64 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F28
Excellent two weeks. Great progress on lots of different fronts. A big, if great, problem now. We’ve got the opportunity to make key senior hires. But we need more capital to do so. 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:
Complete Grace’s onboarding - met;
Do a great job of the GrowCFO webinar and outbound to provide an influx that can put us on track for the NY50 target - met (on the controllable inputs);
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 - met.
Progress
Excellent progress on the team side. We hired Pauline as Software Engineer. She started yesterday. Griff did a day’s programming working with Pauline as part of the recruitment process. We’re thrilled to have her join the team;
Grace’s onboarding has gone well. She did her first solo demo this week, which we reviewed the recording of together afterwards. She did really well. Is contributing really positively and significantly to our progress. Am delighted with how the onboarding has gone. It was an ambitious goal to get her firing on all cylinders by the end of month 1. Will always be lots to learn. But I’m confident we’re where we need to be, which is a great testament to her;
We had a magic Wednesday last week with 3 new customers subscribing, including our first customer for BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group), our second product. This was great, as we’d anticipated it would be another month before we got to this point with BRAG;
A flurry of great new reviews on Xero’s App Marketplace. We’re now at 19 total. Great to see the volume as well as the sentiment about the pain we’re addressing;
The GrowCFO webinar went really well as a piece of content. Great panel to be on. We’ve got an exciting plan for webinars heading into 2023;
We submitted our application for Xero’s Emerging App Partner of the Year;
Closed our £10k remaining outstanding investor commitment. That takes us to 10/10 dream value add investors and £220k of our target £830k;
Have done a good job of getting intros to target Pre-Seed VCs. Now to work through their processes and meetings;
We’ve had a couple of great opportunities arise from our network for key hires. Which is really exciting to progress those conversations.
Problems
The webinar was great but so far we’ve only had one new trialist off the back of it. Quite a few webinar attendees had ticked not to receive marketing communication. And we had lots of personal email addresses;
The outbound trial has been a good learning. But after reaching out via LinkedIn connection to over 100 people, we’ve seen very little response. Time to regroup for how we move forward in 2023. We’re fortunate that one of our investors is an expert on ideal customer profile (ICP) targeting. Was brilliant to pick his brains this week;
I need to get our funding round done, or at least materially done, now so we can make these key hires that will set us up brilliantly for 2023.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks are:
Find >= 1 Pre-Seed VC we’d love to work with and can get to term sheet stage before Christmas, or put in place a funding plan B for the start of 2023;
Put live a new content asset that is a key part of our marketing plan for 2023.
Thanks for reading. Look forward to the next post in two weeks’ time.