November 2024 Investor Update - Sendd
Final Stretch to LIVE!! - October/November Sendd Investor Update
Pre-launch Focus:
We are so close!!! The team has been working massive weekends trying to get things live. We have a handful of things to get working properly, and then we should be good to go. We have security experts on standby to do an initial test for us before we open things up for customers.
I’ve been working on a pretty exciting low-cost marketing growth hack. The aim is to get this live as soon as the product is ready to go. More on this soon!!!
October/November:
The last two months have been a blur. We were heads down on building our product. October was a big push to get all the designs done that we needed for launch before Pablo left for his holiday in November. The engineering team’s hours ramped up trying to get the product ready to launch.
The Good:
Met with one of our initial customers. The original intention was to onboard them during that meeting, but we weren’t ready. However, I was able to demo the product to them and answer all their questions. (Attached video on their thoughts. Less than 2 minutes.)
Had an awesome in-person team dinner with Indy & Jordan in November. Met Jordan for the first time in person. Indy & Jordan both highlighted that they have never worked as hard as they are in their entire career as developers as they have while working on Sendd. This was a good thing. In their own words, the purpose, the vision, and the product, coupled with the tools we are using and the speed we are building at, has been the most rewarding and accomplished they have ever felt. This was incredibly moving to hear for me because I’ve been pushing the team, and they are responding with so much drive and passion.
We expanded our initial customers. We will now be giving access to 7 businesses in this initial release. (I’m looking forward to sharing the live storefronts for these businesses shortly!)
We presented to EHF Friendly Sharks. It was good to share Sendd with them and get some practice in pitching the business.
The team has been rallying, and everyone is excited to get the product live. Special shoutout to Keez, who is not currently part of the dev team. He jumped on at 11 p.m. on Friday night to support the team trying to get things live. With Friday being a 1 a.m. night and then a whole weekend of work later with the rest of the team, we have a proper development release cycle in place. (Making sure we aren’t pushing to production without testing.) Also, a whole bunch of other improvements and bug fixes to try and get things live.
The Bad:
We missed our target at the end of October for being ready to onboard a customer. This is my fault for setting an unrealistic deadline, and we will do better at sizing up work in the future. However, we did achieve lots in a short time frame in part because of that deadline. The backend team felt that if they were full-time, the deadline would have been achieved. The main problem being working 7-10 p.m. weekdays only allows 3 hours of focused time on solving a problem. Resulting in most problems being solved on the weekends where they have all day to solve it without almost 20 hours of lag time before you get back to the problem set.
We still haven’t managed to tap into the design/branding resources we were hoping to get access to. This means we have not made any progress on the branding. Pablo being away has also meant that for November we aren’t able to move product designs forward either. I would love to have a budget to move faster on branding, but we are getting this for free currently, so we can’t complain much. I’m jumping on Canva and doing what I can myself for the time being.
We are on the clock! At the lower burn level, we could effectively bootstrap the business indefinitely if needed. However, at the higher burn level, we have 3 months of burn left.
October Goals:
Update customers on our progress: Done
Get Shop working: 70% Complete
Get Cart working: Done
Fix UX/UI issues on smaller devices: Done
Get end-to-end Stripe workflows Tested: 66% Subscriptions not live yet.
Work through product spec and solve complexities: Done
November Goals:
Create T&C and Privacy Policy for Sendd: Done
Create T&C, Privacy Policy, Returns Policy Templates for Sendd Businesses: Done
Apply to YC: Done
Increase initial customers to cover use cases: Done
Enable Order flow emails and receipts in Sendd: Done
Onboard First Customer: (Not Done)
Create Sendd social media channels: Done
Get Shop working: 90% Complete
Get end-to-end Stripe workflows Tested: Done
December Goals:
Onboard First 7 Customers:
Get security testing done:
Process 10 orders using Sendd:
Do something to get media attention:
Launch first growth hack:
Post 10 pieces of content on social media:
December Plan:
Get the product live. Onboard the initial customers. Process some initial customers’ orders and figure out what the issues might be present. Find and remove bugs.
Release V1.2 features and add some basic things like Settings to the product.
Launch the growth hack I have in the works.
Plan a launch event for Sendd.
Sign up 20 businesses ready to go live on the product.
Spend most of the month with the first 7 customers diving deep.
Financials:
October Burn: $8000 NZD
November Burn: $8000 NZD
December Burn Estimated: $8500 NZD
Runway: 3 Months at $8000 NZD Burn, Unlimited at $4000 NZD Burn.
Asks:
We are going to throw a party of some sort! Leverage it for content and use it to highlight some of our awesome initial customers. If you’re in New Zealand and would like to attend, let us know!
Sendd is committed to helping the 99% of small businesses that make our economies tick. We care deeply about the problems that face this group. We want to live, breathe, and ship for small businesses.
“Sendd me the money.” - Every small business ever
From The Sendd Team,
Adi, Indy, Jordan, Ale, Pablo, & Keez