37 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F16

Mayday Recharger is one month live today! We’ve not yet got our first paying customer, but we’re close. Lots to do, and the list only gets excitingly longer with every conversation we have with our increasing group of amazing power users. Griff and I are both buzzing. We can clearly see such an exciting opportunity. Now to execute on it. Here’s the latest 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

These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:

• Get our first paying customer - that’s the final piece before we can then start raising investment - not met. But getting closer!

• Make attending Accountex, the national accountancy exhibition, worth the time investment - met. Was great (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 have an increasing group of fantastic power users who are pulling features out of us, which is amazing. In the last two weeks, we’ve shipped the ability to duplicate your recharge rules, making it much easier to get set up with us. We increased the length of our trial from 14 to 30 days. We’re a month end product. 14 days risked finance teams waiting until month end to start their trial, potentially forgetting and us then having to wait at least another month until they start benefitting from us. With the risk that this cycle could repeat. 30 days means they can set us up at any point in the month when we’re fresh in mind and then have the ability to trial us on their next month end within that 30 day period. Griff and I do a day each week working together in person. On Wednesday we had a brilliant hour and a half session fleshing out and prioritising upcoming features. We’ve now got an agreed exciting and challenging roadmap to deliver before Xerocon (Xero the accounting system we integrate with’s annual conference, which will be our first event we exhibit at, on 20 July);

• We had a brilliant day at Accountex last Wednesday. It came at a brilliant time. It was great for Griff to have his first experience of an accounting conference in advance of being on our stand for two days at Xerocon. We had an amazing lunch with one of our power users, Luke, which was so insightful;

• We have three customer segments for Mayday Recharger: in house finance teams, fractional CFOs and accounting firms providing an outsourced finance service. We’ve made exciting progress over the last two weeks with a couple of top 20 accounting firms who have large outsourcing teams catering to the larger startups and SMEs that are our target market. We’re also working with some amazing 20-50 people accounting firms who focus on providing a deeper service to a smaller number of larger clients (i.e. ones who are likely to have multiple connected entities and therefore a need for Recharger);

• We’ve got a great clarity on our near to mid term strategy. How we can help larger startups and SMEs automate the pain of taking their accurate bookkeeping and converting it into management information - automating intercompany recharges, interdepartmental recharges and then month end journals. Griff and I had an amazing call with an adviser on Wednesday which was so clarifying in this regard. Steve Jobs talked about 10x engineers. This, like the conversation with Luke at Accountex, was a 10x conversation.

Problems

• We discovered an issue with our sync with Xero that meant we were not pulling through transactions as expected for one of our users. This meant we couldn’t calculate their recharges properly. Great to have their help to identify this and we’ve now fixed the underlying issue;

• Our target 100 customers with 100 reviews by Xerocon is looking ambitious. But we’re getting deep and communicative relationships with our power users, which will be long term invaluable;

• We always need more power users! Massive thanks to Jason, a fractional CFO who is a reader of this blog, who introduced us to one of the businesses he works with. They are a lovely team who instantly saw the value in Recharger (“this is a huge step forward compared to what we do right now”). We prepared this cheat sheet providing summary info and email templates to help people easily make intros.

Plans

Goals for the next two weeks are:

• (Same as last time!) Get our first paying customer - that’s the final piece before we can then start raising investment;

• Be on track for our Xerocon (20 July) product development roadmap.

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