15 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F3

It’s been another excellent two weeks as we build momentum towards our target of launching a sellable version 1 of Mayday Recharger by the end of the year. Here’s the latest fortnightly progress, problems and plans (PPP) post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last two weeks. And plans for the coming two.

Goals For The Quarter

The first PPP post 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:

• 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 - met;

• Have written the first draft of our intro guide to transfer pricing and shared it for feedback - not met;

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

• Confirm 3 businesses for the partnering with accounting firms coaching programme that I’m planning to spend 20% of my time running for the next 9-12 months - to both fund living costs and the development of Mayday - partially met - 2/3;

• Have two great calls with potential advisory board members - met.

Progress

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

• We’ve made great progress on both the back end (the sub-surface mass of the iceberg) and front end user interface of Mayday Recharger (see image below). In building the product, we encountered two complexities in how our recharge rules need to interact that we hadn’t conceived of at the design stage. One was a great pick up from William, who we’re working with as a contractor in building version 1. We quickly revised our designs accordingly and are full steam ahead. 

• I have two businesses that I’m starting work with next week on my Partnering Accountants: Amplification coaching programme. Both are brilliant companies with great teams and fantastic propositions that I’m really excited to be working with;

• Really pleased with the progress on the advisory board side. We’re really fortunate to have an adviser who is a deep transfer pricing specialist. His advice in relation to the rules interaction complexities that we ran into in product development was absolutely invaluable;

• We’ve got a Wix template that we’re happy with for our initial go-live website and have identified and divided up the content we need to prepare;

• Prepared an initial go to market plan for Mayday Recharger broken down by launch and post-launch. We’ll just be available to users of Xero for both of these stages. I found it really helpful to think about how we acquire our first 1,000 customers not as a singular target but rather as 20 blocks of 50. As part of this work, we also made some great initial progress on pricing. We used group/consolidated financial reporting applications as an analogue, given the similarities in value metric of the number of organisations in the corporate group. We’ve got a framework that we’re happy with. We’ll need to decide the precise price levels in due course;

• We submitted our trademark application. This cost £350. The gov.uk portal for submitting it was really easy to use. The main challenge was deciding what classes, and what terms within those classes, to include in the application. I approached this by looking at the trademark applications of analogous products and services (SeedLegals, TaxScouts & big professional service firms) to what Mayday will be initially, and what we anticipate it will become in due course.

Problems

• Not a problem per se. In moving quickly to get an initial sellable product live by the end of the year, we are consciously taking on some technical debt in Mayday Recharger. An analogy would be you’re building a house and decide to fit single glazed windows because it allows you to complete the work faster. But to live in the house long term, you know you’re going to want to eventually replace them with double or triple glazed windows. We’re consciously making some of these decisions in getting version 1 live. Our product will still be able to work brilliantly for users and so it’s in our best interests to optimise for speed. But to scale long term we know we will need to come back and refactor our product in due course;

• I’ve made some progress on the first draft of the guide to transfer pricing. But have let other things squeeze it out and I haven’t got a first draft that I’ve shared yet;

• I’m thrilled to have the two businesses I’m working with for Partnering Accountants: Amplification. I had another that was a great fit to get to my target of an initial three businesses. But due to an internal project at their end, there’s now no way they could get going until early 2022. It was one of those situations where nothing could be done and it would have been counterproductive and futile to try and force it. I’m excited to pick up with them subsequently and this opened the opportunity to engage with a couple of other businesses I’d had on my list as great potential fits;

• I reached out to 14 people with transfer pricing experience with the message below - on both LinkedIn and via email where I had their address. I only got one response. I enjoyed the conversation and will keep in touch. But that was a much lower response rate than I’d have hoped for. In hindsight, I should have A/B tested the final part of the message below. And instead of making it about looking to hire in due course, made it about asking their advice and perspective on what we’re doing with Mayday. Working out what that future transfer pricing team member looks like, and then finding them, is going to be a really interesting challenge.

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. Specifically within that to prepare demo accounts scenarios for testing purposes alongside our beginning the work to connect Mayday Recharger to Xero;

• I want to have all website content prepared for the various website pages, including the terms and privacy policies, by the end of November. I need to take a big chunk out of that in the next two weeks, including getting the draft of the transfer pricing guide circulated early next week;

• There are a few pieces of content that we’d like to prepare. We’d benefit from having some elastic capacity from a writer we could call upon here. In my head, this will be someone with an economics/business mind, but doesn’t need any prior knowledge of transfer pricing, who can write well and has some spare capacity alongside studying or their current job. I want to find at least one candidate for this in the next two weeks. If anyone reading this post is interested, or knows someone who might be, please do get in touch at davidtuck1983@gmail.com;

• As part of the go to market plan, we need to do some basic SEO and PPC work in advance of launch. It’s not something I have any skills or experience in. So I’ll be looking for someone who does, who’d be willing to spare some time to share their advice to help steer me through the basics. As above - if anyone reading this post could help, or knows someone else who might be able to, please do get in touch at davidtuck1983@gmail.com;

• Looking ahead to the first quarter of next year post a successful launch, we can see a scenario where we’d need two team members, one Software Engineering, one commercial all rounder (Support, Sales, Marketing, Operations) to be able to accelerate. And how c.£100k of additional funds could make a massive difference at that point. So I’m going to complete our SEIS advance assurance application in the next two weeks so that’s there if we did decide to go down that route;

• I want to find an additional great fit business for the Partnering Accountants: Amplification coaching programme.

That’s everything for now. Hopefully another great couple of weeks ahead. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!