wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint.
mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.
they outsourced the hard stuff (scraping/banking relationships) and then focused on building a product. nice work, brilliant execution.
I had no idea that Mint was a layer on top of another product. Can you explain this in greater detail? What is Yodlee? (I realize I'm proving your point by asking!) And what is the nature of Mint/Yodlee's relationship?
Yodlee is the service that took on the painful and expensive problem of actually building an engine that can securely store bank and brokerage passwords and use them to scrape hundreds of different financial sites.
They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint, and (b) serving as a kind of OEM for banks, who put up Yodlee's software rebranded as a part of the bank's website.
I have used Yodlee.com directly (and free) for two years; it has functioned extraordinarily well, and is invaluable--it saves hours of time dealing with personal finances, and provides very usable reports. I avoided Mint because I thought that Mint's very thin layer over Yodlee's services was apt to be an unstable business, and now we see that Mint users have been tossed to Intuit. I was also reluctant to expose all my financial details to Mint unnecessarily. Yodlee's own security credentials are high--good enough to convince just about all the large banks, brokerage houses, and credit issuers to trust them. Try a Yodlee account yourself, and you will see that Mint has been adding relatively little distinctive value over Yodlee's unique base.
That to me sounds like a better model than Mint. Sure Yodlee doesn't have the media buzz or "explosive" growth (Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.), but the infrastructure is extremely useful and will be around for a long time.
If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.
But we don't know that Yodlee isn't doing 170M revenues a year either. Getting aquired and making money don't necessarily equate to each other in the most obvious ways.
Youtube was a huge money sink, and got a huge acquisition. Mint is, I believe at least, somewhat profitable, and only got $170M. The timing had a lot more to do with it than anything, but as a consumer, I'm a LOT more likely to give money to Mint than Youtube, and the YouTube founders are arguably a lot richer than the Mint founders.
So is this yet another reason to keep your web app basically free for the masses..?
$170 million in 2 years seems like reason enough for me.. but as Inaka points out: their execution was brilliant. So if you do have a brilliant app maybe you should keep it free.
Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream. They're able to offer you alternative financial services targeted towards you based on the information they have about your current financial products. I'm sure the financial companies offering their products on mint pay more than your average ad or click through.Most webapps don't have this sort of opportunity.
"Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream"
People keep saying this as if it were fact, but never provide evidence. From what I've seen, Mint has a great potential for revenue. I've not seen any public statements about their financials.
For a privately held entity, how exactly would you like a 3rd party to provide evidence? You have to either know someone on the inside or work by proxy. Assuming you don't know someone, your best proxy is the 10x valuation jump. The $145million valuation wouldn't come without proof of the revenue model to an unproven team.
They were executing revenue, and executing very well.
"For a privately held entity, how exactly would you like a 3rd party to provide evidence?"
If I knew how to answer that question, then we wouldn't be having this little debate. Fortunately, I'm not the one making claims about their profitability.
"They were executing revenue, and executing very well."
I'm sure the financial companies offering their products on mint pay more than your average ad or click through
You're right about that...these banks and credit card companies probably pay hundreds per lead, which is a drop in the bucket compared to how much they'll get over the life of the customer.
mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.
they outsourced the hard stuff (scraping/banking relationships) and then focused on building a product. nice work, brilliant execution.