54 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F27
It’s been a good two weeks. In what Stephen Covey would call a productive capacity (vs production) sense. Progress on things that set us up for future success rather than acute successes we can point to. To repeat verbatim the opening from last time. 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 two weeks. And plans for the coming two.
Goals For the Last Two Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
Batch focus on Pre-Seed VCs to see if there’s one where there would be a mutual excitement to work together - met. Done well on the controllable inputs. Seen some, but not as much as would like, progress on the outputs (see below);
Be on track for 50 active users by the end of the year - met. In the sense that we’ve done what we set out to do in preparing well for our webinar next week and starting outbound. We are still off track in the absence of those bearing fruit;
Be on track with onboarding with Grace for her to be firing on all cylinders by the end of November - met.
Progress
Grace’s onboarding is going well. We have an ambitious goal to get to her firing on all cylinders by the end Friday 2 December (one month in). We are on track. Lots more still to do. I’d forgotten how much time it takes to onboard a new team member properly. But this is one step back, potentially infinite steps forward territory;
We’ve added one more customer in the last two weeks. This was a great first, as it was the first time an accounting firm had subscribed for multiple clients;
We’ve prepared well for the webinar next week with GrowCFO, Spendesk, Paddle and Pento. These are great established businesses who all speak to the same in house finance team ideal customer profile as us. Excited to deliver valuable content to the audience next week and then follow up well. We’ve got a promotion we’ll be offering to attendees who are not yet Mayday users;
We’ve started outbound targeting via LinkedIn to in house finance leaders who fit our ideal customer profile. Excited to test this with Grace and I each doing 10 reach outs per day;
We’ve got our content ready to submit our application for Xero’s Emerging App Partner of the Year award. And are in good shape with preparation to launch our email newsletter in December;
We’ve had one new commitment for £10k from a great angel investor. Once we close this, that takes us to 10/10 dream value add investors and £220k of our target £830k;
We had a great demo with one of our existing customers of our prototype for our intercompany loan account product (the third and final part of our trinity of products in our multi entity module). Alongside invaluable feedback, this customer is going to provide us their data to help us develop the product which will be so helpful;
We’ve got our first test user set up for BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group, our second product of the trinity). Great feedback coming through for us to implement and refine the product.
Problems
We’re still struggling to find the right engineering candidates to enable us to move faster on product development. We had a candidate we were excited about. But we didn’t move fast enough and he took another job. A good reminder that the best candidates will always have options. So we need to leverage our ability to move fast as an early stage startup;
I put together a list of 22 Pre-Seed VCs. I’m getting warm intros for most. This is always the best way in where available. The problem is that the introducer will invariably have lots of other things on their plate. So there can be a lag. In my experience it is worth the wait. There were 10 where I already had relationships. So I made contact directly. 2 have passed, 3 I’ve spoken with and are still ongoing. 5 I’ve not heard back from. I had a reply this morning to say my email had gone to spam. So I’m looking into that and will make sure I vary my subject lines and bodies of emails as much as possible going forwards to avoid spam filters.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Complete Grace’s onboarding;
Do a great job of the GrowCFO webinar and outbound to provide an influx that can put us on track for the NY50 target;
Have made contact with all target investors to establish whether there is interest or not. So that if there is 1+ Pre-Seed VC we’re excited about working with, we could close the round by the end of the year.
Thanks for reading. Look forward to the next post in two weeks’ time.