A year in the life of an entrepreneur (Am I blogging again?)

It’s been over 3 months since my last update to this blog (and 13+ months since leaving Google to be a founder) and after last time I stated I would be blogging again every week… I’m clearly not going to promise that. However, I knew now was a good time to let people know how things are now and a few learning’s along the way:

What has happened in the past few months?

Entrepreneurs often look to the stars for advice… Mainly because they’re up late.

Merlin Guides is still up and running you’ll be glad to hear. On top of that, we are now an Expa Labs company, which means that we are now funded enough to be expanding the team in multiple directions and start going after larger clients. In essence, we raised a Pre-Seed round of funding, what is that you ask?

Well funding is a strange topic but in essence, it used to be this:

  • Seed Round: Enough money to build your product and get your first customers
  • Series A: Enough money to expand your team to be able to take the rest of your market
  • Series B: Expand into a new market (either a new location or new area, such as if you originally targetted Tech companies, your next market might be HR companies…etc).

Due to the weird nature of funding, now for SaaS companies (Software as a Service… like Merlin), Seed Rounds require $10k+ MRR (Monthly Re-occurring revenue). As such to make up for the time between starting a company and reaching that amount people came up with ‘Pre-Seed’, i.e. ‘Before Seed’, to help fund companies. You’ll find some VCs (Venture Capitalists) will invest here, but often far less than in Seed, A’s and B’s. As such you’re normally looking at Angels (Rich people that like to invest in other peoples companies), Friends & Family (If you are well connected/rich yourself) or Accelerators. Expa Labs isn’t your traditional Accelerator (and doesn’t call itself one) because it gives much more than others, doesn’t work towards a “Demo Day” (because they want you to build a business, not a pitch deck) and lasts 6 months (or until Christmas time for short).

As such I am now writing this from our lovely Soho offices, with a desk that isn’t my second bedroom or just 30 feet away from an XBox (actually I’ now 6 feet away from one… but that’s a story for another time).

The product has improved dramatically, we’ve started partnering with a few software providers, and we actually have revenue coming in as well. We are still actively working with customers and potential customers to fully understand how we can improve their training (onboarding and processes) as I still feel we have reached ‘Product Market Fit’. What is PMF you ask? Well that’s the point where you have a product that when you share it with your chosen market — people are very likely to want to buy it. It’s the time when all you need to do really is get your message to your market and the money should then come in (which in itself is tough). We’re definitely closer to that point and we’re learning a lot, but considering how hard it is to describe Merlin in one line (currently: ‘Employee Training. Simplified’), we have a way to go.

What am I focusing on now?

Now that we have this funding my big focus has been on hiring. We’ve expanded our sales team using a part-time commission only structure, which is starting to generate a number of potential customers. Right now my main focus is on bringing on engineers to remove myself from the coding work at Merlin.

Being a solo founder means I am wearing lots of hats, too many hats, and as such everything never feels like it’s ever done. By being able to remove myself from engineering, I can focus on 3 key areas:

  • Sales: Improving our process, finding out what works and doesn’t, talking to potential leads and understanding their concerns.
  • Current Customer Feedback: Spending time with our customers, watching how they use the product, seeing how we can make Merlin better.
  • Product Management: Prioritizing what needs to be done with Merlin to get it to the next level, which features to add but more importantly which features to remove.

I’m still doing the above now of course, but I wish I could spend more time on it. Believe it or not about 50–80% of my time is now devoted to hiring. I respect recruiters much more than I used to for sure!

If you know any New York based Engineers (preferably 4–10 years experience with a focus on Javascript), please email me or share this 7 minute YouTube video I made to show what Merlin is and why people would be interested in joining us:

Any other fun things?

Some additional things in the meantime:

A company called Merlin Jobs started advertising on the Subway

Not a bad tag line at all…

Which means I get loads of people messaging me about it, although hopefully, it means that people think we are larger too!

I was featured/interviewed on the 52 Founders Podcast

Thanks to Crissy for interviewing me — believe it or not, I got a few job applicants from it as well!

We are redoing our branding at the moment

MMmmmmm….

I know, I know, I’ve wasted too much time on logos. However we have hired a designer to have a go at Merlin, the logo above is actually one I made… So don’t judge, we’ll hopefully share our new logo next month.

We’ve actually already been through a bit of a UI change as well!

The one on the left is the old version, and the one on the right is the new one.

The main cool stuff is very geeky

We’ve added many additional integrations with services on the backend. If you’re a startup I’d recommend having a look at:

  • Segment (get one set of analytics and push everywhere)
  • Intercom (and use their API to add customers automatically, they also have a great blog)
  • Metabase (Open source way to do analytics on your big data)

Want to help me out?

If you use or know anyone that uses Hubspot (Marketing tool), Pipedrive (Sales tool), AdWords (Advertising tool), I’d love an introduction to them! We’re giving away free training in these softwares so there is no risk in trying it out. Alternatively, if you’d rather send a link or sign up yourself you can here:

As always feedback on the above is appreciated (comment below or send me a message), and I’ll keep trying to blog more.

Keep hustling everyone and speak soon!

Charles, CEO of MerlinGuides

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Charles Douglas-Osborn

Written by

Founder of Haystack (https://www.haystackapps.com), Merlin Guides, ex-Google, Entrepreneur, Pun-dit.