This week, we’re back with another installment in our Paths to Product-Market Fit series, this time with Mercury co-founder and CEO Immad Akhund.
Mercury’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Do the Hard Part First
“If you're a strong founder, you can sell anything. You can get weak product-market fit out of almost any idea, and that's a problem.”
Immad Akhund has learned the hard way that a founder’s persistence can actually be their kryptonite. He’s founded four startups over the last two decades, and his experience building Mercury has brought all of his previous entrepreneurial endeavors into sharp focus.
His first startups never found product-market fit. He eventually did get there with Heyzap, the company he started before Mercury — but only after multiple false starts and pivots.
The idea for Mercury came from Akhund's own frustrations with traditional banks as a founder. By the time he started mulling over his next move in 2017, he was surprised no one had fixed this problem yet, so he decided to tackle it himself.
But the road to launch took lots of patience: Akhund first had to learn all about fintech, a foreign industry to him. He needed to find a sponsor bank to co-build the product with. He’d have to design an experience that both cleared every regulatory hurdle and was a delight to use. It took nearly two years until Mercury was ready to launch in 2019.
The slow build paid off. Akhund says it was “blazingly obvious” that Mercury had product-market fit just months after its public launch — unlike any of his previous startups. “When I finally found product-market fit for Mercury, I thought, ‘Why did I waste so much time trying to sell something that no one really wanted at my previous companies, when I could have just learned quickly and moved on?’”
Now valued at $3.5B with a fresh $300M Series C fundraise, Mercury has reached a scale Akhund never came close to before. In this exclusive interview, he shares all the hard-earned lessons he’d tell his twenty-something founder self.
Here’s a preview of his wisdom:
- The value of picking — and sticking with — the right idea. Akhund took the iterate-around approach with his earlier startups. In hindsight, he wishes he spent more time upfront in search of a stellar idea. “When you’re a stubborn, high-grade founder, you don't know when to give up,” he says. “We’d have an idea and say, ‘Let's sell the hell out of it.’ We spent two years working on every idea we had. We made incremental progress, but in hindsight, we clearly did not have product-market fit for a long time.”
- Why founders should prove they can do the hard part before building anything else. When Akhund took the leap to start building Mercury, he knew nothing about finance. He did know, however, that he could build a great product. So before he wrote any code, he embarked on a months-long discovery sprint with fintech founders, investors and lawyers to find out what was feasible from a compliance perspective. “In the beginning, spend all your time doing the thing you're the least capable of doing — and the least capable of proving to the world that you can do,” he says.
- The merits of taking your time before launch. The early Mercury team spent nearly two years building — and rebuilding — the first version of the product before launching publicly. “When you launch something, it’s very hard to course-correct. There are lots of features in Mercury today that we built pre-launch. Trying to change things now is much harder with 200,000 users,” he says.
- Culture lessons from a first-time scale-up CEO. Akhund had been the scrappy founder of a single-digit team several times before, but Mercury is his first adventure leading a thousand-person company. He reflects on his founder-to-CEO evolution, from the danger of copy-pasting others’ advice to codifying and scaling culture.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors