Bookkeeping
I pretend to be a PM for an app called Numeric that helps accountants with bookkeeping tasks. I talk to Kannan, a fourth-generation accountant with experience at companies like Automation Anywhere.
Watch on YouTube.
Notes
As a PM my objective is to help build products that provide value to high-frequency use-cases so they can acquire newer users at lower cost and retain existing ones at higher value.
- Use-cases: how often and how severe is the use-case, and whether there is a higher-frequency adjacent use-case.
- Acquisition: what are barriers to try and switch.
- Retention: can value be delivered sooner before churn risk.
Takeaways.
- Bookkeeping is a high-frequency, high-severity job. It can happen monthly, weekly, or daily, and errors can materially hurt a business.
- The work mixes repetitive manual tasks with higher-order analytical work.
- As companies scale, bookkeeping complexity grows, so automation that frees time for better judgment becomes more valuable.
- High-severity problems are worth solving, but they also lower willingness to try something new.
- Letting a strong storyteller keep going surfaces non-obvious details.
Next steps with Kannan and others.
- Use moments where accountants switch tabs, move to spreadsheets, or coordinate manually as openings for product mockups.
- Dig deeper into which bookkeeping tasks are already being automated with engineering support.
Big thanks to Kannan for his time and knowledge.