parts of the product in Figma based on feedback from the demo calls. And then validate those with some further calls we have booked in for Thursday 21 October;

• Prioritised product features for version 1 and got the user stories spec’d out;

• Onboard William on 25 October and enable him to get into his stride quickly;

• I’m away for half term from early Friday 22 October so moving forward on other projects will be after I’m back.

That’s everything for now. I’d love any feedback and suggestions on the format for this new stage. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!