The road is long
This is the (awkward) second instalment where we need to show progress since my first building in public update. Which is exactly why building in public is so good. Because it keeps us on our toes to maintain momentum, and also so it shows the truth about those overnight successes – that they’re not overnight, and it takes time to build something! When you’re on the inside, progress sometimes feels slow, even if you and the team have been working flat out, which they have!
So, what did I previously write that was coming next in the last episode that we’ve achieved? We’ll get to that. But first what else have we been up to?
January is always a very busy month as we’re playing catch up a little from the Christmas break. Add to that we organised a ski trip for leaders in accounting and accounting-tech with 21 of us hitting the slopes in France. It was non-stop work hard, play hard with some incredible conversations and shared challenges among the group. We ran a workshop which covered topics like ‘AI and its relevance in the finance function’ and ‘Open APIs and low code/no code’, among others. It left me and Luke with a stack of things to reflect on, and I’m sure the others too.
What have we achieved this month?
Last month I said we were working on an ambitious roadmap and building out the following features:
- Standard dashboard custom P&L groupings: allowing greater configuration regardless of how the chart of accounts or P&L is set up in Xero.
- Knowledge hub: help videos on how to change various settings and basic navigation around the application.
- Demo environment: this is a big one for bringing to life how the application can work for to get the best out of financial and non-financial data for SaaS and tech businesses.
- Migration: continue to migrate non-standard dashboards from legacy app to Project Liberty.
So, how much did we achieve and how ambitious were we? We’ve made good progress on most of these. But, looking back we were probably a little over optimistic in what we could achieve. We hadn’t actually time-boxed these into January, so we still have time to finalise them.
The one which is 99% finished and almost ready to ship is our custom P&L groupings. This is the feature we’ve been focusing on most as it has the biggest user experience impact and insightful change. We also launched a budget selection option too, which gives the user the ability to compare against prior month, prior year or any one of their Xero budgets.
We also mapped out projects across Q1 and got them to a good level of detail for the following month. This in itself feels like an achievement. We’re using Asana to organise this. We’ve also set out specific OKRs for tech, SaaS and e-commerce dashboards.
What challenges did we encounter?
As well as January generally being busy, we also had our annual appraisal season which takes up a fair amount of time. While we only have five people in the product side, we have almost 50 team members across the entire business, so the moderation process it takes a bit of focus off the product and growth unfortunately. However, this is something we do factor into growth assumptions in January (and December being a shorter month).
The custom groupings took a little longer than anticipated. Most of the challenges we encountered were all technical. Some of these related to the state of the text/string in the dialogue box to add new custom groupings and how they acted with different user permutations applied. Another one was around mapping the GL account to the user created grouping. We realised that a user could change the name of a GL account in the core data quite easily which would render the mapping redundant. As such, we had to revert to an ID (always better anyway). In this instance, Xero creates a unique 36-character string ID for each GL account which we could leverage. So even if the name of the GL account changes, we would still have the custom grouping mapped. Unfortunately, our original data extracts hadn’t factored these in, so we had to rescope and reconfigure those scripts, parameters and storing that data based on the unique ID.
This took a little longer than anticipated which knocked back some of the other wins we wanted in January, but we’re 99% there now. And there are some good lessons here for the future!
Metrics – Jan 2023
The part everyone wants to see! We’ve not had much progress on hard metrics as we’ve been building out functionality mentioned above and so not pushing sales.
- Basic (free): 59 logos (58 logos)
- Custom (paid): 3 logos (3 logos)
- Basic (free) 177 dashboards (171 dashboards)
- Custom (paid): 13 dashboards (12 dashboards)
- Individual users: 78 (77)
- MRR: £2k (£2k)
- ARPA: £667 (£667)
What’s coming next?
We’re building out the following features:
- Knowledge hub: help videos on how to change various settings and basic navigation around the application.
- Demo environment: this is a big one for bringing to life how the application can work for to get the best out of financial and non-financial data for SaaS and tech businesses.
- Tech & SaaS demo dashboard: a prerequisite for this is the demo environment but we’re looking to get some example SaaS dashboards connected to Xero and HubSpot up and running. We’re trialling Tonic.ai to help create some useful demo data.
- Migration: continue to migrate non-standard dashboards from legacy app to Project Liberty.
I’ve had some great feedback from the last post, so please keep that feedback coming! Feel free to get in touch with me.
Until next time 🤟
