Product Marketing & GTM Lead · Nov 2025 – 2026 · Freelance engagement
Payhaps: a checkout product that isn't BNPL, in a market where everything is
The situation
Merchants in the UAE had already learned what "pay in four" means. Payhaps isn't that. The shopper pays in full, and gets a fixed 1-in-99 chance of the basket being free.
That's a genuinely different product, and the difference is the whole problem. Every checkout product a merchant had evaluated in the previous three years was a financing option. The category had a budget line, an evaluation process, and a first question: what's my cost of capital?
Payhaps doesn't have one. There's no lending, no receivable, no default risk. Which sounds like good news until you realise it means the product doesn't fit the box the buyer is holding.
When I arrived
When I left
No marketing function at all
A function, built from zero
Sold as BNPL-adjacent
Positioned as a conversion mechanic, not financing
One deck for merchants and investors
Two narratives, built for opposite buyers
No merchant onboarding path
Onboarding journeys and integration guides live
What I built
The marketing function from zero: positioning, messaging and merchant segmentation for an embedded payments startup entering the UAE.
A merchant sales narrative deliberately separated from the investor narrative. A CFO-grade ROI model showing merchant economics with and without Payhaps. The merchant landing page spec, detailed enough for product, design and engineering to ship end to end, addressing CEOs, growth, finance, payments and risk as distinct readers. Merchant onboarding journeys and integration guides for Shopify, WooCommerce and API. A Gen Z–native shopper checkout flow. Investor and stakeholder summaries, launch and activation packs.
The judgment call
Refusing the BNPL category, even though it was the budget line merchants already had.
The easy move was to sell it as BNPL-adjacent and inherit the evaluation process. That would have been fatal. The first question in that process is about cost of capital, and every honest answer makes the product sound like it's missing something.
So the positioning had to fight for a different category entirely: not a financing option, a conversion mechanic. Which meant the sales deck couldn't lead with shopper delight. It had to lead with the CFO's arithmetic and let the 1-in-99 be the reason the arithmetic works.
Separating the merchant story from the investor story was the same decision applied twice. The people who fund a reward layer and the people who install one are persuaded by opposite things, and one deck trying to do both persuades neither.
Frameworks installed