29 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F11
We were planning to be commercially live by the end of February. We are not. And are now planning to go live on the 20 April. At the same time, I couldn’t be more thrilled about developments over the last couple of weeks and what it means for the long term future of Mayday. 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. These have largely been rendered moot by the decision to push back our launch until 20 April. The goal between now and the end of March is:
Make as much product development progress as we can with the development capacity we have;
Get our go to market infrastructure in place - e.g. tracking analytics and as much testing as we can of acquisition channels for launch
Goals For the Last Two Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
Be Live! - not met
Have had at least 5 more waitlist sign ups - not met. Only 2 in the fortnight
Progress
We have the Xero app approval in place for Mayday Recharger. We absolutely could launch if we wanted to. I’ve been re-reading The Lean Startup, which has been instructive. It challenged me to ask “what are we seeking to learn by launching now?” We have lots of feature enhancements and additions that we know we want to make, as well as infrastructure to add in like our billing and trial system. Based on the feedback from our alpha testers, it’s very likely those feature gaps are critical to use and peoples’ willingness to pay for Mayday Recharger. That itself is not a barrier to launching now. We could launch, get even more feedback than we get from our test users and then iterate fast on the product to deliver what people need. That presupposes we have the capacity to move fast based on feedback. My Co-Founder is in his notice period. He is presently our entire development capacity. We won’t have the ability to iterate as fast as we’d like until mid-April. We also only have one chance to make a first impression when we launch. Expectations are higher as a commercially live product than a product that is in a test phase. The stakes are likely to be even higher than they might otherwise be. I have a track record and network within the accounting technology industry that means we’re more likely to get people taking a look at the product. We concluded that the marginal learning benefits we’d get from launching now (i.e. the value of the additional feedback beyond the great cohort of test users we already have) did not outweigh the costs. Those costs being a lesser, and potentially outright bad, first impression from users frustrated by gaps that we’re not able to address as quickly as we would like, and they expect. As well as a likely much more stressful notice period for my Co-Founder. It’s the right decision. In hindsight we probably could have seen it coming but driving towards the original end of February launch plan hasn’t done us any harm;
We’ve made some significant improvements to the way our Calculations engine works over the last couple of weeks. These are key to both it’s stability and usability;
We had two new waitlist sign ups in the last fortnight who we have contacted about testing the product in the coming weeks.
Problems
We’ve spent £200 on LinkedIn and Twitter ads in the last two weeks. We’ve targeted them as far as possible at people who are users of Xero, the accounting system we are integrating with on day one. We had nearly 400 website visits from our ads but no conversions to our waitlist. We’ve paused our ads for now to put in place more detailed analytics so that we can form hypotheses about why our ads are not converting. Before we’ll then start testing again;
We had an idea for how we triangulate relevant users even further on LinkedIn. We wanted to target our ads based on people who followed the company pages of both Xero and one of a range of reporting applications that would heavily indicate a need for Mayday Recharger. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a way to target LinkedIn ads to followers of another company’s (i.e. other than Mayday) followers.
Time to develop the product!
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Make as much progress as we can on the roadmap of feature additions and enhancements we have for the product;
Mayday Recharger is a product that you use monthly as part of your month end finance processes. We have two bites at the cherry before launch. I want to get at least 10 calls booked in for the next two weeks with test users to run Recharger for their February month end;
Use the additional time before launch and us becoming a fully fledged Co-Founded startup to advance my Partnering Accountants work. This is the work I plan to spend 20% of my time on for the remainder of 2022 to prevent me from needing to take a salary from Mayday. I want to get a website up and have a couple of ideas for revenue generating projects off the back of that.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!