22 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F7
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great break. And here we go! The first progress, problems, plans (PPP) post of 2022, the first of a new quarter. A year and a quarter that I couldn’t be more excited about. I’m writing this post quickly. There’s still lots to do before we put our website live and get our alpha testers setup on version 1 of Mayday Recharger next week. 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. It also includes a review of the goals for Q4 of 2021.
Goals For the Last Two Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
Put the finishing touches to the product and website so that we are fully launched - not met - almost. We’re running a couple of weeks behind schedule due to bug fixes;
Have at least 10 businesses who are either a) already setup on Mayday Recharger, or b) have calls or meetings booked in to set them up - not met - we have 3 booked in for next week. And more emails awaiting response. Confident we will get to 10, if not by the end of next week then the week after
Set goals for Q1 - not met - provisionally set and discussed. All focus is on launching right now. Only once we’ve launched and truly know where we are, can we lock in goals for the quarter;
Personally recharge(!) ahead of what should hopefully be a very busy Q1 - met - whilst there was more to do over the Christmas period than anticipated, I feel incredibly energised for the quarter and year.
Progress
It’s been a great two weeks:
The product is in great shape. There have been multiple rounds of me exhaustively testing the product using dummy group organisations that we have setup on Xero. They have transactions in them to make use of all the functionality in Mayday Recharger. I’m reminded that there is only ever going to be a partial extent to which you can anticipate bugs in building a product. There will always be some that only come to light through testing. We’ve been able to move rapidly to fix these bugs and refine the product accordingly. There’s still a bit more to do but we’re in touching distance now of having a product we can put in the hands of users next week. I’m really proud of it and excited about the impact it can have for them;
Really excited to have three alpha users already booked in for next week. They will use the product to run their own intercompany recharges. We will then fix any bugs or functionality requirements that this brings to light;
We’ve made a lot of progress on our website based off of the Wix template we’re using. Alice, the second year university student we’re working with, is taking the lead on this. She’s done a great job of getting the foundations in place and recording an explainer video for the homepage. We’re now putting the finishing polish to the design so that the site can go live next week;
We hypothesise that partnerships are going to be an important near term go to market strategy. I’ve got some exciting meetings booked for next week with consolidation/reporting software applications and CFO networks - two groups that are central to that strategy.
Problems
I’d like us to be further ahead on having alpha user calls booked in. Earlier this week, I emailed a host of people we engaged with at the product design stage. Three have come back to book calls for next week. The rest haven’t responded. First week of the year is a busy time for those who are back at work, with many not yet back. In hindsight, I should have contacted people before Christmas to book calls for early January. I think I was reticent about whether we’d be ready by then. But I should have booked in and I could always have pushed them back at the start of the year if we weren’t going to be ready;
We’re making a fundamental refinement to the product that changes how your intercompany recharge rules are set up and interact. Yesterday, I realised that the way we’d originally built this functionality was long run untenable with some rare but far from impossible use cases we need to cater to. The original approach was the consequence of a quick, and inconsequential, decision as part of designing the original wireframes of the product. This made sense as part of moving fast and getting feedback. When it came to actually building the product, I should have recognised that this specific point needed more thought. That way we could have avoided a manageable but still considerable amount of extra work to rework it. On the flip side, at least we picked it up now. It’s 10x the work to make these fundamental reinforcements and migrate people when you have live customers.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Have 10 alpha users setup and using Mayday Recharger;
Have our website live;
Have moved as far as we can with the process to be approved by Xero, the initial accounting system we’re integrating with, as a certified integration. You can only begin this when you have 3 businesses using your product. You then can’t have more than 25 businesses using you without it. So this is a prerequisite to full commercial launch;
Finalise goals for Q1 that I can cover in detail in the next PPP post.
Goals For The Quarter
The first PPP post provided more detail on our goals for the end of Q4. To summarise, these were:
Have a sellable version 1 of Mayday Recharger live
As covered above, almost but not quite there. In the grand scheme of things, being two weeks behind that goal is a great outcome.
Have an initial go to market plan for Mayday Recharger and activities for Q1 of 2022;
Good. Got some great foundations in place and a clear plan. Ready to execute upon once we have the product commercially live.
Have a long term technical leader/Co-Founder in place (or in notice period);
This is a goal I haven’t mentioned anything about in previous PPP posts. Delighted about where we are. Whilst the goal hasn’t been met, I’m optimistic and incredibly excited to hopefully have news to share on that front in the coming weeks.
Have an initial advisory board in place;
Delighted with the advisors I’ve been able to benefit from in the last quarter. As we commercially launch as a fully fledged business, I will look to formalise this.
Have at least one potential candidate for our future transfer pricing team member we will need for our second product;
Really optimistic about where we end the year off the back of a couple of introductions in December. Have follow up calls booked in for January which will clarify exactly where we are
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.
That’s in good shape. As mentioned in the previous PPP post, we likely won’t start publishing any transfer pricing content immediately. We want to establish Mayday Recharger and our intercompany recharge focus in peoples’ minds before we start talking more broadly about transfer pricing. But we have a great foundation here for when we are ready.
And that’s that. Really excited to update you in a couple of weeks when we should have real life users of Mayday Recharger and locked in goals for Q1 of 2022. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!