Clients / Jillion
Case study · Jillion
Pre-launch GTM for a MENA fintech that sold within a year
A funded Gulf payments startup had no public brand, no transactions and a crowded market. Twelve months later it had bank partnerships, a 40-person team and a buyer, before ever launching publicly.
Julian Moore · CMO via Marketing Momentum · October 2023 to October 2024
The situation
Jillion set out to digitise SME payments in the Gulf: a real problem, a funded team, and a market already crowded with basic tools at one end and legacy enterprise banking at the other. Pre-launch, the company had no brand recognition, no transaction history and no public proof of anything.
Everything a payments business needs before launch, bank partners, senior hires, eventually a buyer, depends on confidence. The GTM job was to create evidence and credibility in the right order, fast.
The diagnosis
Launch marketing was the wrong frame. What the business actually needed was validated demand it could show to partners and investors, and a brand that institutions could take seriously. Those are different deliverables from awareness, and they come from different work.
Market-fit testing ran through live ad campaigns, surveys and direct customer interviews rather than a positioning workshop. The gap it exposed was the mid-market: businesses too big for basic payment tools and ignored by enterprise-focused legacy banks. That finding set the proposition priorities, payment orchestration and QR Pay, and everything that followed.
Pre-launch marketing is validation plus credibility. The job was building an asset worth partnering with and worth buying, not generating launch buzz for a product that was not yet public.
The work
What changed
Four workstreams in twelve months, sequenced from evidence to credibility to ecosystem.
Market-fit testing
Tested demand with live campaigns, surveys and interviews before anything launched publicly. Real click, response and interview data validated the mid-market segment and killed weaker propositions cheaply, months before they could become expensive.
Proposition focus
Prioritised payment orchestration and QR Pay as the differentiating features the validated segment actually needed, and built the messaging and materials around those rather than a generic payments pitch.
Brand repositioning for institutional trust
Overhauled the brand to signal institutional credibility rather than scrappy startup energy. In Gulf banking conversations, looking like an institution is table stakes; the repositioning was done specifically to support the bank-partnership discussions.
Hiring and partnerships
Marketing carried the employer story too: selling the vision and culture before there was a public product. The company grew from around 10 to around 40 people in under nine months, including veterans from leading fintechs and JP Morgan, and I helped secure two major UAE banking partnerships.
Operator detail
How it worked in practice
Ads as research, not acquisition
Pre-launch ad spend was buying answers, not customers: which segments clicked, which messages held attention, what the response data said about willingness to switch. It is the cheapest honest research available in a market with thin published data.
The brand was rebuilt for bankers, not users
The audience that mattered most pre-launch was institutional: bank partnership teams, regulators, senior candidates, potential acquirers. Design, messaging and proof were all calibrated for that room, and the two UAE banking partnerships followed the repositioning.
Recruiting without a public brand
Candidates could not look up reviews or press. The vision, the validated market evidence and the calibre of early hires were the recruiting assets, and each senior fintech and JP Morgan-experienced hire made the next one easier.
Confidence compounds
Validated demand made bank conversations easier; bank partnerships made hiring easier; the team and partnerships made the business credible to a buyer. None of it caused the sale by itself, but the sequence built the asset that sold.
Outcomes
Results
| Metric | Start | Outcome | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| UAE banking partnerships | 0 | 2 major partnerships | during the engagement |
| Company headcount | c.10 | c.40 | under nine months |
| Company outcome | pre-launch startup | sold before public launch | by October 2024 |
UAE banking partnerships
0 → 2 major partnerships
during the engagementCompany headcount
c.10 → c.40
under nine monthsCompany outcome
pre-launch startup → sold before public launch
by October 2024The sale is a company outcome. The GTM work helped create the conditions: a validated proposition, an institutional brand, two major UAE banking partnerships and a team a buyer would want. Team growth figures are company headcount, not marketing headcount.
Julian is an exceptional leader who completely built out and led the entire marketing team from the ground up. What stood out most was his seamless integration with the product teams, something I had rarely seen before in a CMO. His deep knowledge of B2B marketing was pivotal to our success.
What I took from it
Pre-launch, marketing’s customer is confidence: partner confidence, candidate confidence, investor confidence. Live validation data and an institutional brand are worth more than any amount of launch planning.
The Gulf-specific lesson: in markets where relationships and institutional trust decide who gets a meeting, brand credibility is commercial infrastructure, not decoration.
About Julian Moore
Julian Moore is a growth CMO specialising in fintech and B2B SaaS. Across 20 years he has led growth in six fintech and SaaS leadership roles, from pre-seed startups through PE-backed scale-ups to listed businesses including Xero, with three company sales during his tenures (Contis to Solaris, Bullhorn’s Vista to Insight transaction, and Jillion pre-launch). He runs Marketing Momentum, a fractional CMO practice for fintech and SaaS founders.
More about Julian →Pre-launch and need the market to take you seriously?
If partnerships, hiring or funding depend on credibility you have not built yet, the work is validation and institutional trust, in that order. I have run that sequence from day one to exit.