171 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F39
A brilliant two weeks. Momentum compounding on multiple fronts. Lots of exciting developments: Balancer (and the multi-entity suite of products it completes) getting great feedback, great progress and new opportunities for our next product RevRec, a flurry of new sign ups, great foundations on marketing and new experiments. Here’s the latest progress, problems, 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 Last Two Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
We’re all set to experiment from a go to market perspective over the coming weeks, testing different channels to acquire customers. Run our first two experiments - met;
Fundraising will continue to be my big focus. I’m not going to set targets on things I can’t control. But I’m optimistic I can make significant progress over the next two weeks - not met. Not given it enough focus;
Have our spec finalised for revenue recognition - met
Progress
We launched Balancer two weeks ago as the third product in our trilogy suite for multi-entity businesses. The reception has been great. So many exciting suggestions for future enhancements that can deliver even more value. This completely unprompted LinkedIn post was the icing on the cake. Graham is the reigning Xero South Africa MVP (power user). We’ve got such an exciting foundation with the full multi-entity suite we have live;
We’re making great progress on RevRec. This is a big step for us as it marks us developing products that are also relevant for single entity businesses. This considerably increases our addressable market. We’ve completed the spec and Josh is doing great work on the designs, his first product work for us having been focused on our new website and brand sign joining in April as Head of Design. In building RevRec, we have the exciting opportunity to partner with a subscription platform. We will use their customers’ sales data to inform the revenue recognition treatment that applies in Xero. The partnership is moving really well. We’ve also discovered a similar opportunity for customers of Stripe. A chance meeting at an event last week led to a discussion and demo. Lots of pain there we could build a brilliant solution to address;
We will be implementing a new pricing structure this month. We’ve settled on the paradigm for this. I need to do some work today to put some numbers to it so we can start work on implementation;
We’ve had a great week for new trial sign ups. We are a Staff Pick on the Xero App Store at the moment, which significantly increases our profile on there;
Zoe has done some brilliant work updating our Marketing at Mayday document. It’s a structure Bailey put in place when she did some consulting work with us last year. It’s been invaluable to distill what we’ve learnt about our target customers over the last year and build personas around it. We’ve got a clear and exciting plan of marketing experiments we plan to run this month;
We’re booked for Griff, Bailey and I to head to Australia for 2 weeks at the end of August for a trip around exhibiting at Xerocon, Xero’s annual conference. We exhibited in the UK last year and did a similar 2-week trip to Australia to exhibit at the one in Sydney. It was such a valuable trip. Xero used to run regional Xerocons, but now just do one global event. Making it even more impactful to go. We’ve got a great number of customers in Australia now as well. Excited to form a plan in the coming weeks for how we make the most of the trip;
I finally got our 2022 accounts & R&D tax credit claim done. It’s now with our accountants and will hopefully be submitted in the next couple of weeks.
Problems
Fundraising, no bad news. But not enough work on from me in the last two weeks with the final May bank holiday and a day off for my sons’ half term on Tuesday. Bailey starts two weeks on Monday. I really want to have things put to bed by then so I can focus on the business. I’m going to have it as my only goal for the next two weeks to focus the mind;
Product prioritisation only gets more of a challenge. Griff and I have a discussion on it next week. I’m really excited about but simultaneously apprehensive as we will need to make some hard choices about what not to do in the immediate term.
Plans
Goal for the next two weeks:
Get this round of fundraising done before Bailey joins on 19 June.
Look forward to updating in two weeks!