Test an emerging founder acquisition thesis
An attractive adjacent segment can be visible before its real customer job is understood.
Early signals often pull teams toward scale while uneven evidence calls for a narrower learning agenda.
“Our money moves constantly, but I don’t want another tool that creates more admin.”
Henrique Oliveira · Agency Founder
Runs a 14-person digital agency balancing client receipts, contractor payouts, and software spending.
What pulls against what
- market size vs. behavioral fit
- acquisition efficiency vs. activation quality
- external signals vs. observed usage
- fast narrative vs. reversible learning
What is at stake
A promising cohort may represent durable new demand—or a misleading artifact of incomplete tagging. The task is to decide what deserves a small, reversible bet
Why Mercury
At Mercury, this can matter when founder segments outside the core audience begin to show signs of durable financial-operating needs.
Written for
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.