
Full Details On Mint’s $14 Million Series C Round - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/12/full-details-on-mints-14-million-series-c-round/
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prpon
I've been a long time user at yodlee.com which powers the backend of Mint.com
and other account aggregators. Yodlee gave up on the idea of trying to
monetize the customer information they have. They instead reinvented
themselves as the technology provider for all other financial institutions.

I am sure Yodlee.com is a profitable company but I do not think their
investors will ever see much return on the 110 million dollars worth of
investment since 1999.

If you take away Yodlee powered backend, Mint.com does not have much going on
for them other than the subscriber base. If you have a hard time monetizing
from the subscribers you have, It's just going to be a long painful ride for
everyone involved.

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jlm382
Yodlee has dozens more features than Mint does, yet Mint has so many more
users. Why is this?

Because personal finance is intimidating, and nobody wants to do it. By having
virtually nothing to do in Mint, it lowers the intimidation factor that people
have when thinking about managing their money. It's a way to get people in the
door, and getting that far has always been the struggle behind personal
finance sites.

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prpon
I've made use of Yodlee so much so that over the years, I've told it to anyone
within earshot. The most common excuse I get from even the tech savvy
programming crowd is "I do not want to have all my account information in one
place, it's a single point of failure".

While true, the same holds for all information that we have online that is
important to us. But it's a big mental block that both these sites need to
overcome. Yodlee kinda shifted that burden by selling software to financial
providers whom we already trust by opening accounts.

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joez
I think mint is having a hard time monetizing. I love their value proposition
(i.e. costs BofA $300 to acquire a new mortgage customer, mint charges $150
referral while saving mint's user x from their previous mortgage) but I have
never been interested in any kind of offer from Mint. Maybe it's because I am
satisfied with my financial accounts or I just rather hear a referral on a
great new card from a friend. Has anyone ever taken up mint on their offer? Or
even clicked through?

I'd like to see Mint leverage on it's user data but since it hasn't yet I
doubt it is as simple as turn on AdSense and watch the money pile up. Which
leads me to wonder when will they start leveraging it and how?

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webwright
We (RescueTime, YC08) have a lot in common with Mint.

Having experimented with it a fair bit, I can safely say that if it's not a
content site with CRAP-TONS of page views, it's really hard to make PPC ads
work. Stuff like Gmail is not a big win in terms of CTR because users quickly
learn to ignore the ads-- and neither is Mint or RescueTime (our baby). Mint
can play the leadgen game (sending people to different banks) but bank changes
and new mortgages are rare decisions and I'd imagine that Mint users often
ignore the lead gen links and focus on their own content.

I also imagine that they have a similar problem that we do-- giving people
data visualization isn't inherently sticky and people drift away from data
like this. It gets boring. And because it's self-improvement/awareness
focused, it's like a gym that doesn't have a membership fee and has no
cancellation cost-- few people are disciplined enough to stick with it.

On the data asset front, we have the same type of asset. But it only really
has value (beyond linkbait/PR) if it's a representative population. I'd wager
Mint's userbase decidedly doesn't NOT represent a cross-section of America.

I think Mint has a lot of promise, but I think they have some tough problems
to solve. And by taking $14m (presumably on a $50m valuation), they've just
signed up for a very very long road.

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dshah
I'm curious: Where did the $50MM pre-money valuation number come from?

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webwright
Oh, I was guessing (and had post-money valuation in my head FWIW). No clue,
really!

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naz
Hope they spend some of it on supporting Canada

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kajecounterhack
TD Bank actually works with Mint.com (then again TD is also in America)

