19 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F5

The next progress, problems, plans (PPP) post will be on Christmas Eve! Final sprint now towards our goal of having Mayday Recharger live by the end of the year. Lots still to do but we’re making great progress and are still on track. Here’s the latest fortnightly 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;

• Finish the first draft of the Ultimate Guide and have all website content on track for launch - met;

• Do the best job I can of building buzz about Mayday Recharger at AccountingWebLive - met;

• Identify both the Xero and transfer pricing/international expansion content people for us to work with as elastic capacity - partially met;

• Resubmit our SEIS application - met;

• Have a new plan that I am enacting for finding our future transfer pricing team member - partially met.

Progress

We’ve covered a lot of ground over the last two weeks. Whilst there is still a lot to do before launch, I’m delighted with the progress towards our ambitious goal to have version 1 of Mayday Recharger live by the end of the year:

• The build of Mayday Recharger continues to go excellently. We’re making good progress on the integration with Xero. There will be a bunch of stuff to tie up at the end. But I’m confident that we will have a sellable product by the end of the year. We now have 17 potential users on our waitlist, which is great;

• I’ve completed the first draft of Ultimate Guide To Transfer Pricing for Startups & SMEs. I’ve learnt a huge amount from writing it. I’m really excited about the value it can bring to our audience of non-transfer pricing and non-tax specialists. It’s now out for feedback from a combination of startup/SME finance leaders and transfer pricing experts. I’ve advised them not to read it too close to coffee consumption, what with the risk of overdose from that plus the natural caffeine from 4,000 words on the pricing of intercompany transactions for tax purposes! Excited to get their feedback and then finalise it into content we can use for marketing purposes;

• Really pleased I went to AccountingWebLive last week. The new Omicron strain, combined with accountants being busy in December meant there weren’t as many attendees as I’d anticipated. The upside was that this enabled longer conversations with those that were there. I got a great response to Mayday Recharger, especially from Joe David of Nephos/Myna (see picture below). If a regular picture tells a thousand words, this must be worth at least ten-thousand! The demo with Joe alerted me to the fact that many accountants will have multiple entities for different areas of their business and therefore need to make recharges between them. This could be a great starting point for early users of Recharger that I’m following up with other accountants. I also got to speak to lots of tech businesses about my Partnering Accountants: Amplification programme. I was thrilled with the level of interest. I’m going to expand it to a maximum of five businesses from the start of 2022. It looks like I’ll now have the good problem to have of deciding which five businesses to work with, which I’m thrilled about;

• Excellent progress on the elastic content capacity. We’ve started working with Alice, who is a second year university student. She did a great job of helping with t-shirts and flyers for AccountingWebLive. We realised we could use broader help beyond transfer pricing/international expansion content writing (which Alice will also be doing) for the commercial, marketing and operational aspects of Mayday. We’re going to work with Alice part-time for 10 hours a week into next year. This has given us the resource to start building our social media profiles and start posting content (see Mariah’s excitement about the launch of Mayday Recharger below!). A request: We’re building our following so would hugely appreciate it if you would follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter! We’ve had a great response to me posting on LinkedIn for someone who knows Xero to write about relevant categories of Xero-integrating technology products for our target customers at the largest end of Xero’s user base. I’ve got calls booked in today with potential candidates to work with;

• Our SEIS advance assurance application has been resubmitted. HMRC advise that 80% of applications are dealt with within 15 days and 95% within 40 days;

• I haven’t come up with any kind of new plan to find our future transfer pricing team member. But a couple of connections, one I saw at AccountingWebLive, have introduced me to transfer pricing professionals who are interested in discussing Mayday and our plans, which is great. I also have a call booked in with an adviser who is a retired senior transfer pricing professional to get his advice on how to pursue this.

Problems

• Very few. Lots to do on the product and website prior to launch. But I’m confident we’re on track;

• I did some SEO and PPC research this week and there are minimal search volumes around transfer pricing and intercompany recharging. So this has clarified that it’s unlikely to be a channel we rely on for customer acquisition near term.

Plans

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• Complete the build of the first version of Mayday Recharger so that it can be used by initial users;

• Complete the setup of our social media and website, including related items like our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy;

• Choose and get everything in place with my five businesses for Partnering Accountants: Amplification, so that we can start working together from January;

• Decide on and start working with a writer for the Xero related content for our target customers.

That’s everything for now. Look forward to posting the next PPP on Christmas Eve when we have a sellable product of Mayday Recharger live! Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!