30 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F12
It’s been a sedate couple of weeks, albeit with a significant learning regarding our planned transfer pricing team member. I was ill all of last week with a fever and had a stomach bug this week. My Co-Founder is our entire product development capacity right now. He’s just moved house and is in his notice period at his current job. He’s had very limited time to move the product forward. His last day is 8 April. We’ve then both got a week booked off for Easter. 19 April is when the next stage can truly start, with us going commercially live on 20 April. We’re heading in a great direction, just temporarily in a lower gear than we’ll soon be able to transition to. 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 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:
Make as much progress as we can on the roadmap of feature additions and enhancements we have for the product - met. In that we’ve made the limited progress that was possible. In retrospect, this was a rubbish fluffy goal that could never not be met;
Get at least 10 calls booked in for the next two weeks with test users - met. Have had 9 really useful feedback calls this week and have another one booked in for next week;
Use the additional time before launch and us becoming a fully fledged Co-Founded startup to advance my Partnering Accountants work, including getting a website up - not met. Did some work with a freelancer which advanced my thinking about what I’m looking to do on this. But haven’t found the right person to work with yet
Progress
Really valuable insights from the tester calls. I feel like we’re pretty close to having a product that people will pay for. Had a great discussion with one test user about pricing. He has become an invaluable source of feedback and advice. We’ve gone for a very simple pricing structure for now, where the number of connected entities in your recharge group is the sole determinant of price. This discussion made me think we might need to find a way to segment our customers. So that we don’t deter simpler users whilst also capturing full value from more complex users.
We’re going to start doing some contract work with a friend of mine, Bailey. She is a brilliant startup marketer turned Founder. She is working on her next startup and contracting alongside that. We’re going to do an initial 3 days of work over the coming months with her helping us put our marketing foundations in place. This will help increase the speed and return on the work we are doing with Zoe, the second year university student who is doing a great job of working with us part time on marketing and growth.
We’ve made some great progress on marketing analytics and understanding the journey website visitors are taking on our site. We’ve started a limited (£20 per week) of spend on Twitter to drive more website visits, primarily to give us more data to be able to assess website flows.
Problems
Haven’t found the right person to work with yet on the Partnering Accountants website I want to get live. We’ll also want this person to help with design related tasks for Mayday. I have a couple of calls booked in next week for potential candidates.
This is as much progress as it is a problem. I’ve written before about our anticipated second product which will help startups and SMEs get the transfer pricing professional advice they need. And how for that we will need transfer pricing expertise we don’t currently have as a team. A friend from the accounting tech industry who’d been reading this blog introduced me to a former colleague who has 15 years of experience in transfer pricing. Over the last couple of months we’ve been speaking to him in relation to potentially working together. This week we took the decision not to move forward with working together. He’d spoken with John, the retired transfer pricing partner we’re very fortunate to have as an adviser. John gave him a glowing review. And we got on with him really well. However, we realised we’d been indulging an idea that a middle ground existed. That we could dip our toe in the transfer pricing advice side of things now. But as of today we don’t have any visibility of when we’ll have the product development capacity to start working on this in earnest. We’re getting really interesting suggestions from users about other opportunities for where we could take the functionality we’re building in Mayday Recharger. So we likely won’t have this visibility for at least a few months yet. Startups die of indigestion rather than starvation. I find it valuable to apply the “hell yeah” or “no” decision framework. And we couldn’t get to a “hell yeah” decision to work with this person, as much as we liked him and capable as he is. This has been a valuable learning for us that there’s no point pursuing any kind of transfer pricing team member recruitment until we know when we’re going to be shovel ready on our transfer pricing product.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Find someone to work with for the Partnering Accountants work as well as Mayday design related tasks
And that’s it! I’m not going to set goals for the sake of it. The current low gear we’re in for the next month precludes anything more substantive. Our capacity to move faster and set goals will change dramatically soon
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!