Happy Thursday and welcome to another fine edition of the Leaderboard. In today's edition, we're chatting about: Mercury's tech-forward personal banking, an AI marketing tool that ditches cringe, and a much-needed upgrade for business mail. Let's dive in.
Mercury Personal: Powerful and personal joint accounts on Mercury
I’ve gone on about how much I love Mercury’s UX and design before (not an investor, just a fan since Alpha), and it’s refreshing to see that level of thought brought to personal finance—because if we’re using modern tools for everything else, why settle for clunky banking? Mercury Personal carries over the granular permissions from the business banking solution, which I used back in Alpha to give my family and partner access to specific accounts. Leaning into this use case with fully-fledged joint accounts feels like a natural evolution—and a seamless, smart one at that.
Remention: Place your product in billions of online discussions with AI
I think Remention’s tagline undersells the real potential value of the tool. The lazy approach to AI-driven marketing is to just let LLMs flood otherwise organic discussions with banal GPTese that’s more annoying than persuasive. Used properly, Remention seems to provide a way to circumvent this. The tool identifies threads where it would make sense to plug your product, and provides suggested copy to help you engage. The shrewdest marketers will leverage the AI’s comparative advantage — thread identification — but maintain strong human involvement in the copywriting. (At least until AI copy improves.)
Stable: A virtual address and mailbox for your business
Never settle for less! I had resigned myself to be stuck with EarthClass Mail and the limits of its outdated interface. And bam - Stable swoops into save the day! With remote companies now the norm, Stable is taking a fresh take on handling official business mail, including offering real street addresses - not just PO boxes that aren't compliant for official business comms (e.g. business registration). I’m excited to migrate our company to Stable in the new year and bringing all business correspondence into one consolidated place with easy automations and workflow management.
In an era where AI is reshaping how businesses operate, the journey of building an early-stage startup has never been more dynamic—or complex. How do founders navigate finding product-market fit, delegation, and scaling, all while adapting to technological innovations?
Join on January 14 at 3 pm PT for a fireside chat with Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder of Vanta, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Founder of LTSE, as they explore the journey of the modern startup founder.
Eric and Christina will discuss: