From @dialecticpod 57 with @immad:
Greatness seems achievable once it’s familiar. Immad grew up poor in London, but twelve generations back, an ancestor ruled the Durrani Empire, so greatness was part of the family story. Later, sitting beside billion-dollar founders at Y Combinator dinners made it feel human-sized: “I don’t think I’m amazing or anything, but I also don’t think everyone else is that amazing either.”
Look for risk with a floor and no ceiling. Quitting a $50K job meant $50K of downside, “but I could make a billion-dollar company.” He now teaches his kids to chase capped downside with unbounded upside and to avoid the reverse.
Banks are bad at product because the product doesn’t pay. Immad estimates lending supplies 80–90% of most banks’ revenue, making them “mid-market enterprise sales companies selling loans.” This explains their neglected everyday banking interface.
When the default is mediocre, doing the obvious is an unfair advantage. Immad assumed a law explained why banks hide transactions older than 90 days. In fact, they all share the same backend software and its 20-year-old limitation. Mercury refused to accept limits like that, and “the bar was not that high.”
Enough small improvements can add up to something new. Mercury launched without a novel hook. Just “the thing that you might expect your bank to do, but we did it much nicer.” Immad believes “80% of the fight is doing the little things,” and that doing them consistently compounds.
Two percent of a big enough market is a big market. Six months before launch, Immad spoke to 100 companies and found only two that were really excited: a dispiriting result after so much work. His eventual lesson: “If 2% of people are like, ‘F\k yeah,’ that’s actually a lot of people if the market’s big enough.”
Trust is the foundation of a right to win. Most products don’t begin with “Step one: Send me all your money.” Banking does, which makes trust painful to build. But once customers clear that bar, they’re already in a trusted relationship when the next high-trust product arrives, like accounting.
Go long entrepreneurship. Only about a quarter of Mercury’s customers switched from another bank. The rest opened their first account for a new company. Immad wants to compound with them: “The future is defined by those companies, not the existing companies.”