Mercury's founder spent 1.5 years building a fintech startup with only 2% of entrepreneurs showing real interest, but that was enough in a large market. He relearned frontend code to handle complex bank integrations and learned that the worst moments come from overthinking, not from failing. His previous company, Heyzap, took six years before it worked.
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we spent 1.5 years building Mercury and it wasn't obvious that, like I would say in that time I probably spoke to 100+ entrepreneurs, right? And when you ask them like, oh, are you like, would you use this, right? Like maybe from the 100, like 2 were like, yeah, definitely use it, like give it to me now. And a lot of them were like, oh yeah, I mean it sounds interesting. And I was just like, I had like so little data apart from my instinct on whether like people would care, right? Because it's like, it turns out that even if 2% of people really, really would use it, like that's enough because the market was big enough. But it wasn't obvious. I was like, God, I just spent like, I'm spending a year and a half building this thing. You know, it kept taking longer than I thought because like, you know, it was more complicated than I thought. And we ended up doing like 2 integrations with like partner banks and, you know, it was definitely hard. So I wouldn't say at any point I was like, let's give up, But it wasn't like obvious, right? Like it was definitely like going like, yeah, like what am I doing here? Like how do I push this forward kind of thing? It's taking a long time, et cetera. Yeah, one thing that really helped me is like for the first 6 months or so, I was like, okay, I did the fundraise, I did the bank partner thing. And then I was like, now what, right? Like I'd done all of the things and now we just had to build it. And I hadn't actually programmed or coded. So I'm an engineer originally, but like I was also the CEO of my previous company. So I hadn't really coded for like 3, 4 years. But I was like, how do I push this forward more? And I'd already talked to as many people as it made sense to talk to, et cetera. So eventually I was just like, okay, you know, I'm just gonna relearn to code. And yeah, eventually, and that actually helped a lot, like just getting in there and like being in the zone and like helping build it really like helped alleviate my angst. And it was kind of fun to learn frontend programming again. And build the product. So that helps. I think generally speaking, like the sorrow or the troughs of sorrow are like the worst when you're like not doing something, right? Like when you're just worrying and thinking, oh, this isn't working for this reason, etc. I think the best thing to do is actually turn it into like an action plan. It's like, okay, you know, in my previous company, Heyzap, we went for 8 years and basically didn't work for the first 6 years, right? So that's like a really, really long time. But every time it wasn't working, we were just like, okay, we're gonna make this other thing work and we're gonna spend like, you know, a lot of time making this other thing work. And then we were like, okay, we launched it. And like, there's always like rays of sunshine in the troughs of sorrow, right? Like, it's like you launch something, it has a little bit of traction, but like takes another 6 weeks to figure out it doesn't work. And you, uh, yeah, after all of that, I realized like, and like actually I always have to remind myself of this, it's like you have to really enjoy that journey. All right. Like, I think if you're too focused on like success and you don't enjoy programming or you don't enjoy like talking to customers and building things or whatever it is that you're doing, I think it's just really hard. And I think I was like kind of fortunate that I do really enjoy programming and do, I think it's like a real privilege to make things for life, right? Like I think I could have easily had another life where I was just like working at a big company and a programmer there and not really like passionate about what I was doing. I've only had one job in my life and that's what it was like. So, like, I think it's a privilege to make something. So, like, I try to, like, remind myself of that and go like, okay, you know, we're making something. That's the fun part. And let's just, like, keep, keep the action and momentum going rather than, like, fixate on, like, the things that aren't working. Hmm.
