Week 8: Banks hate us

Mike's happy face

Another eventful week passed, and much of it has been focussed on getting the software and sales pitch ready for our first proper sales meeting.  That meeting was today, and we hope it went well.  Time will tell. We just need to get Mike to talk less. That might take longer than writing the software, but we will persist.

The most pressing issue for us has been trying to set-up a merchant services agreement and to open a business bank account.  We didn't want to borrow money, we just wanted to pay money into it, and yet the banks either rejected us or made us jump through hoops.  Thankfully HSBC at least wanted our business, and now it's almost done.  I'd love to get Vince Cable down here and show him how hard it is as a new business.

Now (apparently) the most exciting thing that has happened this week is that we received our consumer credit licence.  This came from the office of fair trading, and allows us to do the work we want to do. I think Mike wanted us to jump up and down a bit, but Roger and I still struggle to get excited by paperwork.  Still, to be fair to Mike, here's a little hooray. Hooray! ...and I gave it top spot with today's photo.

The software has rocked this week.  We used Litmus to test our email and landing page content across 30+ browsers and email clients.  My previous dealings with Litmus hadn't been good, but this time the software and service was great. We've also managed to test a 60,000 email send with our automated testing tool and that worked a treat.  I'm worried that Roger is getting a bit too excited about his automated testing system... lucky he has a long weekend and some time away from it.

Next week, we send some real emails.

Excitement levels:  Gimme me real data... Gimme!