28 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F10

It’s been two weeks of solid progress towards our near term goal of being commercially live by the end of February. We’ve addressed two of our big pre-launch product requirements. We’ve passed a major milestone in being fully certified by Xero as a connected app. Here’s the latest fortnightly 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 Quarter

The ninth PPP post provided more detail on our goals for the first quarter of 2022. To summarise, these are:

• 25 paying customers for Mayday Recharger

• Raise our SEIS round;

• Recruited both a technical and commercial team member

• Make and execute a good decision about applying to Y Combinator

• Found our transfer pricing team member and provisionally agreed terms

• Be able to set (and achieve) ambitious weekly (or monthly if a better fit) 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

Goals For the Last Two Weeks

These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:

• Get to 20 alpha users for Mayday Recharger - partially met - and not fully met by choice;

• 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 - partially met - Great advances in the product. Xero app store approval complete. Help centre making good progress. Billing system we may need to leave out for end of Feb launch;

• Have a regular daily cadence of great social media posts that are driving new sign ups to our waitlist - partially met - Daily cadence in place but not driving waitlist sign ups yet.

Progress

Pleased with our continued momentum in the last two weeks:

• We’re now at 17 alpha testers. We’ve been hugely fortunate with the quality and volume of feedback we’ve received. We decided not to press on to 20 alpha users as right now, volume of users and feedback is not a limiting factor for us;

• We’ve been approved by Xero as a certified app. They took us through a rigorous process, whilst moving really quickly which was great. We have prepared the content we need to be listed on their app marketplace. We can go live whenever we want, which we’ll do as soon as we have all of the pre-launch product features in place;

• We’ve chosen Paddle over Stripe for our billing system. Paddle’s fees at 5% of the transaction were higher than Stripe’s headline rates. When we factored in the likelihood of needing to use a separate subscription management product like Chargebee on top of Stripe, the cost differences were negligible. Paddle manages and indemnifies you for international sales taxes, as well as managing your billing support. This, plus having minimised technical overhead from having just one billing platform, swung our decision. It’s likely we won’t have time to implement Paddle in full before the end of February, but it will be a priority project post launch;

• We’ve made big improvements to our product over the last two weeks. We’ve overhauled how we sync with Xero so that we now sync automatically at least once a day and also when a user logs in. This had been a source of confusion for test users. We’ve also transformed our calculations engine, where our users’ recharge rules are used to calculate their intercompany recharges. We needed this to cater to how transactions in Xero and/or their recharge rules might change over time;

• We’ve made good progress on our help centre content in advance of having this live for launch. Alice, the second year university student we’re working with part time, is doing a great job of leading on this.

• We’ve just started spending £100 a week experimenting with ads on LinkedIn and Twitter. Zoe, the second year university student we’re working with part time, has done a great job getting this up and running.

Problems

• One of our test users is a top 20 accounting firm. They were very positive about the product but then couldn’t find a client to test it on. This likely reflects that big accounting firms are not best placed to be test users of new software products, especially when they are using the product for their clients;

• We’ve only had 3 waitlist sign ups in the last two weeks. Zoe is doing a brilliant job on social media. We’re putting out great regular content on LinkedIn and Twitter. But right now we have very small followings.

Plans

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• Be Live!

• Have had at least 5 more waitlist sign ups

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post! See you when we’re commercially live!