34 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F14

Very brief post this one as I’m away for Easter holidays this week. It’s such an exciting time. We are now officially a Co-Founded startup with Griff having gone public as Co-Founder & CTO. We’re geared up for launch on Wednesday (20 April) next week. 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 Last Two Weeks

This was the goal set in the previous PPP post:

• Prepare well and be fully present to make the most out of the three days work with Bailey and Zoe - met. Was invaluable getting Bailey’s input. We have an exciting marketing plan to implement over the coming weeks;

• Implement our trial and billing system ready for launch - met;

• Finalise press release and contact list as well as social media for launch - met;

• 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 - met. Much more still to research and learn. But we’ve got a good foundation 

Progress

• So excited to be working with Griff as Co-Founder of Mayday. He was my dream Co-Founder in starting up again. We’ve made great progress over the last 6 months with the limited capacity he’s had alongside his previous job as a startup CTO. Now we can kick on. I’m writing about the process of finding a great Co-Founder in the Co-Founder mini-series on here;

• The 3 days work with Bailey was fantastic. So insightful. Brilliant to be able to benefit from her process and muscle memory in coming up with a marketing plan for the coming weeks. We have hypotheses about buyer personas as well as some changes to make to our messaging. In particular to frame the benefits of Mayday Recharger within the context of making the month end finance process less painful. Lots to implement from next week;

• Implementing Paddle as our billing system and making changes to our sign up and trial process have taken longer than we anticipated. But we’re in good shape for launch;

• The press release about the launch has gone out to a range of accounting related publications. XU Magazine have said they’ll cover it in their next biweekly publication. And I have an interview booked in with AccountingWeb next week;

• Griff and I coordinated our social media announcements over the past week. With me updating my status for Co-Founder & CEO of Mayday on Monday (17,600 views at the time of writing), publishing about the next chapter (170 views at the time of writing) on Wednesday and posting about Co-Founding with Griff (5,000 views at the time of writing) on Friday. This after Griff had posted his own update about becoming the Co-Founder of Mayday on Friday morning. I’m pleased with the level of engagement with the posts. We added 75 new followers to our LinkedIn company page. But just one new sign up to our waitlist;

• We’re holding a 30 minute launch webinar on Wednesday that Griff and I will be presenting on. We currently have 11 people registered;

• The month-end close research has been thought provoking. Lots to come back to in relation to our medium term strategy post first things first - the launch of Mayday Recharger.

Problems

• Over the next two weeks, we will get invaluable feedback from the market about where and how deep any problems are. I’m excited about where we are. And I am equally excited to learn.

• I made a mistake with the timing of social posts last week. On Monday evening we put a banner on our website about our launch. I should have waited to change my LinkedIn status to Co-Founder and CEO of Mayday, which I did on Monday morning. This minimalist update got way more exposure on social media than any other of my social posts last week. I should have waited to make sure the website banner was ready to capitalise on website visits it generates. It goes to show that you can never tell which social posts will pick up the most traction.

Plans

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• Launch well. Do a great job of supporting new users and capturing what their feedback is telling us;

• It is exactly 3 months from launch to Xerocon, Xero’s (the accounting system we integrate with) annual conference. This will be the first conference we exhibit at. Over the coming days, we will set goals for where we will be by that time.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post! See you in a couple of weeks once we’re live!