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Recur Club Cashburn Manager

Arsh Akhtar Ansari
Background
Recur Club is an up & coming startup from New Delhi which is trying to revolutionize fund raising for high growth businesses by constructing an asset using their MRR or ARR
Following is an experiment of a crucial product that the company can delve into which could be a huge delight for their core customers and also can help us avail a gold mine of data.
❓ Problem Space
Currently I’ve a vague idea as to how a funding round is closed and what exactly happens after that . So let us see a typical user/customer journey of sorts to zero down on an interesting problem
🛣️ User Journey
Now let’s look into a typical user journey. Since we’re looking into the problem related to funding then let us start with the plan to funding itself. Here is a typical user journey that most of the company goes through at their early stage. This will help us zero down -
This seems interesting. Recur club is already trying to solve the problem during funding by giving these firms an alternate healthier option to raise funds. Pre funding seems to be a lot of mess as it is imperative that in calculation of such sorts it would be tough to position a product there as it may hinder business processes as it is a one time thing. Thus, let us focus on the post funding period.
Here I would like to pick up the common problem of cash burn. This will also help us generate a healthy retention metric for our customers as customers will only return to the product when their pockets are empty which builds a negative relationship between the retention metric & customer satisfaction (very similar to retention in dating app). But if we are able to help them manage their cash burn they’ll be returning to actually fire up their growth rocketship
Thus, I am trying to solve the problem of reducing/controlling cash burn of these high growth startups and probably give them some guidance/sense of data around their cash burn by helping them identify the ROIs of each of the experiments / growth activity. Now to delve deeper into the problems let us understand our users and the stakeholders involved
👨‍👩‍👦 User Personas / Stakeholders
Search
Business Head
Description
Is owner of a certain division of the business. Has to setup a target for the division and deliver on them
Goals
Has to improve an essential KPI for the business in a given timeframe
Frustrations
Isn’t clear as to why they haven’t received the funds they need
There is no clarity as to why they are not able to improve certain KPIs even after spending
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Now I will look into what are the problems and the existing solution present in the market for them. Here rather than just looking at the problem & the current solution in the market I’ve added the dimension of importance & satisfaction of users for the particular problem. This will later help us to prioritize the features to build on the basis of the problem we will be solving
🔍 Problem Themes vs Existing Solution space
0
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❕Solution Space

💡 Solution Hypothesis
First of the major task is to put up a system to be followed after each of the funding round. These are in essence the exercises that each company should go through & then finally give some value to the users
🥅 Goal Setting
Essence is to setup metrics and define what improvement you’re looking to achieve for the first time unit i.e. a quarter / a month
A hierarchical form to understand family of metric i.e. break one metric into multiple experiments / projects
🛠️ Resource Allocation
Resources of a project will be of 2 types - talent & money. Thus we’re looking here to track the allocation of both
Talent / Energy
After setting up the metrics & goals we can link the owner / necessary personal looking after the project
The owner can then link each of the projects / experiment / metric with the ticket on the project management software bringing in more clarity of the progress
Money
A get API to pull up the available funds in the account in real time & also show up the historical spending
Very similar to goal setting looking at the funds founders decide as to how much has to be allocated to a given activity or experiment which via API is communicated to accounting software
Also need to setup a logic for book changes done via accounting software APIs in case of reallocation of funds
👣 Tracking
There are majorly two type of tracking that can be taken place as these are well quantified - money & metric. Thus here is how we’ll set up their tracking
Money
Connections for accounting software to fetch transaction level data and allot them accordingly to the metric
Notification system for transaction attribution(attributed to a specific metric/experiment) tbd by the payee
Metric
Connections for product tracking software like google analytics & others to bring in already tracked data onto the software
Connections for exposed API so that tracking of org specific metrics can be done
🔁 Reconfiguration of goals
Now once we’ve all the things up & running in the organization we start to vigilantly follow the amount spent and the progress in our goal. We can help with keeping up with the vigilance by -
Notifications when the spending or outcome has a sudden change
ROI calculator in which formula can be defined by the user but tracking this can give users a deeper insight
There can be only 2 things happening here - things go well/as expected or things do not turn out better. Let’s see how we can help users in the second case -
Connecting with relevant business folks among our network who can help them out. Here the network that we seem to be suggesting are traders. Many of whom will be an HNI and when connected properly can actually benefit the company a lot. We can actually access data points from the trader profile to actually make a match

Now we create a user story vs feature set map as this helps understand what exact problem/pain point is a feature exact solving and moreover helps us visualize a feature in a much better helping us to take a leap from solution → product. We also tag each of these feature theme with their values, which are - Must have, Performance benefit & Customer delight. This is done by to what extent is the feature solving the story and how much does the user wants the problem to be solved (importance vs satisfaction)


🗣️ User Stories vs Feature Sets
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🛹 MVP build
Now we’ve all the features in place let’s now pluck out the low hanging fruits which tastes the most delicious. Meaning, the features that create most value but are really easy to build. Thus, I propose a point system as follows-
Feature Value vs Points
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Search
Feature Value
Points
1
Must Have
20
2
Performance Benefit
10
3
Customer Delight
5
There are no rows in this table
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But there seems to be other dimension to it i.e. effort. We will define it in dev weeks it will take to launch the feature. Finally we calculate ROI of feature as Points/Effort and decide the version of product based upon this
Feature ROI
0
Search
Feature Theme
Feature Value
Points
Effort(in weeks)
ROI
Version
Remarks
1
Metric Setup
Must Have
20
2
10
v1.0
High ROI
2
Leader Assignment
Must Have
20
2
10
v1.0
High ROI
3
Product tracking software connector
Performance Benefit
10
4
2.5
v1.0
Only feature related to metric tracking
4
Transaction Tracker
Must Have
20
4
5
v1.0
High ROI
5
ROI calculator
Performance Benefit
10
2
5
v1.0
High ROI
6
Hierarchical ticket system
Performance Benefit
10
4
2.5
v1.1
​
7
General metric tracking API connector
Must Have
20
8
2.5
v1.1
​
8
Sudden change notification
Performance Benefit
10
4
2.5
v1.1
​
9
Transaction Attribution
Customer Delight
5
8
0.63
v1.2
​
10
Networking with solvers
Must Have
20
16
1.25
v1.2
​
There are no rows in this table
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🎯 Success Metric
North Star Metric
The north star metric can simply be defined as - Return time for funding / organization increases
Let’s look at what all metric will we need to track to further increase our main metric
Cash burn Rate / organization decreases
(expected goals - actual goal) for a timeframe / organization decreases
ROI on cash burned / organization increases
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