49 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F26
It’s been a good three weeks with the hugely exciting landmark of our first team member joining with Grace starting this week. I was off last week for half term. It always takes a day or so to ramp back up fully. Things are going well. We couldn’t want for a better position and opportunity than we have. We need to move faster. Here’s the latest progress, problems, plans (PPP) post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last three weeks. And plans for the coming two.
Goals For the Last Three Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
Make great progress on funding - partially met. Another great new investor. But we’re at the end of a stage now (see below);
Continue to be on track for 50 active users by the end of the year - partially met. Good adoption but will need a step change in the volume of new trialists to hit that goal (see below);
Release BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group) to our first users, have a v1 spec for our loan account product and release our new onboarding flow - partially met with loan account and new onboarding where we want. BRAG a bit behind.
Progress
We’ve added 3 more paying customers (we now have 5). We got our second annual plan, which we’re thrilled about. We’ve had some great new reviews, with one describing Mayday Recharger as “the answer to a larger Xero user's prayers” and that “there's software we tolerate, software we appreciate, software we love, and then there's Mayday”. We’re forming a clear ideal customer profile (ICP) where trialists are seeing value and converting really well. Now we need more of them!
We’ve scheduled two great webinars (one in November, one in January) with businesses that share the same ICP as us. Excited to do a great job of delivering on these and hopefully generating some new trialists;
We’ve now raised £210k (£25k of that still to be received). We’re pretty much bang on 25% of our target £830k (10% dilution). Couldn’t want for a better average quality of value add investor than the 9 we have. We’ve been very deliberate with how we’ve raised this round. And we’ve so far been rewarded for that. We’ve got so many opportunities to put the money we have raised, and want to raise, to work. We need to get the rest of the round closed now (see below);
Grace started as our third (alongside Griff and I) team member on Wednesday. She’s made a brilliant start as Commercial Executive. We’re working together in person 4 days a week for the next month as part of her onboarding. We’ve put in place some, as light as possible, new processes with this exciting new juncture. Introducing daily standups and a regular commitment to personal learning as a team with an hour a day devoted to it. The challenge now is to onboard Grace as quickly as possible so she’s firing on all cylinders; at the same time as not false economy cutting corners on the understanding she needs to be able to do her job well;
Griff has done a great job on the designs for our loan account product. This, alongside Mayday Recharger and BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group), will be the third and final pillar of our multi-entity product offering.
Problems
I mentioned in the last post about raising money from the potential gamechanger / lynchpin investor. In my next pitch after that investment, I was guilty of complacency. The potential investor I was pitching had read our deck. He flagged some key points he was keen to understand. I was a blunt instrument in defaulting to the approach that had worked with the gamechanger investor. As a result I failed to engage this potential investor. The pitch understandably fell flat. And he was a no. He was generous enough to provide detailed feedback on why. Great lesson in empathy and tailoring the pitch to the person you’re pitching. I was able to channel those learnings into a pitch the next day, which went really well. With that pitch becoming our 9th A* investor who has invested £50k;
Not so much a problem. But we’ve come to the end of a stage now with funding. I feel like we could close another £50k every couple of weeks from similar investors to the 9 we already have. But that will mean it takes us 5 months to raise the full round. And mean fundraising is an always on distraction. We have a choice to make about whether we look to fill out the round with a larger investment from a Pre-Seed VC or broaden the focus for potential angel investors;
We’ve yet to strike gold with finding the right person to be our first engineering hire. We have so much product to build. It’s an amazing opportunity. Confident we will find the right person. Just need to get lucky in terms of someone’s circumstance and timing;
We’ve had a couple of false starts this week with set ups for BRAG. I need to cast the net a bit wider to find test users.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Batch focus on Pre-Seed VCs to see if there’s one where there would be a mutual excitement to work together;
Be on track for 50 active users by the end of the year. We’ll need a step change here in terms of volume of new trialists. Need to prepare well for a webinar in 3 weeks. As well as trial some outbound approaches;
Be on track with onboarding with Grace for her to be firing on all cylinders by the end of November.
Thanks for reading. Look forward to the next post in two weeks’ time.