26 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F9

It’s been a great two weeks. A bit of a paradox. I feel we’re simultaneously much closer to building something really exciting with Mayday Recharger. At the same time as being further away from having an initial sellable product. Here’s the latest fortnightly progress, problems, plans (PPP) post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last two weeks.

Goals For the Last Two Weeks

These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:

• Have 10 alpha users setup and using Mayday Recharger with calls booked in to setup a further 10 - met in one sense - we now have 13 alpha testers. Not met in another - I only have 3 further alpha tester calls booked in;

• Done everything we can to be as far through the Xero app certification process - met;

• Finalise goals and roadmap for Q1 that I can cover in detail in the next PPP post - met. See below

Goals For the Quarter (and Year)

Off the back of feedback from alpha users and the opportunity we see with Mayday Recharger (more below), we now see the shape of Mayday’s 2022 differently than we did a few weeks ago. Our previous plan was to start working on our transfer pricing policy creation product in the second quarter. We’ve pushed that back three months. We now anticipate we’re going to be fully focused on Mayday Recharger product development until the middle of the year before our main focus as a founding team can shift.

We’ve set a goal that by the end of the year, we want to have 1,000 groups running their recharges not less frequently than monthly using Mayday Recharger. With a stretch goal of 2,000 groups. Once we get more clarity on our pricing structure we may switch in a revenue goal in place of the number of groups. But right now, we don’t have the feedback on our planned pricing structure to do that.

Our goals for Q1 are:

• 25 paying customers for Mayday Recharger. A customer being a distinct user paying for Recharger, regardless of how many recharge groups they have. We want breadth of users validating they will pay for the product at this stage;

• Raise our SEIS round;

• Recruited both a technical and commercial team member off the back of raising the SEIS round;

• Made a good decision about whether applying to Y Combinator is the right fit for us and now is the right time. If it is, have done the best we can to ensure a successful application;

• Found the transfer pricing team member we will need for our transfer pricing policy creation product and provisionally agreed terms, even if they are not yet in any notice period;

• Be able to set (and achieve) ambitious weekly (or monthly if a better fit) KPIs/OKRs/[alternative three letter acronym] targets for growth and product in Q2 and onwards;

• Have version 0.1 of our Intuit-style follow me home framework in place as a founding team for staying close to our customers to understand their needs. We recognise the need to get this in place from day 1 to avoid it being crowded out by the day to day. 

Progress

Great progress in the last two weeks:

• Thrilled to have 13 alpha testers set up on Mayday Recharger. The feedback and insight we’re getting from them is immense. There is significantly more complexity to peoples’ intercompany recharge needs than we were previously aware of. The value that Mayday Recharger can bring and the opportunity is consequently greater than we’d anticipated. We’ve got a product development pipeline that is getting bigger by the day! We’ve broken down that pipeline into four categories: 1) pre-commercial launch requirements. The must haves that are so critical to effective use of Mayday Recharger that we can’t launch without them, 2) Priority 1 post launch smaller enhancements, 3) Priority 2 post launch smaller enhancements, 4) Big additions - e.g. integrating with more accounting systems beyond Xero. We’re targeting end of February to have all of the pre-commercial launch items complete and are making great progress. Then it will be a hell for leather sprint to address the other roadmap items by the middle of the year;

• We’ve made excellent strides with the Xero approval process. They have been really helpful and responsive. We’ve prepared the first draft of our listing for their app store, which we’ll finalise within the next week. Xero has helped alleviate the roadblock we had of only 25 group organisations being able to connect to us as a test app. And have raised that limit to 75, which has enabled us to cater to the 13 alpha testers and get their feedback. We’ve also registered to exhibit at Xerocon London in July, which will be a great opportunity to attract new users for Mayday Recharger;

• We’re now working part-time with two second year university students: Alice, who we started working with late last year and did a great job leading on our website. She’s leading on preparing some design templates we need for marketing Mayday. And also building our help centre that we will need for commercial launch at the end of February. We’ve also started working with Zoe, who’s made a brilliant start this week leading on our social media and working on our Xero marketplace listing and SEO/PPC. 

• We need to put a billing system in place before the end of February. This is a really important decision given the core part of our infrastructure it will be. We narrowed it down to Stripe and Paddle and are in good shape to make our decision by the end of this week.

Problems

• No major problems. There’s been repeated confusion with alpha testers about how our product interacts with Xero. With testers thinking there are bugs when it’s been a product of them needing to manually sync data between the two systems. Within our pre-launch roadmap is work so that this sync can be carried out automatically, which seems to be the base level user expectation from how other apps connect with Xero;

• We had a feature request from one user to be able to point their recharge rules at a different type of transaction (one that had been posted to the balance sheet, not the profit and loss account which is where we have exclusively focused). We made a change to the product to cater to this before discovering that there were significant knock on complexities introduced. We’ve not introduced this feature for now and are getting additional validation about the need for it. I could and probably should have identified those knock on implications before we built the feature.

Plans

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• Get to 20 alpha users for Mayday Recharger;

• Be on track for end of February commercial launch with all of the constituent parts that entails: product development, billing system, help centre and Xero app store;

• Have a regular daily cadence of great social media posts that are driving new sign ups to our waitlist.

Really excited about the progress we’re making and the imminent commercial launch. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!