After following this debate of wesabe vs. mint (and thinking it was about delicious things like wasabi and mint when I first heard about it) I wanted to try out Mint.

It wanted my online banking username/password ... who the hell gives the username and password of their bank to a website? In light of unimportant social networks like twitter and facebook making damn sure you aren't sharing the username/password combination around ... people give their ... I'm confused.

How do these sites stay in business? Do people really care that little about security?

As someone who tried using Wesabe seriously for several months, I will tell you why they went out of business: their product was not very useful.

I spent quite a while entering receipts and tagging things and all I ever got was a few charts that showed me how much money I had spent. There was no tool for budget estimation, there was nothing to help do mortgage calculations, cripes, there was hardly a point to using the website at all with the sole exception that they had some pretty good discussion forums.

The only reason I preferred Wesabe to Mint was because Mint wanted to reach into the guts of all your accounts and that felt kinda creepy.

(This is Marc from Wesabe.)

I definitely, and intentionally, left out a lot of the detail about why we decided to turn the site off. My post was already huge and that final decision wasn't what I was writing about; I was writing about the competition between the companies and how people perceived it. Also, some parts of that decision are personal and I didn't want to write about them. Of course, though, we didn't just try one thing and then give up. We tried everything we could think of to keep it going.

That said, I addressed some of the reasons for the decision to shut down in the post announcing our closure:

http://blog.wesabe.com/2010/06/30/wesabe-is-discontinuing-it...

This is the single question I had in mind reading the other article. why did mint's success have to mean death for wesabe? he even identifies a yet unsolved problem that the service is not accurate or helpful enough. Were the costs too prohibitive? I think you can cut the costs, downscale, and continue until finding the right spot and rise again. Also I expect the market to be very big and particularly accommodating for several startups in this area.

I highly doubt they just gave up. I am more inclined to believe that they were facing declining revenue with no money in the bank.

The author claims that businesses often reinvent themselves in order to survive. As I understand it Wesabe _did_ reinvent themselves. I believe they were working closely with banks to have them implement some Wesabe related tools directly for the banks' customers. I didn't work at Wesabe so I may be wrong about this.

Personally, I stopped using Wesabe for the same reasons that DannoHung mentions in his comment. I wasn't getting a good 10,000ft view of what was happening to my money and there were no tools available to help me budget. Shame though because I'm not exactly thrilled about giving Mint/Intuit/Yodell my personal info.

This is just opinion, not based on any facts or circumstances that the companies might have faced.

"Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand."

Thank you, thank you, thank you for not using the "pivot" buzzword.

Reading http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint made it seem like they "lost" because they gave up.

Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand. Most successful businesses in fact face more than one “going out of business” crisis in their lifetime.

The longer your business survives, the more chances there are to find new ways to thrive. Marc mentions they were near to running "indefinitely on revenue," but doesn't address why they didn't go that route. Sure, they were NEARLY failing, but running a business isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. You only "lose" when you go out of business.

And yes, Mint was "winning." But still, the fact that Marc chooses not to focus on what they could have done just to survive makes it seem like he doesn't understand that staying in business is crucial, even when you're "losing."

The author was making some sense until he held Tesla up as an example of not giving up. Using the government to raise further capital from others against their will is hardly a good example.

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Who's the author? His about page brings up nothing.

Personally, I don't think Marc gets it at all. He says the goal was to get people to change their financial behavior, and this is a noble goal. Maybe, but so is building a weight loss application for people who don't want to lose weight.