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Akhund frames Mercury as a response to legacy banks failing to help founders with the money decisions that matter, a frustration he says stretches back to his first company in 2006. He co-founded Mercury with two others, Jason and Max, in 2017 to build, in his words, a radically different way for founders to do banking. Separately, in Mercury's April 2019 Show HN launch thread, Akhund noted his previous company (an ad network) also partly inspired Mercury, though he didn't spell out the specific connection there.

“Creating a radically different way for founders to do banking is the reason Jason, Max, and I started Mercury in 2017.”

Mercury's earliest public users engaged through its Show HN launch post; Akhund personally answered pricing, eligibility, and product questions in the thread as they came in.

“We give a lot more for free than normal banks. We only charge for wires because right now we have a high fee with our partner.”

Mercury's first customers arrived from the launch itself, without a sales or ads push behind it. Akhund said that in his earlier companies a launch was only the starting gun for ramping sales and ads, and that he had not expected a launch to deliver customers on its own; signups in launch week ran well past what the team had planned for. Accounts generated revenue from the start rather than converting from a free tier later, since Mercury takes a share of deposit revenue with its partner bank and charged for wires from day one. A handful of customers were on the product before the public launch too: Mercury ran a private alpha through 2018, and Akhund handed out early access himself by email to people who asked.

“launches were just the start of when I could rev up sales/ads to get customers. They didn't actually deliver customers.”