32 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F13
It’s been a good couple of weeks. We’re still in a lower gear than we will imminently be, but have been able to move forward some important things over the last two weeks. My Co-Founder is our entire product development capacity right now. His last day in his current job 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
Our goals for the quarter ending today were:
Make as much product development progress as we can with the development capacity we have - met. We’ve made good progress with the limited scope we have right now;
Get our go to market infrastructure in place - e.g. tracking analytics and as much testing as we can of acquisition channels for launch - have done well with this with the work we’ve done with Zoe, a second year university student, who is helping with marketing and growth. Excited to get this reviewed and refined with the contract work we’re doing with my friend Bailey. She’s an experienced startup marketer. We’re starting a 3 day consulting project with her today.
Goals For the Last Two Weeks
This was the goal set in the previous PPP post:
Find someone to work with for the Partnering Accountants work as well as Mayday design related tasks - met. Starting some initial work with Will and Ella next week
Progress
We’ve signed our agreement with Paddle as our billing system and are starting work on implementation;
We’ve implemented our new layout for our revenue rules in the product, which look brilliant. And there’s a marked increase in product speed. I’ll test these over the coming days before we push them to our live product;
We’ve got our press release drafted for launch along with a target list of accounting related press to reach out to. We’re just in the process of getting final contact list before we send it out prior to launch;
Excited to have met Will and Ella who are design oriented university students. With final term coming up, we’re going to initially do test projects with both of them;
Have had a great couple of breakfasts with my Co-Founder the last two weeks. I’ve found the back and forth re our medium and long term strategy really valuable in shaping our thinking. Especially in how it’s led to our identification of month end close tools as an area to explore (see below);
With the launch of Mayday, I want to make sure I continue to develop myself and actively learn. From experience, this can easily be crowded out as a nice to have. I’ve launched Acquiring Wisdom to document my personal learning. I hope this will be valuable to others in their personal development. As well as providing a forcing factor for me to make sure I’m continuing to learn.
Problems
None really. Just the ability to shift gears which is coming very soon!
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Prepare well and be fully present to make the most out of the three days work with Bailey and Zoe;
Implement our trial and billing system ready for launch
Finalise press release and contact list as well as social media for launch;
Learn as much as I can about month end close tools (e.g. FloQast and Blackline). These are targeted are large enterprises as far as I can tell. I’m trying to understand whether they exist at the smaller enterprise/SME level of the market we are targeting with Mayday Recharger. And if not, why not.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!