← All work

Fintech · payments · under NDA

Building a new checkout category from zero.

SECTOR

Payments and fintech

STAGE

Pre-launch, stealth

MARKET

UAE

ROLE

Product Marketing & GTM Lead

PERIOD

2025–2026

FintechPayments

What this would be today

The Landing Page ReviewThe Investor NarrativeGTM Foundations

The situation

A strong product idea, and no agreed way to explain it.

A UAE payments startup had built a checkout-native incentive: a way for merchants to reward customers who buy at full price. The product worked, and nobody could say what it was.

Every conversation described it slightly differently. There was no category it obviously belonged to, no defined merchant segment, and no shared answer to the first question every merchant asked, which was some version of "so what is this, exactly?"

You'll recognise this if

  • Every conversation describes your product slightly differently
  • Buyers keep comparing you to the wrong thing
  • Your category doesn't have a name yet
  • Compliance or legal keeps arriving late and killing momentum

All four come from a product nobody can file.

01 · What this engagement produced

26 of 34 outputs

26 of the 34 outputs, across five of the six stages.

The category, a checkout incentive, came out of stage 03, segment, position and price.

01Research5 of 6
01Voice of customer03Market report04Why now05Assumption log06Pre-mortem

1 not produced

Win / loss

02Competition3 of 4
07The Fifty08Table-stakes read10Competitor monitor

1 not produced

AI visibility

03Segment, position and price6 of 6
11ICP and segments12Use cases13Buying committee14Positioning15Packaging and pricing16Deck spine
04Message4 of 4
17Messaging framework18Claim check19Landing page review20Message drift
05Launch and enable8 of 8
21Launch tiers22Launch brief23Channel and funnel24Product Oracle25Sales enablement26FAQ27Onboarding journey28Release notes
06Measure and maintain0 of 6

6 not produced

Product funnel metrics, Launch post-mortem, Trust metrics, Customer case studies, Half-Life Map, Six-stage readout

Solid is what four months produced. Dashed is what it did not reach.

02 · The diagnosis

The category decided which regulator the company answered to.

An undefined checkout mechanic that changes what a shopper pays can be read three ways, and each one carries a different licensing regime. Read as buy-now-pay-later, it falls under consumer credit rules: affordability checks, a credit regulator, and the obligations that come with lending money. Read as a raffle or a prize mechanic, it falls under gaming and lottery regulation, which is a far worse place to land in this market. Read as a checkout-native incentive, it is merchant marketing spend, and neither of the first two applies. So the category was a licensing decision. Getting it wrong makes you a different company with a different licence.

Struck

Read as buy now pay later

Consumer credit rules, affordability checks, a credit regulator.

Struck

Read as a prize mechanic

Gaming and lottery regulation, the worst place to land in this market.

Chosen

Read as a checkout incentive

Merchant marketing spend, and neither of the first two applies.

The category was a licensing decision. Getting it wrong makes you a different company with a different licence.

The same decision, in your business

Which category are you letting the market file you under?

Book a call →

03 · The mandate

I was hired to build the marketing function and define the category it sells into.

I joined as the founding marketing hire. No function, no positioning, no merchant narrative. The remit ran from category definition through segmentation and messaging to merchant-facing assets and onboarding.

Built from zero

Function

6

Stakeholder narratives

2

GTM surfaces

merchant and shopper

04 · When I arrived, when I left

When I arrived

When I left

No agreed category

A defined category with explicit boundaries

Every conversation different

One narrative, six stakeholder versions

No merchant segmentation

ICP defined by basket value and drop-off behaviour

A product nobody could describe

A merchant site, a pitch deck and an onboarding flow ready for the first pilot

Compliance raised late

Compliance answered first

05 · What I built

7 workstreams

Seven workstreams, from category to investor narrative.

01Category definitionA checkout-native incentive that sits on the existing checkout.

03 Segment, position & price

THE INVESTOR NARRATIVE
  • Positioned as an incentive layer on the existing checkout
  • Explicit category boundaries, including what the product is not
  • A narrative built on checkout hesitation, where buy now pay later is built on affordability

The category progression

CHECKOUT 1.0

Making cards work.

CHECKOUT 2.0

Faster, smoother, more flexible.

CHECKOUT 3.0

Checkout becomes a growth and engagement layer.

The category argument was that nobody had built the third one yet.

The same problem elsewhere: buyers filing you under the wrong budget line.

02Merchant segmentation and ICPWho this is worth deploying for.

01 Research · 03 Segment, position & price

GTM FOUNDATIONS
  • Merchant segments defined by basket value, category and checkout drop-off behaviour
  • Buying triggers and the internal path a merchant follows to approve something new at checkout
  • Disqualification criteria, because a checkout incentive is wrong for a large share of merchants
03A six-stakeholder messaging matrixSix people have to agree before a merchant adds anything to its checkout.

04 Message

GTM FOUNDATIONS
  • A distinct promise per stakeholder, each with its own proof and its own objection
  • No two stakeholders get contradictory reasons to say yes
  • Handled risk and compliance first, because that is where this category dies

Six people have to agree

Six people, each with a different reason to say yes.

CEO / GM

Grow revenue without new risk

No debt, no discounts, no regulatory exposure.

Growth & ecommerce

Turn checkout into a growth lever

Measurable uplift at the moment of decision.

Finance

Predictable economics

Fixed expected cost, no balance-sheet exposure.

Payments & engineering

Zero disruption to checkout

Integrates with the existing payments stack, no new payment flow.

Risk & compliance

No credit, no lending

No consumer debt, no affordability checks.

The one that matters

Enterprise

An addition to the stack

Works alongside what the merchant already runs.

The same product, with a different reason for each of the six.

The same problem elsewhere: one message written for the person who signs, and nobody else in the room.

04The merchant hubThe pitch as a working site.

05 Launch & enable

THE LANDING PAGE REVIEW
  • A merchant-facing site carrying the full stakeholder narrative, integration story and FAQs
  • A separate shopper-facing surface, because a two-sided product needs two GTM surfaces
  • Built and shipped
05Sales and onboarding enablementWhat a merchant needs to go from first call to pilot.

05 Launch & enable

GTM FOUNDATIONS
  • A merchant pitch deck I built and presented to prospective merchants, from first conversation to onboarding
  • Merchant pitch narrative, one-pagers and an ROI framing finance would accept
  • A commercial model for a merchant's finance lead, kept separate from the investor narrative
  • An onboarding flow built and in place, so the first merchant pilot was ready to launch
06PSP integration strategyWhich payment service provider to build against, and why.

05 Launch & enable

GTM FOUNDATIONS
  • Compared the PSPs operating in the market against integration requirements, merchant reach and time to live
  • Built a framework for which PSP suits which merchant profile
  • Supported the integration work itself

A checkout product reaches merchants through whoever already sits in their checkout, so choosing that partner is a distribution decision.

07The investor narrativeThe same category argument, told to a different room.

03 Segment, position & price

THE INVESTOR NARRATIVE
  • A master deck structure: the category, the problem, why now, the model and the ask, in an order that survives questions
  • The category argument and the why-now, carried over from the merchant work and rewritten for an investor room
  • Traction stated in three parts: signed, integrated, and still a target
  • Kept separate from the merchant commercial model, because an investor and a merchant finance lead are buying different things

The founders built the financial model. I built the deck structure, the category argument, the why-now, the market report and the traction framing.

06 · The outcome

Five merchants signed letters of intent.

5

signed merchant LOIs

12+

merchants in active pipeline

2

PSPs integration-ready

These are the company's outcomes during the engagement. I built the go-to-market they came through. I did not sign the LOIs or write the integrations.

07 · The judgment call

I refused the category the market was ready to hand us.

There was an easy version of this. Describe it in the language buyers already use, accept the comparison, and get a meeting quickly. It would have worked until the risk and compliance conversation, where products in that category face credit rules.

Defining a new category is slower and costs you the shortcut. It also puts the product in front of a growth budget and turns the compliance answer into a reason to buy.

08 · What this proves

Four things, if you're deciding whether to hire me.

I work in ambiguity.

No category, no ICP, no narrative on day one.

I define new categories.

Including turning down the obvious one.

I write for the whole buying committee.

Six stakeholders, six promises, no contradictions.

I ship the assets.

Two live GTM surfaces.

Where to start

What this would be today

This was four months, full-time, before any of it was productised. The same work now splits across three engagements.

The Landing Page Review

Free · 2 days

The merchant-facing page, read as a stranger and rewritten. On this engagement it was one part of a larger build. On its own it's two days and it costs nothing.

The Landing Page Review →

The Investor Narrative

€4,500 · 3 weeks

The category, who it's for, why now, and the narrative spine of the deck. I built everything in that offer here, for a company raising with a product nobody could file into a category.

The Investor Narrative →

GTM Foundations

€5,000/mo · 3 months minimum

Segments, positioning, a message for each of the six people who had to agree, pricing at outline, the channel decision and the launch. I built everything in that offer here.

GTM Foundations →

Book a call →See what each one costs →

Frameworks installed

The Messaging MatrixProduct Oracle

What this took and what stays off the page

I don't name the company, and its pricing, commercial model and partners stay off this page. I publish the traction figures above with permission. If you want the detail behind them, ask on a call and I'll tell you what I'm able to.

This took four months, full-time. The same work is now three months at four days a month, because the system that came out of it does the repeatable parts.