196 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F41
A great three weeks. We are in the midst of a hugely exciting step change. Two huge new additions to the team in Bailey and Emily. Some excellent progress on fundraising. We are on the cusp! 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:
Onboard Bailey - met;
Set OKRs for Q3 - met;
Accelerate - met!
Progress
Bailey has made a fantastic start as Head of Growth. She’s making a phenomenal impact; everything (and more) that we hoped for with the role. She’s bringing a rigour, discipline and focus to our growth efforts as we build the go to market channels on top of the product market fit we have with the three multi-entity products we have live;
We have seized an amazing chance to be opportunistic. We’ve hired Emily as Commercial Lead (sales, success and partnerships). We met Emily last year on our trip to Australia, where she worked at Xero. We were incredibly impressed. When we found out she was moving over to the UK, we leapt at the chance to create this role. It gives us the ability to do important things earlier and better than we would otherwise have had the ability to. We’re so excited to have Emily join us on Monday;
Fundraising is going well. We’ve had a great response to the SPV: some amazing customers, finance leaders and industry operators are joining us as investors. We’ve had a flurry of new angel commitments. There are a couple of big commitments pending confirmation. I’ve benefitted from making this my sole focus. I’m happy with how the pitch is landing. It feels like we are hopefully on the cusp of getting this done and dusted;
We have our new pricing programme, which includes us making a core version of Balancer available as a free product, going live imminently. Alongside the Balancer free version, the other big change is the introduction of a lite plan. We found we were losing out on groups who only had a small volume of transactions. Feedback on the lite plan has been great with a couple of demo calls recently who challenged our existing pricing given their relatively modest needs;
Bailey is making great progress with the planning for our Australia trip for Xerocon in August. It was a great trip last year. And we have a vastly stronger hand to play this time;
We’re putting together a content series around how to build an enterprise level system around Xero. Zoe is doing a brilliant job leading on this. Excited for the value this can deliver to our target customer of an in house finance team of a larger Xero using business. We’re collaborating with other software solutions and accountants in producing the series. It has had a great level of interest from them so far;
We won our second award! Generation-CFO is a community of 70,000+ finance professionals. We won their Rising CFO Tech award, which we’re thrilled about.
Problems
We decided to stop working with Josh as Head of Design at the end of his 3 month probation period. This was a tough but right decision. He did a great job on our website. But we have a full stack marketing plus product design need. And unfortunately it wasn’t the right fit on the product side;
Am starting to see summer holidays adversely impact fundraising in terms of delays
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks:
Get fundraising done and dusted;
Decide what we are doing about our design remit going forwards as well as, subject to fundraising, decide how we want to be opportunistic with product and engineering remits we have.
Look forward to updating in two weeks!