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

Fintech Payments

What this would be today

The Landing Page Review The Investor Narrative GTM 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. Technically it worked. Commercially, 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

None of that is about payments. It's about a product nobody can file.

01 · What this engagement produced

13 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what four months actually 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 not a communication decision. Getting it wrong doesn't make you harder to explain, it 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 not a communication 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

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

Stakeholder narratives

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 to explain

A product to deploy

Compliance raised late

Compliance answered first

05 · What I built

7 workstreams

Seven workstreams, from category to investor narrative.

01Category definitionA checkout-native incentive, not a payment method.

03 Segment, position & price

THE INVESTOR NARRATIVE

Positioned as an incentive layer sitting on the existing checkout rather than a new way to pay
Explicit category boundaries, including what the product is not
A narrative that puts checkout hesitation, not affordability, at the centre of the problem

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.

Payment as an endpoint, or payment as the moment. The category argument was that the third one hasn't been built 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 matrixNothing gets added to a merchant's checkout without six people agreeing.

04 Message

GTM FOUNDATIONS

A distinct promise per stakeholder, each with its own proof and its own objection
Written so that no two stakeholders are given contradictory reasons to say yes
Deliberately handled Risk and Compliance first rather than last, because that is where this category dies

Six people have to agree

One product. Six different reasons 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

Not credit. Not lending.

No consumer debt, no affordability checks.

The one that matters

Enterprise

Additive, not a replacement

Works alongside what the merchant already runs.

The product didn't change. The reason changed six times.

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

04The merchant hubThe pitch, built as a product rather than a deck.

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 rather than specified

05Sales and onboarding enablementUnderstandable is not the same as adoptable.

05 Launch & enable

GTM FOUNDATIONS

A merchant-facing pitch deck, built and presented directly to prospective merchants, taking them from first conversation to onboarding
Merchant pitch narrative, one-pagers and an ROI framing finance would accept
A CFO-grade commercial model, kept deliberately separate from the investor narrative
An onboarding flow built and in place, so everything needed for the first merchant pilot was ready to launch rather than designed on paper

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 rather than treating them as interchangeable
Supported the integration work itself

A checkout product doesn't reach merchants directly. It reaches them through whoever already sits in their checkout, so choosing that partner is a distribution decision, not a technical one.

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

03 Segment, position & price

THE INVESTOR NARRATIVE

A master deck narrative architecture: 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 framed honestly: what was signed, what was integrated, and what was still a target
Kept deliberately separate from the CFO-grade merchant commercial model, because an investor and a merchant finance lead are buying different things

The market sizing and the financial model were the founders' work, not mine. I built the narrative architecture, the category argument, the why-now and the traction framing, and the numbers came from them.

06 · The outcome

What the company reached

signed merchant LOIs

12+

merchants in active pipeline

PSPs integration-ready

Company outcomes during the engagement, not personal results. I built the go-to-market these came through; I didn't sign the LOIs or write the integrations.

07 · The judgment call

Refusing 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 right up until the risk and compliance conversation, which is where products in that category go to have a very different discussion.

Defining a new category is slower and costs you the shortcut. It also puts the product in front of a growth budget, not a credit committee, and lets the compliance answer be a differentiator rather than a defence.

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 categories rather than position inside them.

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. Everything in that offer was built 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. Everything in that offer was built 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

The company isn't named, and its pricing, commercial model and partners stay off this page. The traction figures above are published 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.