146 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F36
Yesterday was Mayday’s first birthday. We launched on 20 April 2022. Griff and I were already really pleased with where we are, one year in. On Wednesday evening we got the icing and cherry on the cake when we were named as Xero’s Emerging App Partner of the Year award. We are absolutely thrilled. Every business has problems. We have lots of great ones and only one frustrating one. Fundraising continues to make progress but much slower than I’d like. As previously, I’m completely confident it is when, not if. I’d just like the when to be sooner! Here’s the latest progress, problems, plans (PPP) post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last three weeks. And plans for the coming two.
Goals For the Last Three Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
Close the funding round - not met;
Release Balancer in beta - met.
Progress
Xero is the (currently, sole) accounting system we integrate with. All of our customers are Xero users. They run annual awards for the 1,200+ software products that integrate with them. We won their Emerging App Partner of the Year award on Wednesday evening. This is huge for us. The Xero awards are the only non-pay to play (buy a table / sponsor another award and lo and behold you win another award) in our industry. It was an incredible evening and really lovely to be able to celebrate with the team;
We’ve added 8 more customers since the last PPP post, now at 33 total. Of those 33, 11 are on annual plans, which we’re proud of for the vote of confidence it shows in the enduring value we’re delivering;
We’ve had 6 more Xero App Store reviews. Now 46 total (all 5*). Just thrilled with the quality of what people are posting about us;
Josh has made a phenomenal start as Head of Design. His first project is an overhaul of our website. The designs are looking incredible. It’s a massive design and brand step change moment for us with Josh joining;
Bailey is now in her 2 month notice period before joining as Head of Growth, which we’re incredibly excited about. She was able to join for the Xero awards on Wednesday which was great;
Zoe started full-time on Monday as Commercal Executive. She’s proving a massive asset to the team, delivering a fantastic quality of work;
Balancer (our third product, for keeping intercompany loan accounts in balance) is now in beta. We’ve had double digit beta testers register proactive interest and set up to test, which is much higher than we’ve had for prior products. Their feedback over the coming days will dictate the timings to full launch. Claudio has done an amazing job driving the development of Balancer. Surreal that he’s only been with us for 2 months.
Problems
Funding is slow. I think I may have made a mistake in wasting time on a bunch of solo General Partner funds who could invest larger amounts. That was all well and good but I’m now not convinced that those funds ever invest without their being another fund leading and validating the round, which we don’t/won’t have. I could have identified this earlier. All of the fundamentals for us are great as a business, and they only get better with more customers and the award win. Monday is set aside to take stock and think about our ideal investor profile and how we best close the round with the hand we have;
An increasing breadth and depth of good problems to have. All by way of choosing what we focus on. Griff and I have really noticed this from a product roadmap prioritisation perspective. With every new product comes a list of enhancements we’d love to make to deliver even more value to customers. Pauline is doing some great work with a big enhancement to BRAG (for cross entity bank reconciliation, our second product). But allocating out this product development capacity is only going to get more of a challenge. We had a customer who was ready to pay if we could deliver one of these enhancements. We had a similar situation recently where we decided to build the necessary functionality and that proved a great success. With the relevant user becoming a customer and now power user and advocate for us. In the most recent case we didn’t have the same conviction about the user being an ideal early adopter and potential power user. So decided not to shift priorities around. We’re only going to get more and more of these good problem to have trade offs.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks:
Post beta feedback, set and achieve launch for Balancer;
New website live;
Fundraising decide upon and execute new plan.
Look forward to updating in two weeks!