78 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F29
It’s the last progress, problems, plans (PPP) post of 2022. It has been a great year. I‘m disappointed I haven’t been able to deliver the end to the year we aspired to on the fundraising front. But so much to be excited about in 2023. Now for retreat, renewal and return with gusto coming out of the blocks fast in the New Year. Here’s the latest PPP post. It covers progress and problems from building Mayday over the last three weeks. And plans for the coming three.
Goals For the Last Three Weeks
These were the goals set in the previous PPP post:
Find >= 1 Pre-Seed VC we’d love to work with and can get to term sheet stage before Christmas - not met;
Put live a new content asset that is a key part of our marketing plan for 2023 - met.
Progress
We’re in great shape as a team. Pauline is nearly a month in as Software Engineer. Grace nearly two as Commercial Executive. Both are already making really important contributions. We have a Senior Software Engineer lined up to join in January just as soon as we have the funds in place to formalise the offer to him. So excited to have him join to accelerate our product development;
We end the year with 10 brilliant customers and 20 brilliant reviews on the Xero App Marketplace;
We’ve had another fantastic A* value add angel commit to invest £10k in us. We’re now at 11/11 dream value add investors;
We have a great webinar arranged for January with Joiin, a consolidation tool. With our current multi-entity focus, we have a very tight alignment with them in terms of ideal customer profile. The webinar already has over 100 registrants and it is still over a month away;
We’ve published the first of our monthly newsletters and launched our public product vision as the opening instalment of our public product roadmap. We want to clearly communicate what we’ll be building and get our target customers engaged in shaping that roadmap;
We’ve put CFO Techstack live. This is an important part of our long term brand and marketing strategy. Building a community and learning hub by being useful to our target customer;
Our second product, BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group) is performing really well. We’re getting ready to officially launch it at the start of January;
We’re making good progress on our third product, the final part of our trinity of multi-entity products, intercompany loan accounts. Our goal is to have product market fit with our intercompany module by the end of Q1 2023;
Griff and I had a great day in Woking on Tuesday, exactly 8 months since we were there for the Mayday Recharger launch. Any startup will always have things they wish were further ahead. But it was great to have the opportunity to do a year’s retrospective (as well as planning for the future). We’re so fortunate in so many ways: 1) to have the alignment we do as Founders, 2) that whilst there have been lots of mistakes and things we’d like to be different, we have no stones in our shoe at the end of the year. No bad baggage it’s going to be hard to unravel, 3) we have some incredible investors who are adding value to us way beyond their money, 4) we’ve proved that we can pivot and change our minds, trading our hand for a better one when the market is telling us to, 5) we have an incredible opportunity. Which is really all any startup can ask for. Then its our control when it comes to execution.
Problems
Only one. Funding. I’ve been focused on Pre-Seed VCs for the last month. I haven’t yet been able to get one over the line. And don’t have any ongoing positive discussions heading into 2023. I’ve been in contact with about 20. Nearly half passed without taking a meeting. The rest took at least one call/meeting. 3 really engaged with and were funds that we were very excited about. But none could get to the requisite conviction to move forward. There are great positives. We’ve learnt that this could be a great way of funding us as a company. And there are plenty more fish in the sea. Rejection is also a great opportunity. It forces you to question, and in positively answering strengthen, your conviction. As well as looking for opportunities for how to refine one’s pitch.
Plans
Goals for the next three weeks (to Friday 13 Jan) are:
Come out the blocks fast in 2023 on fundraising. Raise at least £100k of additional angel money so we can make our Senior Engineering hire. Get intros to at least 40 Pre-Seed VCs that I can pitch in January/early Feb;
Launch BRAG brilliantly;
Kick off our new outbound approach and referral programme towards our goal of reaching 100 customers by the end of Q1.
Thanks for reading in 2022. Looking forward to 2023!