13 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F2

It’s been a brilliant two weeks. Here’s the latest fortnightly progress, problems and plans (PPP) post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last fortnight. And plans for the coming two weeks.

Goals For The Quarter

The first PPP post two weeks ago provided more detail on our goals for the end of the year. To summarise, these are:

• Have a sellable version 1 of Mayday Recharger live;

• 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;

• 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.

Goals For the Last Two Weeks

These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:

• 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.

Progress

I’m thrilled with the progress over the last two weeks:

• We revised the designs for Mayday Recharger in Figma on Wednesday 20 October. The previous week, I had booked in seven calls on Thursday 21 October to get feedback on these revised designs. All calls were with people we spoke to during the initial round of demo feedback. One had to cancel at short notice. Across the six calls, I got feedback from seven people. I had two people I wanted to speak to in Australia. With the time difference and my start of day commitment getting my sons ready for school, I was able to combine them onto the same 5.15am call. The Figma designs were hot off the press from the work on Wednesday, so weren’t stitched together as a pseudo product as they were during our initial feedback calls. But as all the people we were speaking to had seen that pseudo product within the last two weeks, and these designs were a refinement of that product, this didn’t prove to be a problem;

• The feedback was excellent and left us confident we were ready to start building version 1. We had a couple of great calls with William on Thursday 21: me to run through the Figma designs from a user perspective so he had the big picture perspective, and my friend who’s helping me oversee the technical development to run through the user stories that had been spec’d out on Github;

• I’ve been away for half term this week. William has really got stuck in which is great and we’ve also been able to make some progress on the user interface designs for the product as well as the backend architecture;

• I recorded this podcast last week. We got talking about Mayday. I was asked whether there was a website where people could find out more and register their interest. There wasn’t when the podcast was recorded on Monday 18 October. But there was a week until the podcast was going to go out. So we got this landing page up.

Problems

• As previously, nothing significant. With regards to Mayday Recharger it feels like it’s all in our control right now to hit our end of year sellable product goal;

• Having now connected on LinkedIn with over 250 people who work in transfer pricing, I put up this post in the hope of flushing out potential team members. One person got in contact, but this was someone I already knew so it’s hard to attribute that to the post. I’m going to try a more direct approach (see below).

Plans

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• Maintain and increase momentum with product development of version 1 of Mayday Recharger so that we remain on track for our end of year sellable product live goal;

• Have written the first draft of our intro guide to transfer pricing and shared it for feedback;

• Reach out to 10 people with transfer pricing experience who could be potential fits for our TP team member to arrange calls/meetings;

• I’m planning to spend 20% of my time on consulting work for the next 9-12 months. To both fund living costs and the development of Mayday. I’ve got an idea for a coaching programme I’m really excited about to best leverage my expertise on how to partner with accounting firms as a channel to market. I’ve been thrilled with the initial interest in this. I’m planning to work with just three businesses at this stage. I want to have started work, or at least have an agreed start date, with those three businesses by the end of the next fortnight;

• Advisory board is still at the early stages. But I’m really excited by the incredible people I have engaged with Mayday as a concept. I have two calls with dream advisory board members in the next two weeks that I want to do a great job of preparing for, executing on and most importantly, learning from.

That’s everything for now. Am so excited about the progress we’re making. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!