Building MercuriDash

May 23, 2026•Entrepreneurship

Go Big Or Go Home

Over the last couple of years, I've been building — creating, refining, iterating — a platform that I believe is a genuine game-changer for creative consumer brands. My mission all along hasn't been to make a quick, superficial app. It's to revolutionise the way things are done: to make the process more efficient while respecting creatives and the creative process, and helping them remove the parts that are wasteful. I saw a problem and realised it needed a solution that was nuanced, careful and thoughtful — and that's what we've now built.

MercuriDash doesn't just help teams rapidly ideate, visualise, and refine products through a creative and product-led lens. It also lets brands embed every signal that matters to them directly into the product development process. The platform is designed to respect each brand's authority — so every team gets to decide what's important. A creative-first brand can prioritise brand identity. A cost-conscious brand can lead with production feasibility. A sustainability-driven brand can weight material sourcing above all else.

With our platform, no more guesswork. No more circular meetings. A new way of bringing products to market, built specifically for the realities of creative consumer brands. You can see what we are building at mercuridash.com.

Choosing the bigger assignment

The original aim was to save time and money in product development. But as I built, I realised the assignment is much bigger than speed. And it hinted at something I already knew instinctively: we don't need to help creatives come up with ideas — that part is fun, and they're good at it. We need to help them make products that win. We need to help guide better decisions. We need to help them move towards success, in the way they define it.

So it's not just about creating — it's creating within constraints. It's not just pretty images — it's about embedding real-world signals, demand criteria and analysis, and tracking every iteration. And doing all of that while balancing the competing priorities unique to every team and brand. That's what takes MercuriDash from a fast iteration tool to a true decision-making platform — one that helps brands make better, more confident calls. (And yes, faster and cheaper, too.)

In doing that, we inadvertently built our secret sauce.

A carefully considered scoring methodology that makes it simple to evaluate concepts side by side. You know which to take forward and which to drop, so you can move with confidence — investing time and budget into your strongest concepts, and walking away from weak, expensive, or misaligned ones early, before they become costly mistakes.

And there are distinct learning models that track and codify taste, process and performance — so we've also closed the loop. We go beyond the concept and see what happens after a product launches, then feed that back into the model, so every launch sharpens the next one. Each product that moves through the workflow carries its own decision analysis with it: a record of why it earned its place, ready to reference at every stage.

What makes our platform unique is that it doesn't just learn from preferences and taste. It also learns from the processes that work, and from actual performance data. And critically, every team can edit and control their own model. They decide who influences it and what goes into it.

That way, every brand gets their own intelligence layer — even on basic plans — and it gets smarter over time based on what they choose to feed it and how they use the platform. In some ways, it's a bespoke approach done "light," without the enterprise agreement and associated cost.

Working for creatives — visuals as a language

Even though the platform is about concept design and development, and not image generation, we still use visuals as a primary language — because that is the language of creatives.

One of our focuses from the start has been how deeply we go into product category taxonomy and stylistic references, so that the visuals are exactly what you're picturing in your head. We consider many advanced parameters ranging from aesthetic to mood to materials to feel. We really wanted to go deep, and it worked: in earlier versions, users loved what the platform came up with — and now it's even better. Because creative products aren't just ideas on an Excel, nor are they just images. They're both.

Teams can see multiple views of every concept — inside, outside, packaging, lifestyle sets — so they can truly visualise a product on shelves, in campaigns, and on a website, before committing.

When they're ready, they can export, transfer, and turn concepts into drafts, specs, or line sheets, so they can share them onwards. We create an easy hand-off point in their process.

Why this matters — the ROI

The economics here are striking. We estimate that even for a small brand, just a few better products launched — and a few weak ones avoided — delivers ROI upwards of 10x the investment in the platform. That multiple scales with launch frequency, SKU count, and team size. For a brand running dozens of launches a year, the compounding effect is significant: fewer sunk costs on products that won't perform, more capital concentrated on the ones that will — and a process that learns over time how to create product winners with more repeatability.

This isn't AI slapped onto a product workflow. It's AI used the way it should be — to genuinely create value by surfacing and codifying the judgement, taste, and constraints that already live inside great brand teams, and making them usable at every decision point.

The original problem remains

Consumer brands are everywhere. The market is more competitive than it has ever been — more launches, more SKUs, more DTC brands fighting for attention. Every single one is looking for an angle to sell more and avoid product flops.

The biggest mistake a brand can make is to take something into production and get it wrong. And that happens more often than it should — not because teams aren't talented, but because the information is scattered, the decision-making is disconnected, and the intelligence that should balance every choice is either misapplied or missing entirely.

A decision you can get behind — logically, creatively, and commercially — needs all three to line up. Right now, for most creative brands, they rarely do. And therein lies the killer problem.

We've already expanded the platform across multiple categories — beauty, makeup, home — and we'll continue to broaden into more consumer verticals over time.

To build a product is easy. To build a carefully considered product that's faithful to its industry — one that doesn't just bolt on AI and data but uses them to create massive, scalable value, and solves a problem that affects millions — that takes time. That's what we've been doing. And we're just getting started.

What's next — the bigger picture

We started in beauty, makeup, and home — but the questions we're solving aren't category-specific. They're the same questions every consumer brand faces, in every vertical. What do we make, and why? How do we know we can trust this direction? How do we accelerate time to market without losing alignment with the people who matter? How do we learn from every launch so the next one is sharper? How do we stand out while staying true to brand identity? How do we think visually and analytically in the same workflow, instead of switching tools, meetings, and mindsets to do it?

Those questions apply just as much to a food and beverage brand launching a new product line, to a toy company trying to land its next hit, to an electronics brand balancing design, cost, and performance. The categories change. The decision-making problem doesn't.

If I let myself zoom all the way out — imagine one place that holds the infrastructure behind multiple successful brands, across multiple categories. A system where the way great products get built is captured, refined, and made accessible. Something like a YouTube for product. A place to dream, design, build and ensure great things get made well. A creative, connected and intelligent infrastructure that drives every consumer product — and is adaptable to any brand - each operating with its own taxonomy, applying signals that are relevant, and building on its own taste and process intelligence.