He doesn't give the name element enough credit. It's huge. Mint is one of the two examples I give of best brand names ever.

Not kidding. Ever. Silk Soymilk is the other example I use.

Mint's a killer brand name, I think it'd be literally impossible to beat Mint on natural branding in personal finance, it's the most perfect name I could imagine. It has double, good meanings - "Mint" as in a place where coins/money are minted, and of course the plant/candy. Then the plant/candy is associated with being fresh, clean, safe, and it's colored green, again like money.

It's just genius. It's also only four letters, easy to remember, relevant, and they got the domain name for it. It's really, really good. The only other name so good is "silk soymilk", for basically all the same reasons. (soymilk -SoymILK - easy to remember, silk is clean/smooth/elegant/upscale, four letters, hard to forget, etc).

Seriously, Mint might be the best named/naturally branded online company ever. I'm not joking. If I ever had to do a lecture on naming and branding, I'd 100% for sure use Mint as an example.

Hi, I was one of the early Mint.com product guys.

I just want to say thanks to Marc for sharing this. I know how difficult it is to be objective in a post-mortem analysis, and I think your post is a very balanced (and dignified) assessment.

There's one more important differentiator, however, that hasn't been discussed yet and which pre-empts a lot of this commentary, that I thought I'd share: Mint intentionally targeted a different market.

Most consumer spending in the US is managed by middle aged men and women that are not especially financially nor technically savvy. It was our view that previous personal finance solutions (Quicken, MS Money, and the following web-based solutions) catered more towards the technically/financially proficient, and had therefore missed the larger market opportunity.

So we tried our best to ignore the Silicon Valley drivel around "viral distribution" and "cloud security" and focus instead on issues like "How can we make it easier for a soccer Mom in Kansas to set and meet her monthly grocery budget?".

The Mint brand (including the name, visuals, and user experience) were all designed with this in Mind. They were definitely supportive, as Marc correctly points out, but in no way were they determinate.

I think Mint and Wesabe were both strong products that served their users' needs well. We just happened to target different users, and ultimately there were more of ours.

The essential point seems to be that Mint was easier for users. This is something we constantly emphasize at YC. You care a lot about your startup. You have no idea how little a potential user cares. So you can't let the activation energy be high.

Plus users are mostly not programmers. They're terrified by software. Most software they've tried in their lives has caused them pain, either by not working right or by being incomprehensible (which are indistinguishable to the victim).

So imagine you're designing your app for someone who's both apathetic and cringing with fear at the same time. You cannot make it too easy. If there's something you can do that will take a week and make your app 1% easier to start using, it's worth doing.

This is a really good article and it does cover a few things that were probably factors, but I remember looking at both Wesabe and Mint back when they were both new and I chose Mint for two reasons:

1. The design was better, which made me feel more comfortable about handing over my data (Mint's designer Jason Purtorti talks about this here: http://vimeo.com/15066599)

2. Mint seemed more focused on being a really simple-to-use webapp to analyze my finances, whereas Wesabe's messaging indicated that they were trying to leverage the wisdom of crowds to help people make better financial decisions. I don't want the crowd analyzing or managing my finances, and it wasn't clear at a glance how their goal could be accomplished while protecting my privacy.

Also, as he mentions regarding the Yodlee thing, Wesabe had a "download this application and it'll retrieve your bank data" thing, but Mint just worked with thousands of financial institutions, and that seemed much easier and more reliable.

Regardless, this was a great blog post and I wish we could see more introspective posts like this when ventures don't work out the way the founders hoped.

Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all...Their approach completely kicked our approach's ass...Changing people's behavior is really hard

Hmmm, reminds me of an old saying, "When in doubt, leave it out." Now I'm going back to all my forms and mockups, wondering if there's anything else that can be removed. Short attention spans, human nature, and plain old laziness make "Keep It Simple Stupid" more relevant than ever.

A domain name doesn't win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn't lose you a market. You can't blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you'll win.

Bulletin board material. Front and center. (I really should be spending more time writing code and less worrying about the market or reading Hacker News.)

[EDIT: We complain a lot here about "survivor bias". This is an excellent post and a great counterexample with much to be learned. Wesabe may have lost, but AFAIC, Marc is most definitely a winner.]

I looked at both Wesabe and Mint when trying to decide on a aggregation service. I ended up choosing Mint.

- Mint was easy to remember, and easy to spell. Wesabe was neither. I often typoed the name as "wasabi"

- Mint didn't make me do any real work. Wesabe made me do all the work.

- Mint felt private. Wesabe wanted me to work with "the crowd" of other users

- Mint was simple and beautiful. Wesabe looked rough around the edges

So I went with Mint.

This "Myth": Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough to explain the different outcomes,

Is contradicted by this: Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could

UX design isn't just pretty pictures - which is why its now called "user experience" as opposed to "user interface" now.

I think a lot of people dismiss ux considerations because they think its just the part of the site thats "pretty" and its not.

To me, the larger story is about risk. A lot of people here, if directed to build a personal finance startup, would go about it in much the same way that Wesabe did. Launch early, attempt to build a community of enthusiasts, and grow the site organically (through word of mouth) as opposed to advertising. This is the time-honored way, and a lot of startups have succeeded by it.

What did Patser do? He went and dropped $2 million on the domain name before he even had a single user, and then inked a sweetheart deal with Yodlee to gain an overnight technical advantage on the competition. He spent money on advertising, artwork, and design. (Interestingly, the claim that Mint spent $1/user conflicts with something I read earlier: http://www.slate.com/id/2228846/. Not sure where the truth lay.)

He did everything that the 37 Signals / MVP crowd says you shouldn't. I'm not criticizing, but in their pursuit of instant profitability / dislike of VC money, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the value of gambling big. Patser took risks, and the market rewarded him for it.

I LOVED the wesabe downloadable data import client. The fact that I didn't have to fork over the login credentials to my financial accounts was a huge win & what kept me away from Mint until wesabe closed. But clearly this was not an issue for most people and hence why the simplicity of the yodlee backed solution ultimately won.

Wesabe did one very interesting thing when they launched which was that the CEO had open office hours when you could call and talk to him. They were one of the first "Web 2.0" companies to do this. I think they stopped this at some point, but I always loved the concept.

Thank you Marc for your insightful article. It must stung like the beejesus to work so hard and still get your head handed to you. It seems like your decisions were guided by your high-mindedness, believe in the best in the people, for the people, for example: people should work and understand closely their financial data. Betcha learned people are f@!#$%ing sloth, eh? Perhaps this is a case of self-project yourself onto your target market, then finds out that people are not like you at all, because if they were, they'd get off their asses and start a company, change the world or something like that :)

I tried wesabe and mint. Mint was easier to use. However, now that you explained a little bit about your Yodlee decision, I can sympathize w/ your conclusion. It turns out to be strategically deadly wrong but given your high-mindedness, don't beat yourself up too much. You can always take comfort in the fact that you were not "Webvan" :).

To get websabe to where it was, you must have made a number of "right" decisions also so you should reviews those too. You'll be back, I'm sure, and we look forward to your next venture. good luck.

ps. do consider the whole user-experience next time. pps. I ditched mint and went back to quicken for better control of my data and mint haven't got the cash account feature to fully work yet.

The key lesson seems to be that ease-of-use is of absolutely paramount importance. Maybe this can even be expressed in mathematical terms: you can't just look at the "raw value" provided by a service, you have to look at the ratio of value received to time and effort invested.

Maybe I'm just ignorant but I never even heard of Wesabe until this HN post. I've been an unhappy Mint user for years though (I still argue Mint is nowhere near as good as Microsoft Money was).

So if I'm representative of "average people", then lack of marketing may have been a folly too.

From the article: When we talked to Yodlee in 2006, the company was crumbling, having failed to get acquired and losing executives. They were also very aggressive in negotiation, telling us they would give us six months' service nearly free and then tell us the final price we'd be charged going forward. --

This is pretty disturbing to me. It seems what Marc and Wesabe did was the right thing to do to not trust Yodlee HOWEVER, it also appears that the user doesn't care a damn.

How do you handle such situations?

The one thing to resonate with me the most is "No one, in my view, solved the financial problems of consumers."

Marc is right. Financial literacy is a huge problem for a country that's supposed to be the richest in the world. How do we teach people the importance of personal finance management or change their spending habits? We teach all sorts of things in school except this.

Personally, I have been on a campaign for the last 9 months to teach people about the importance of planning, budgeting and saving. It's been difficult convincing people that they should think about their future. Even when I'm sitting down at the kitchen table face to face, it is difficult to establish the reasoning why they should care in the first place.

There are 4 types of people I encounter with the most:

1. I don't know how to take care of my finances and I don't care about my future.

2. I do know that it is important, but everything is going to be okay even I remain ignorant.

3. I don't know, but I would like to learn more, but don't know how.

4. I know some, I think I have a good idea, but still want to learn more, but don't have somebody to turn to.

The common problem between all of them:

1. Most people don't know WHY they should care about their personal finance.

2. Most people don't know where to get trust worthy information to help them or have access to professionals.

I have been trying to solve these problems with one family at a time. If you can do the same with power of reach through the internet, it would be golden.

Excellent, clear thinking; thank you for this analysis. I wanted to ask more about:

we both totally failed at... actually helping people.

Changing people's behavior is really hard.

Yes, but it seemed to me -- and this post confirms -- that Wesabe was genuinely thinking about this problem of how to get people to change behavior, to improve their lives. Mint seemed (and still seems) to have a much lower ambition in this respect.

Question #1: Was Wesabe actively engaging in experiments in how to help people/change behavior? I know the support community did help some people, but it sounds from your post that in its existing form it didn't do something palpably different from what people would do on their own. So it seems that Wesabe ought to have been building as many experiments as possible, hoping for something that seemed (at least anecdotally, at first) to help some subset of users above-and-beyond what they were able to do elsewhere.

I suspect Wesabe was running some experiments but too few. If that's true, what prevented those experiments from happening? Infrastructure work/scaling challenges/security concerns? Was the employee or user count too high to efficiently run experiments?

Question #2: If Wesabe was running a good number of experiments, why was Wesabe unable to secure investment for a longer runway of more experiments? After fixing the Yodlee problem (which I agree was a major problem), Wesabe seemed well positioned to lead in experiments to change behavior. The space still seems enormously ripe for innovation. So why did new funding not happen? Was Mint's success demotivating? Was the timing bad, given the economic downturn?

I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website.

I had some exchanges with Marc and he was great and helpful. I was taking a big risk on signing up with Wesabe so I conviced my superiors to give me one month to set it up, and a second month to run an internal pilot and then decide if we would launch the PFM integration to all customers.

Unfortunately we ran into some issues, that were minor in my mind, but my employer being in the financial services industry they have a very low tolerance for risk when working with customer's financial data, so they called off the Wesabe integration within two weeks into the first month.

This was for the enterprise Wesabe product, mind you, and was around six months ago so I guess Wesabe was already in its last run anyway, but I guess not having a stable enough MVP for their enterprise customers might not have helped much.

I wish you great success in your next endeavor, precipice!

On the name thing I see a lot of misunderstanding about this. A name can be a little silly, sure. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Mint. People use this to justify terrible domain names all the time.

There are a few things the above have in common that Wesabe doesn't:

1. They're real words. (Technically Google isn't, but it's a misspelling of a real word that probably more people than not would make.Very few people, if told about it, would type in googol.com). Look at the Alexa top 100 in the US, it's almost entirely real words.

2. They're easily pronounced. If I tell my friend about Yahoo.com, he's going to be able to type it in or easily Google for it. I assume Wesabe is similar to wasabi, but I'm still not even sure about that.

Its fun to look back and enumerate the reasons for success or failure, but dumb luck is just such a huge part of this game as well.

Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by "build[ing] tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for the better, which I believed required people to more closely work with and understand their data."

A startup can't implement every feature perfectly, and will ultimately have to make choices without knowing which was the "right" one.

seems like their mistake was ignoring yodlee and trying to make their own stuff...which lost them a lot of traction.

had they launched with yodlee, Mint would have been nothing more but a "better designed wesabe"

seems to me like they should have spent the cash to subscribe to yodlee, and then spent their effort building their own version like they ended up doing.

I thought that wesabe's integrating at the bank level might have been a smarter approach. For instance Bank of America has a mint-like finance aggregation tool built into their online banking. I already entrust them with my finances why not use their tool?

As far as I recall, Wesabe was providing a similar service to smaller banks, as their solution for this, right? Personally I would guess that market opportunity would be at the bank level, you sell $500k-$1m/yr licenses to integrate the tool directly with a banking website, you don't even need consumers, just a really friggin good sales team...

So, recently, as I started pulling loans out for school and creating budgets, I went on the look for a money management service and tried out Wesabe among a few others. Mint ultimately won, and I'll tell you why, from my personal opinion as a user. Maybe it might help somebody somewhere.

A) Design

Perhaps the biggest selling point for me was how polished Mint was in comparison to Wesabe. It felt professional. I felt I could trust Mint with my personal financial data. Wesabe seemed unfinished, rough around the edges. Sure, it played more to my irrational mind, but I just felt more comfortable using Mint. Just hook in my various accounts, let me create a budget, and do the rest for me, which is what Mint did. I was guided through the profile filling process, and there was a strangely human quality about Mint -- as if it were my own personal accountant.

So the first thing I learned was that a good design and user experience can be very effective in developing trust within a potential user for your service. Second was that lots of time should go into capturing a user's attention upon first laying eyes on your app, placing guides along the way, etc, ensuring initial and continual engagement.

B) iPhone App

At the time, Wesabe didn't have a native iPhone app (I don't think they ever did come out with one). They had a webapp, but it wasn't good enough for me, especially when Mint had a native app. This played a bigger role than I thought it would. Having a native app just feels better. Just the feeling of launching the app is rewarding. I don't know about you, but I really try to avoid using webapps in mobile Safari as much as possible; they tend not to be as polished and snappy.

So, if your app and users create the need for a mobile interface, don't settle for webapp.

C) Focus (Personal/Community in this case)

Wesabe seemed to have a communal element, which I really didn't care for. Mint came across as a more walled-off made-only-for-me personal assistant, and I liked that feeling. I didn't want to share my tips on saving cash with others; I just wanted a service to manage my money, nothing else. In that respect, Mint felt more refined and catered to my needs -- it was more focused.

Give your app laser-focus.

Found this blog post to very revealing, although not entirely the way others do. Expressing openly and owning these two decisions (to focus on build vs. buy & simplicity vs. user customization) is admirable, but the slippery rhetoric undermines these mightily. There are many shrewdly baked-in messages and denials that are far afield from above: - No has solved the problem that we set out to solve in personal finance. In other words, yeah, I know I said Mint won, but we didn’t really lose to Mint – no one has won! - Circumstances conspired to make me CEO. Er, perhaps another decision was to not have the humility to bring in a more qualified CEO. Since we’re all being so honest. - Our product was just as good as there’s other than these 2 facts. In other words, I created and know how to execute at the level that Mint did. Of course you do – you’re in the job market! I’ve heard this 'falling on the sword' rhetoric from CEOs of a failed company as a public way of engendering praise. It’s politically disingenuous because -of course you’re responsible- – everyone knows that claiming otherwise is horrible PR for yourself. The purpose of the post to bake in all the rationalization of how the decisions were right given in the information, you’re of high character, and get that personal brand out there in a controlled way. And that’s the way to ‘keep the focus on making the user happy’

"Mint aggressively acquired users by paying for search engine marketing (reportedly spending over $1 for each user), while Wesabe spent almost nothing on marketing".

Startups need to realize that customer acquisition is an important part of the equation too. Sure technology,UX, and a memorable name is important too but too many people are still thinking if they build a good product, start a blog, twitter everyday is all that is needed to succeed.

First interesting read. However, overly simplified. Name, product and UX are all good reasons but they can all be fixed. Companies succeed or fail for two reasons - CEO and cash flow. The importance of a CEO is usually understated but the CEO is critical. Being a visionary, cracking the whip when necessary and instilling values (excellence is the first) cant be replaced. He is driving the company forward. He can be a coder but he should not write single line of code. His role is to manage not to develop. As per Cash flow. Given enough cash flow, anything can be fixed. Company can relaunched, product improved and marketing invested. As per Wesabe vs. Mint. In this day and age people who give control of their accounts to ANY third party are plain crazy. However, the buzz instilled confidence in people and they think Mint is safe. Wesabe could have had a place in the market with people who don’t trust Mint's approach. The issue was, it was not "sexy" and the people who might have been interested didn’t hear about it. Good Marketing could have addressed that (positioning, PR etc). Which goes back to the CEO being a CEO and not focus on coding.

There is still plenty of innovation happening in this space for those outside of the US. I know of three New Zealand based startups http://www.pocketsmith.com , http://www.xero.com and http://www.heaps.co.nz

Winning the DEMO contest put Mint on the radar for me. First time I heard of such a business. Knew of Quicken but the idea of taking it to web was 'a ha!'. Never heard of wesabe - and I consider myself web savy - flickr, delicious etc.

I loved the idea but did not trust putting such info online. Then I saw yodlee relationship. I knew banks trusted Yodlee so I gave them (mint) extra trust because of that. I read through their TOC and it gave me more confidence.

On a related thread...I wanted to do online bill pay some time earlier and knew that there was some independent company-yodlee (not wanting to tie myself to my bank) that did it but darned if I could remember the name). So yodlee lost business because of that odd name (in my - survey of 1- case). Love the post and cmts. Good luck with your next venture. Bring same passion - and invest in good URL<g>

Web 2.0 personal financing tools:

Mint - Aquired by Intuit

Buxfer - not actively maintained, founders working @ facebook

Wesabe - shut down

Anyone want to speculate on what went worked/didn't work and might work in the future in this space? As mentioned in the article, it seems like users don't really care about digging into their data, but seeing pretty graphs is good enough.

I'm impressed with Marc's lack of rancor towards Mint -- very classy. It lends credibility to the whole article.

Very insightful read. But I don't understand why he didn't continue the startup. He even identifies a yet unsolved problem. I would have cut the costs and continue in my own direction and try gaining traction. There is probably room for this. I dont see how mint success has to mean a failure for wesabe.

This is an amazing post.

Thanks for laying out your version of the story which I feel is definitely more accurate. Why did you not decide to not pursue Wesabe for the long term ?

As I understand, Mind did well in some places like immidiate gratification but was bad in accurately aggregating financial statistics. You could have reworked your UI to provide the immidiate gratification and over time also made a more robust aggregator.

Also, the fact as you state is that Mint/Wesabe both did not really make a dent in the market. Additionally, the fact that Mint has got acquired, most likely they never will. It is extremely unlikely that Mint after being acquired will be able to keep pace with Wesabe. More so the fact that you guys had substantial revenue , you could have cut the fat and dumbed down for a long haul easily.

Marc I remember hearing you speak at a conference in '07 and being very impressed at how exaustively you interviewed potential users before building. 

Do you feel in retrospect that there was anything obvious you could have done and monitored post-launch that would have let you out-manoeuvre Mint?

Wesabe built our own data acquisition system, first using downloadable client programs (partially because that was easier and partially to preserve users' privacy) and later using a Yodlee-like web interface

That is the real product, the real company, launch it.

It is clear that Wesabe lost. What is not clear to me is that Mint won. Yes, Patzer got $170M out of Intuit for the investors, got his share, and a nice new job at Intuit. But now what? Mint's revenues were not that great, and as for profits....who knows. Now it is being absorbed into the Intuit Borg. Intuit is still trying to figure out what the heck it did when it bought Digital Insight. Will Intuit ever see an ROI on its $170M? Oh I forgot, this is Silicon Valley. ROI doesn't matter. But Mint is a neat name. That and $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

Great analysis, very valuable -- thanks to Marc for taking the time to do it. The points about the Yodlee tradeoff and focusing on the use case that required a lot of work from people are very insightful.

I agree with the others here that Mint's name and design played a huge role in its success. Years ago somebody mentioned Wesabe to me and from the way the name sounded I couldn't find it on a quick web search, I gave up. When I eventually saw the site my reaction was "looks complicated". By contrast Mint was easy to find and looked very easy to use.

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While Mint is a great name, I totally agree that the difference was execution. Several years ago I tried Wesabe, Mint, Quicken, MS Money (which, IIRC, used yodlee), as well as Yodlee's site itself. I went with Mint because it just worked. It had access to all of the Yodlee banks, with a far more intuitive interface than yodlee. Frankly, at the time, there were no alternatives. I've not bothered to look since.

My 2 cents:

1. Mint was viral to a degree. The service itself wasn't, but their blog was. They put a lot of effort into building a community around their blog - posting tips and guides on managing your finances, and so on.

2. I wonder if Wesabe ever tried shifting to be a more power-user service. If what he says is true, it sounds like they could made it into a service that caters to people that really do want to actively manage their finances.

I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most people flock to it: it's automated and there isn't much you need to do to get existing transactions and analyze them. Maybe it's changed since Intuit bought them, but I signed up for their service two different times and toyed with it for a few hours before canceling on both occasions. To me, true finance management is not only analyzing existing spending, but preparing for future spending.

I want to be able to setup a budget.

I want to be able to setup recurring transactions and future bill payments so when I look at my finances at any given moment, I can see what I have coming due today, tomorrow, in two weeks.

I don't want to rely on my bank to tell me how much cash I have available, because it doesn't know the $1 pending gas charge from yesterday is actually a $45 fill up that hasn't cleared, but I do.

I want to keep track of all aspects of my paycheck so I can estimate my taxes all year long and adjust my withholdings accordingly or save if I'm going to have to pay in.

I'm sure I could go on and on. I realize we're moving towards (or are already in) the era of webapps and people are moving away from desktop apps, but I've yet to find a decent online finance manager that does what MS Money can do. It's a shame they discontinued it, because in my opinion it kicks the crap out of Mint.

I'm not really sure how this relates to the article, I just think it's a shame that Wasabe lost out to Mint because Mint was dumbed down enough that users don't have to do much of anything. Properly manging your finances should most certainly require user interaction to do it properly and it sounds like Wasabe was trying to do just that. Maybe that's why so many people struggle with finances, because they don't take an active enough roll in managing them and I fear something like Mint just aids in that passiveness.

As the Marc says in the article, "Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance." It's been a while since I've given it a look, but last I check Mint wasn't even close. If Wasabe was, it's truly a shame they were beat out by Mint catering to and lazy users and enabling them to stay lazy when IMHO, the problem they're allegedly trying to solve requires exactly the opposite.

"Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance. Can you succeed where we failed? Please do -- the problems are absolutely huge and the help consumers have is absolutely abysmal. Learn from the above and go help people (after making them immediately happy, first)."

I humbly disagree with you guys. I personally don’t think the name played that much of a role. In my opinion Mint won because of 3 reasons.. 1) They won techcrunch disrupt and had people buzzing 2) They gave customer what they wanted. They had the right "easy" approach to the problem. 3) They got higher value users by doing SEM.

"A domain name doesn't win you a market" - he clearly didn't understand the domain name field. That's why he got that crappy Wesabe name. Mint gave hares to the owner of Mint.com so he let Mint use it.

A domain doesn't win you a market but CAN help you quite much! Otherwise, you put more money in the marketing...

I only used Wesabe because I'm from Australia and Mint doesn't support my bank, the Firefox uploader was great (a bit more control over access to your bank account, sort of) but the actual website wasn't useful enough for me to keep using it. Would love to see what Mint is like.

For those who haven't seen, it appears this blog post was prompted by this Quora discussion: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Wesabe-shut-down-while-Mint-did...

I found the most interesting part to be when the author admitted to overlooking the idea that users might want instant gratification from a useable site. seems like in this day and age that would be the #1 priority of any company/website/startup.

"No one, in my view, solved the financial problems of consumers. No one even got close. "

Completely disagree. Mint's easy budgeting tools helped me cut expenses and start an aggressive savings plan. That, plus INGDirect's multiple sub-accounts.

To summarize:

- Give instant gratification; require as little work as possible from your users

- Be visible; Mint advertised heavily; neither site was viral

Other smaller factors too, but those seem to be the biggies, based on Marc's article and comments here.

Reading the article, it sounds like Marc set out to change people's behavior. I don't think Mint did that. There's a lot more money in giving people what they want rather than what you think they need.

Marc,

Thanks for putting your thoughts out there like this. We are currently tackling the small business finance space (Profitably.com) and it's interesting to see your comparison to Mint.

What are you up to now?

I really loved reading this post. Thanks Marc, for sharing! I'm sure that brought back some painful memories. Totally worth it to us ;)

Isn't the attitude of "If Company A Wins, Company B Loses" kind of a dangerous mindset to have when you're running a startup?

Acquiring customers for $1 a pop is cheap. If customer lifetime value is < $1 then something is terribly wrong.

Question: Is there a way a financial management site can be viral? Marc claims that neither Mint nor Wesabe was.

The name Wesabe had a huge part to do with losing. Patzer is right, with a name like Wesabe you have ZERO chances of capitalizing on word of mouth. Before you buy a domain for your business, find 10 random people and ask them to type out the domain. If they fail or have to stop to even think about how to type out the domain, it's a failure.

my response to Marc's post based on being an investor in Mint and a colleague of Marc's

http://blog.pasker.net/2010/10/02/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint-%e...

I had a phone interview with Marc sometime in 2007, I think just after TC40. During the interview they made me aware of Mint.com, so I spent the afternoon playing with Mint & Wesabe.

By the end of the afternoon I had begun using Mint to track all of my finances and had only managed to get Wesabe to recognize 1/3 of my accounts. Wesabe had a fantastic team, but Mint was the clear winner, so I decided not to go forward.

My impression, from my limited in person interaction with Marc,he was fanatic about user privacy. He and, I think, his team spent a great deal just on this subject and the sad truth is/was the users really did not care that much. Touching on an other topic is the aggregation service, Marc and his team seemed to have spent a great deal on the technology and work around methods so that they did not infringe on any patents. In hindsight contracting with Yodlee would have been better.

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I humbly disagree with you guys. I personally don’t think the name played that much of a role. In my opinion Mint won because of 3 reasons.. 1) They won techcrunch disrupt and had people buzzing 2) They gave customer what they wanted. They had the right "easy" approach to the problem. 3) They got higher value users by doing SEM.

The name is an albatross.