87 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F30
It’s the first progress, problems, plans (PPP) post of 2023. It has been a very mixed start to the year. Two exciting wins with Claudio soon to join and £60k of additional investment committed. One disappointment with Grace soon to depart. 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:
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 - partially met
Launch BRAG brilliantly - on track;
Kick off our new outbound approach and referral programme towards our goal of reaching 100 customers by the end of Q1 - not met.
Progress
We’re thrilled that Claudio will be joining us as a senior engineering hire next month. Griff worked with Claudio previously. I’ve met a couple of times. We couldn’t be more excited to have him join the team, both interpersonally and in what his skills and experience give us the ability to do in accelerating product development. We’re in great shape from an engineering standpoint with Griff, Pauline and now Claudio;
With Grace moving on (see below), we’ve put a role live for First Commercial Hire. This will be an amazing, career transforming, role for someone. So much scope for impact and growth. Immediate term, I don’t have vast scope to run a hiring process and onboard someone with my focus on fundraising. So we’re hoping there will be a candidate from within our respective networks that this mutually clicks for;
Great start to the year on fundraising. We closed £10k from another great value add investor who committed just before Christmas. And one of our existing investors introduced his brother and brother’s friend who have both committed for £25k. Ideally, we’ll raise another £40-140k of angel money over the coming weeks;
I’ve got my list of 40 Pre-Seed VCs. Now to get meetings booked in;
We’ve had brilliant engagement with our public product vision and Q1 roadmap. Loved this post about us we received this week;
BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group, our second product) is not yet live. We decided very start of the year was the wrong time to launch it. Launch is planned for 23 January and things are well on track for that;
So excited for the webinar we have arranged for on 25 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 now has 250 attendees, all of whom should be relevant addressable customers for us;
We put in place our OKRs (objectives and key results for 2023 and Q1). We want to get to 100 customers (currently 10) and all of our 3 multi entity products live with product-market fit by the end of Q1.
Problems
Grace has unfortunately decided to move on from Mayday. We had a great open discussion at her two month check in just before Christmas. So many fantastic positives in terms of her aptitude and fit with us as a team. But it felt something was missing in terms of her deciding she wanted to be great at this. We left it to come back to after the time and space of the Christmas break. Our first time together in person in 2023 was Tuesday this week. We had another great open discussion. Unfortunately, she has realised that this isn’t the right type of career path for her so the intrinsic motivation just isn't there. What’s great is that we were able to communicate so openly and positively about this. Grace isn’t clear on what’s next yet. She’s still doing really high quality work. And with me fundraising focussed, there is the opportunity for us to continue to work together in a quasi-contractor sense in the very near term for as long as it suits both parties. It’s great to find that third way vs a false dichotomy “in or out” situation;
We’ve put our outbound plans on hold for now with Grace moving on and me not having the capacity for;
We’ve run a couple of go to market experiments that don’t seem to have borne fruit as yet, including a referral programme that none of the customers we’ve asked about have identified people in their network for.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks:
Have had, or have scheduled, meetings with 40+ Pre-Seed VCs;
Do my best to maximise chances of finding someone in my extended network for the First Commercial Hire role.
Look forward to updating in two weeks!