206 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F42
An up and down two weeks. Thankfully the up came second! Disappointing with Emily deciding not to join. But there’s opportunity in everything. And we continue to make great progress on multiple fronts with fundraising in great shape to close by 4 August. 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:
Get fundraising done and dusted - not met;
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 - met.
Progress
We’ve had some brilliant new customers come through over the last two weeks. Thrilling to see the value they’re getting from the product suite;
I had all but conceded that we’d experienced our first ideal customer churning. Their card details had expired and, in spite of lots of chasing, they hadn’t entered new ones. Turns out the team member had been on holiday for 4 weeks and emailed yesterday to say they’re still very much using us. This felt like a new customer win!;
Our new pricing, with the introduction of a lite plan and free version of our Balancer product has gone well. Claudio and Pauline have done brilliant work on this. We’ve had a number of businesses re-engage who hadn’t followed through with using us with our old price regime;
Funding is progressing really well. We have 15 new direct investors ready to close (this is excluding the money we’re raising via the SPV). We’re in good shape to close everything by Friday 4 August. I’m then on holiday before we go to Australia for two weeks. I just need to put the finishing touches to the round next week;
Our Australia trip is taking great shape. Bailey’s been doing a brilliant job of organising. We’re at Xerocon, Xero the accounting system we integrate with’s annual conference, for 2 days in Sydney. We’ve got some other great side events organised to make the most of the trip;
Our content series on building an enterprise-level system with Xero is making fantastic progress. Zoe has done a brilliant job of leading it, with great input from Bailey. There will be 12 webinars in the second half of September with video, audio and written content around them. We’ve lined up some brilliant solutions to partner with and experts to speak on the webinars. It’s shaping up to be invaluable content;
We’re clear on our hiring plans. We’ll pick up how we address the design remit when we’re back from Australia. Emily not joining us has created an really exciting opportunity to pick up a discussion with a candidate we spoke to earlier in the year.
Problems
We were initially gutted about Emily deciding not to take the Commercial Lead role. She’d come in for our Q3 kick off two Fridays ago. We’d then all been for drinks together. It was feeling like a great fit. What was meant to be her first day the following Monday started well, but ended without her signing her contract. First thing Tuesday morning, we had a call where she communicated that she’d decided the role wasn’t for her. We’d had an early heads up that Emily was moving to the UK. We moved fast because of the scale of the opportunity. In retrospect we may have moved too fast and effectively, before Emily had decided what she wanted from a work perspective out of her time in the UK. Ultimately, we’re hugely grateful that she took the difficult decision early. From past experience, these things can rumble on for a while so it was great that we were able to get there so early on. If it wasn’t, as is clear now, the right thing for her, it was never going to be the right thing for us;
Fundraising is moving well but getting hold of people with summer holidays in full swing is more of a challenge than it is at other times.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks:
Is just one goal. Get fundraising done and dusted by 4 August.
Look forward to updating in two weeks!