How will you manage capacity - from the little I’ve seen so far, it seems that you, Alistair, already have a lot going on (put 5 hours per week), and Seb 15 hours.

Financially, how are you looking? The more complex a challenge/product, usually the more budget required to execute.

What do you think is happening behind the scenes with the incumbents? e.g. the video shared about Sage and Xero’s new chat based tech

There must have been many attempts to solve this - why did they fail, but you’ll succeed?

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Organised notes

So, on reviewing this, it seems clear that this business falls very heavily on the product side of the spectrum of product vs marketing - if it can be built, it will be incredibly valuable. But, that leads me to my questions:

Remain sceptical - challenge answers

Product

Can you give me some specific examples of the pain points that this product will be solving? It would be great to understand the before and after of the situation e.g. what’s currently happening at the moment, and what the solution, with this implemented, would be like.

This helps me understand two things - how valuable the solution is, and also the technical complexity

How big a pain point? What’s the impact of not having it fixed?

How many people/firms does it affect (industry size)?

What priority is this within the business to solve this? Is it a nice to have? Or mandatory?

It’s clearly really valuable, so I’m sure many have tried to do this, so my question is:

Are there any businesses working on this right now?

Are the incumbents working on this currently like the videos from Sage and Xero shared on slack?

Do you know of any examples of businesses who have tried and failed to achieve this?

What is the possible explanation for why this doesn’t exist already?

Has anything critical changed which now makes it possible where it wasn’t before?

What are your thoughts around the build plan

You mentioned starting with a few agents running small tasks to start

Is this a product which needs everything to function all at once, or can you build it iteratively?

Given the complexity, how do you plan on building this out

Do you need budget?

Or planning on building first features yourself?

If so, how is it that this could be so valuable, but yet it could be built by one person?

Or going to raise to build?

What have you been up to so far? How is progress going? How long have you been working on it?

Team

It’s always great to understand founder market fit:

What is it that makes you the right team to solve this?

Do you have enough time to commit to this - I understand Alistair is already really busy with many projects?

Are you too close to Yohan?

Marketing/competition

Are the incumbents working on this currently like the videos from Sage and Xero shared on slack?

I understand you’re technical Seb, and Alistair you have the accounting background, but do you have anyone in the team for marketing?

Traction

How do you foresee getting early traction?

And scaling from there?

23-5-24 - where are they up to

What’s the likelihood of the raise - how much equity and cash are we getting?

8-10 convos with investors, 3 requesting more updates. couple more reach out to him each week. 4 said no so far.

Reason for the no: Don’t have enough data points, no market record, not right team to win

They are saying very early on product and raising a seed round, but should be raising a pre-seed

What about the other conversations? They’re waiting for more info from him, which sounds like ‘see what happens’ fob off.

First engineer on board, his name is Silver

Doing a demo next week for a VC, so working to get the demo live asap.

6-8 weeks he thinks they’ll have something live.

He’s got 1 year worth of savings remaining

Gone from a 10 to a 9 in terms of confidence, no longer thinking it’s going to be a quick run, it’s going to take longer. Desire is still to go for seed valuation and amount, but if the market says pre-seed, then he’s willing to go in that direction.

Wants to make sure they are seen to be raising a large enough amount so that the accountants think it’ll be a serious deal and will be around for a long time.

wants to stay within EAH network until he gets a real wow moment.

My questions -

What are the reactions to the memo instead of pitch deck?

Taking the slow slope, so what does that mean in terms of timing then?

What about my VC connection? - Alistair at venture friends and product hunt guy

Re read the memo

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Numbrs - New GL - Seb / Alistair

Reviewing their submission form⁠⁠

Rough notes

Organised notes

23-5-24 - where are they up to

What’s the likelihood of the raise - how much equity and cash are we getting?

Reviewing their
`submission form`⁠
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