35 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F15

Mayday Recharger is live. We launched well. I don’t know what we were expecting in terms of volume of new users. With hindsight that is something we should have taken the time to define explicitly. Almost certainly it was more than the three new users we have had sign up in the two weeks since launch. The honeymoon is over! We’re now getting into our groove to grind it out to get our first customers. Here’s the latest progress, problems, plans (PPP) post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last three weeks (not the normal two weeks as I had a stomach bug and then a family wedding last week). And plans for the coming two.

Goals For the Last Two Weeks

These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:

• Launch well. Do a great job of supporting new users and capturing what their feedback is telling us - met. Proud of how well we launched. Not as many users to support and get feedback from as we’d like;

• 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 - met. See below.

Goals For 20 July

• 100 customers, with 100 reviews on the Xero App Store

• We’ve released automated one click posting intercompany recharges back into Xero, our self-service accountant billing and have a demo’able version of interdepartmental recharges

• Have raised £150-250k of funding

• Have hired our first two team members with that funding

• Have a group of target users that we are regularly observing and learning from for our customer archetype

• Have set our initial company values

Progress

• We launched well. We held our launch webinar on Wednesday 20 April. I really enjoyed presenting with Griff. We had 30 registrants. 10 attended and the remainder were sent the recording, which is accessible on Youtube here. Zoe, the second year university student we’re working with, did a brilliant job organising and promoting the webinar;

• We went live on Xero’s App Store on the afternoon of Tuesday 19 April. We were fortunate to be able to ask three of our test users to leave us reviews in time for Wednesday. They left lovely reviews and it was great to have coverage of our three customer segments: in house finance team, part-time CFO and outsourced accounting firm;

• Our press release got picked up well with great coverage in XU Magazine and in AccountingWEB with an interview I did with Tom Herbert, their technology editor, on the Tuesday before launch;

• Product development marches on. We had a huge release on Tuesday with the release of functionality to easily import your intercompany recharges into Xero via CSV upload. This is the final step of the intercompany recharge process. We’ve now closed the whole loop. We’ll further automate this step over the coming months by replacing the CSV with one click entry into Xero (part of our product goal by 20 July);

• I had a great meeting with an adviser I’ve got to know well over the last eight months. After asking about our upcoming plans, he proactively raised about being keen to invest, which we’re thrilled about.

Problems

• We need more people using the product. We need to learn what it doesn’t do that they need it to. And we need to learn whether and how our current pricing structure needs adjusting. We need to find a way to inject the requisite urgency to get people to start doing their intercompany recharges differently, using us;

• We rushed some changes to the website the Tuesday before launch and only realised later in the week that we hadn’t checked them for mobile optimisation;

• We could have been more out ahead of things with Xero regarding going live on their App Store on Tuesday 19. We had to call in a few favours to get things accelerated on the Tuesday. It was alright on the night, but not to say we can’t learn and do better next time.

Plans

We have cascading leap of faith questions to answer right now. Is there enough of an addressable market for Mayday Recharger at the Xero level of the market (or do we need to broaden the product offering or move up market)? Is the product where it needs to be to satisfy that addressable market (assuming it is there)? Is our pricing right? 

We need more users to answer those questions and to see if we can convert them into paying customers. It doesn’t matter how we get them right now. Re-reading Paul Graham’s Do Things That Don’t Scale was timely for this. Griff is taking the lead on inbound marketing activities. I’m going to focus on outbound (which won’t scale) and supporting new users. 

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• Get our first paying customer - that’s the final piece before we can then start raising investment

• We’re attending Accountex, the national accountancy exhibition, on Wednesday. Make that worth the time investment

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next Progress, Problems, Plans post!