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Mercury is going to close our bank account

Ilya Novohatskyi

Jul 25

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Hey guys.

This month, Microns is celebrating its birthday - 3 years! 🎂

Time flies, and I remember how I started this project from my parents' house. I didn’t have funding; I just used my salary from the agency. And it was beautiful because limited resources generate creativity.

The marketplace is slowly gaining traction, and I see great potential. So, the next step will be to monetize sellers to make it a profitable venture without VC money.

I don’t want to raise money and become dependent on someone else’s desire to get an excellent ROI in the next 3-5 years. I want my customers to become my investors because that’s the most reliable revenue source. That way, I can ensure I build a marketplace our customers use and love.

In today’s newsletter, you’ll learn :

Who I hired next after the developer;
How Mercury created problems for us (might for you too);
Automated e-commerce business with $37k in revenue;
Everything takes time: In 3 years, Alex built 25 products and reached $10k/month.

Photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash

👋 Welcome

Welcome to the 331 new people joining in the last 20 days.

Let me know what you think of your first issue.

Replying helps Google realize it’s not a spam.

Want to collaborate? Drop me a DM here.

🎨 What’s new on Microns

1) Save as a draft. I always simplify anything possible to make things easier and faster. However, when selling a business, you must provide a bare minimum of information so potential buyers can decide to contact you. So, instead of losing information that you filled you can save listing as a draft and continue working on it when you have a time.

Now you can save your listing as a draft.

2) New team member. Earlier this month, I hired an operational manager. Oksana will review new listings and answer support inquiries. This way, I can focus more on product development, content, and growth.

🏦 Mercury issues

At the start of the week, I received this email. It says that Mercury will stop serving founders located in Ukraine. When I read it, I was overwhelmed. Why did they put Ukraine on the same list as Russia and Iran? It was nonsense for me. So I got furious and posted about it on X.

Then, I figured out the real reason behind this suspension. OFAC (U.S. Department of the Treasury) sanctioned occupied Ukrainian territories. This means that financial companies must monitor and block any activity from those regions. Mercury takes so many resources to implement proper monitoring that blocking an entire country is easier.

Boom! There were plenty of hot discussions on X, and the founders were angry about this change. I analyzed every reply and got many DMs. In the end, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. So I learned a few positive things from this situation:

You always need to have at least two bank accounts. In my case, I already had a Wise business account, so I was calm.
If your post becomes viral on social media, you can make valuable connections. For example, the CFO at Brex reached out to me and proposed his help, which gave me another good option.

I can tell only one thing: Customers remember how you behave with them. So, none of the blocked businesses will return to them. The trust was lost.