97 - Progress, Problems, Plans - F31
An excellent two weeks. So exciting to have BRAG live as our second product. We have great momentum. I need to deliver now on new customers, funding and hiring to sustain and enhance that momentum. Here’s the 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:
Have had, or have scheduled, meetings with 40+ Pre-Seed VCs - partially met;
Do my best to maximise chances of finding someone in my extended network for the First Commercial Hire role - met.
Progress
Really excited for Claudio to join us as a senior engineering team member. He starts on 13 February. We’ve had some brilliant applicants for the First Commercial Hire role. I’m more confident than not that I’ve spoken to at least one person we will want to hire. Now to apply right person, right role, right stage and make the hire!
We’ve added two more great new customers. We’re now at 12 in total;
I’ve had 5 VC pitches this week and have another 5 booked in for next week. I rebuilt my pitch from the ground up. Always room for reflection and improvement. But I’m generally satisfied with how I’m pitching. Always helps to have something you believe in!
We launched BRAG (bank reconciliation across the group) on Monday. The launch went well. Griff and I are doing a launch webinar next week. We also held a webinar last week to run through our Q1 roadmap and vision. We’re seeing great engagement with our build in public product content;
We held our webinar “Multi-entity month end with Xero” with Joiin, a consolidation tool, on Wednesday. We had 270 registrants. 70 attended. It was a great webinar. Lots of great feedback about how useful the content was. We had 27 questions which is far above the level of engagement I’ve seen on any webinar I’ve been part of previously. Now to follow up well on the leads. We’re running a promotional offer, 50% off in 2023, for attendees who sign up for a trial before the end of January. We’re finding that getting people to carve out the time to act is a big challenge. So this incentive will hopefully help;
We’re working on an exciting pillar piece of content with Joiin and ApprovalMax (an approvals tool that targets a very similar ideal customer profile to us) for Q2.
Problems
My target was 40 VC meetings held or booked in. I’m only at 10. I’ve got a list of 103 VCs. The majority I’ve found intro routes in. 52 are still to come back re booking in a meeting. A few have passed because they’re not investing right now. General feedback seems to be it’s a slow market;
Capacity. We’ve got great momentum. Great projects we need to move forward like CFO Techstack and trialling outbound. Without compromising on quality, we need more capacity ASAP.
Plans
Goals for the next two weeks:
Made a great commercial hire;
40 VC meetings either held or booked in;
Followed up well on the webinar leads to convert at least 25 to active trialists.
Look forward to updating in two weeks!