Radically different banking deserves more than just one Shaked.

Mercury customer since 2020. Designer, product marketer, AI-native operator.

See my work →

Image created by Ittai Shaked

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The opportunity

Every founder discovers Mercury
at a different moment.
Each one needs a different story.

Every entry point deserves a story built for that exact moment, and bespoke assets that move from insight to execution fast: sales enablement, shorter deal cycles, campaigns that actually convert, with AI doing the heavy lifting on production.

Founder Segment 01
The first-time founder
Moment: just incorporated
They need a bank account before they need most other things. The content strategy here is top-of-funnel and fast: partner with Stripe Atlas, YC, Clerky. Own the "first bank account" moment with content that makes Mercury the obvious default, not a decision.
What I'd build: comparison guides, incorporation partner content, "day one" onboarding sequence
Founder Segment 02
The post-fundraise team
Moment: just closed a round
They have real money to manage and real spend controls to set up. This is Mercury's product at its strongest: virtual cards, approval flows, cashflow visibility. The story here is about operating like a real company, not a scrappy startup.
What I'd build: vertical case studies, operator-voice content, "how we run finance at scale" series
Founder Segment 03
The agentic operator
Moment: drowning in financial ops
They run lean. They use AI for everything. They want banking that executes, not just records. Mercury has already built exactly this. The opportunity is creating content that makes them feel it, not just understand it, with campaigns that map directly to how they already work.
What I'd build: AI feature demo series, "watch it work" content, a campaign that makes agentic banking feel inevitable
Founder Segment 04
The international founder
Moment: building a US company from abroad
Mercury is one of the only banks that actually works for non-US founders building US companies. This is an undermarketed story with a deeply underserved audience. Localized content, founder testimonials by country, and clear "here's what you need to open an account" guides would unlock a significant acquisition channel.
What I'd build: localized landing pages, international founder testimonials, geo-targeted acquisition content

My work

Used to building with lean teams.
Wired for fast execution.

Globality
Brand & Product Marketing – Sole Marketer
0%
lift in brand impressions
Rebrand + AI GTM. One person.
Enterprise AI procurement platform needed a new brand and a way to make autonomous agent technology feel trustworthy to skeptical Fortune 500 buyers. Led the full rebrand: strategy, identity, design system, execution. Owned the GTM for Glo, their AI co-pilot. 144% lift in impressions, no agency.
Alchemy
Product Marketing (Contract)
Launch
Web3's first ChatGPT dev tools
Launched AlchemyAI. Owned the full GTM.
Web3's biggest developer platform needed to launch their first AI product into an ecosystem that wasn't sure it wanted AI yet. Owned positioning, messaging, launch strategy, and cross-functional execution for ChatWeb3 and the Alchemy ChatGPT Plugin. Strong community response and conversion on launch day.
See the case study →
HappyRobot
Growth Marketing – First Marketing Hire
Category Shift
voice AI to vertical intelligence
Repositioned the company narrative. Solo.
First marketing hire at a $62M-backed AI company. No existing assets, no playbook. Built the full marketing infrastructure from scratch, redesigned the website, and led the strategic repositioning from "voice AI for freight" to "intelligence within any vertical." Covered a team's output using AI as the operating layer.
Genie
Co-Founder
Award-Winning Campaign
student finance app, co-founded
Ditch the Debt. Campaign + product.
Co-founded a student loan optimization app and built the brand from zero. Ran the "Ditch the Debt" campaign: an emotional, story-led push that drove early user acquisition and won an award. Led product, marketing, and creative end to end. Mercury was our bank.
See Ditch the Debt →

How I work

Positioning from scratch, in categories that didn't have names yet.

Mercury is building financial infrastructure for the way founders actually operate, and that's a genuinely hard story to tell: complex product, skeptical audience, a category that barely existed a decade ago.

The pattern held across three companies: enterprise buyers at Globality who had never budgeted for AI procurement, developers at AlchemyAI still figuring out what Web3 was worth, and logistics operators at HappyRobot who didn't trust AI agents yet. 40+ GTM campaigns in two years, most of them solo, all in categories without an existing playbook.

01
I've sold "agent" to skeptical buyers
At Globality, AlchemyAI, and HappyRobot I made complex AI feel trustworthy to audiences that weren't ready to buy it yet. That means knowing where resistance comes from, what language defuses it, and how to earn trust before you make the ask.
02
Customer signal to campaign, fast
The full PMM motion runs here: customer research, narrative, positioning, launch. No handoffs to a designer, no waiting on a writer. The feedback loop from insight to shipped asset is weeks, not quarters.
03
Position all the way through to creative
Strategy without execution is just a slide deck. The landing page, the campaign, the one-pager, the deck, all of it ships. The design skill isn't separate from the PMM skill, it means the work looks like the thinking.
IO
Mercury
•••• •••• •••• 2020
Ittai Shaked
Genie • 2020

The connection

I've been on the other side of this product.

In 2020, I co-founded Genie, a fintech startup helping students manage and reduce debt. I sat on the founder side of your product and felt exactly what it means when financial infrastructure actually gets out of the way and lets you build.

Ideas

Banking that works
the way founders work.

Mercury has already built the product. The work now is expanding the narrative and getting it in front of the founders who will connect with it most. Three directions worth building.

The “relief” campaign
Founders' biggest fear is falling behind on something financial while heads-down building. The positioning here isn't about features, it's about the feeling at 11pm when payroll ran and you didn't have to think about it. Short-form video, founder social proof, triggered sequences at moments of financial stress. Mercury as peace of mind, not just a bank account.
The CFO you didn't know you had
Mercury's AI Insights gives founders financial clarity that used to require a full-time CFO. That's a category claim worth owning loudly. The messaging positions Mercury as financial intelligence, not just a bank account. Sales enablement angle: vertical case studies by company stage and spend profile, so the growth team has proof points for every conversation.
The AI-era bank
Mercury is building banking for a world where AI agents execute financial decisions. The brand that owns that narrative now will be the default infrastructure for AI-native companies in five years. The campaign targets AI-native founders in their own ecosystems: Discord communities, X, AI tool platforms, the spaces where the next wave is already building. Thought leadership, founder interviews, and an 'AI banking is already here' content series before the category names itself.

Founders who choose Mercury aren't shopping for a bank. They want infrastructure that moves as fast as they do and runs while they build. Each of these campaigns gets there from a different angle.

See my work ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Email me ↗

Ittai Shaked

Product Marketing – AI-Native Operator

Solo PMM who uses AI to cover what usually takes a team. Positioning, campaigns, creative, and launch across AI companies at every stage: from zero to product-market fit, through growth, and into repositioning at scale.

Works best when the product is technically complex, the category is still forming, and the brief doesn't fully exist yet. The throughline has always been seeing it all the way through, not finding the hand-off.

Product Marketing GTM Strategy Brand AI-Native Campaigns Launches Positioning

Here to write
the next chapter.

Have been watching the product evolve since first discovering it in 2020, building a startup that needed financial infrastructure tailored to the needs of a founder. The case Mercury gets to make right now, to founders who've never had infrastructure like this, is one of the most compelling in fintech. That's why this page exists.

ittaishaked@gmail.com Mercury CLI → See my work → LinkedIn →
Hey Barrett, The Mercury CLI button up top was built for this conversation. Worth a click. ↑