

The real reason "Wesabe lost" (to Mint) - QuantumGood
http://www.davidglarson.com/business/why-wesabe-really-lost-to-mint/
Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand. The longer your business survives, the more chances there are to find new ways to thrive.<p>The article http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint made it sound like they gave up. Businesses can survive even when their original goals do not—running a business isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.<p>Yes, Wesabe was behind in the race with Mint. But you don't "lose" until you go out of business.
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Swizec
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?

~~~
points
This is one reason why Mint would never work in the UK. We have real security
on our banking websites - hardware security (You get sent a hardware device to
generate codes, or to put your card into etc).

(As an aside, our banks are simply crazy fast now. I logged into HSBC the
other day, issued a bank transfer to a Barclays account. Logged out, logged
into Barclays less than a minute later, and the money was there. Impressed I
was).

Any banking website that simply accepts a username and password would scare
the hell out of me.

I still don't quite understand what the value-add of mint is though. I'm
guessing that banking websites in the US aren't very useful, or that some
users value being able to collect all their financial data into one place (How
many banks accounts from different banks do people need?)

~~~
mst
> Any banking website that simply accepts a username and password would scare
> the hell out of me.

That's still most of them, I think. Halifax used to be username+pw+one
security question. Now it's username+pw+3 letters out of a second pw (called
"memorable information"). And to attempt to stop keylogging (or at least I
presume this is why), the select boxes for the 3 letters don't let me hit the
letter, I have to use arrow keys or the mouse. Which, frankly, makes me want
to club somebody to death with a baby seal, even if it -is- theoretically more
secure.

~~~
points
I don't know the technicalities, but I always considered Halifax a 'building
society' rather than a grown up bank. That is worrying. And ++ for the
irritation of arrow keys+mouse etc I've seen that before on others.

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DannoHung
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.

~~~
cdr
I found the receipt-entering and thing-tagging useful in and of itself. The
auto-labeling was awesome for watching my accounts - you generally only had to
label/tag a business once.

I vastly, vastly prefer Wesabe's auto-labeling system to Mint's POS labeling.
On Mint, any transaction from Chili Ave (a major road) gets autolabeled as
Chili's, the restaurant - and so on. It makes Mint worse than useless for me.
I get better info logging onto my bank's 90s era site.

~~~
blasdel
I stopped logging into Mint for exactly this reason — the auto-labeling it
does is _abysmal_ , and the UI for correcting it is _even worse_.

I have no idea what people are talking about when they fawn over Mint's user
experience.

~~~
btmorex
They're talking about the signup process basically. Mint is a terrible product
with a fantastic signup process. All those posts about how great it is are
from people who signed up, looked around for 5 minutes, then never used it
again.

~~~
blasdel
Plus almost all of the users that do stick around go for the high-end
financial referrals that Mint pitches them based on their data. Cost Per
Action fees for rewards cards and mortgages are through the roof for complete
signups of high-value people.

Their conversion rates are terrific even when you include the vast majority of
people like us that sign up and never use it again. They were making quite a
lot of money when they were acquired.

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precipice
(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...](http://blog.wesabe.com/2010/06/30/wesabe-is-discontinuing-its-accounts-
tab-as-of-july-31st/)

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Aegean
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.

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JeremyChase
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.

~~~
jerf
Yes, I am very uncomfortable with the logic that since Wesabi didn't lay out
their every effort to save the company, they must therefore not have put any
thought into it. That's an unjustified leap; perhaps they didn't think it made
for a very interesting read, if nothing else.

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n8agrin
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.

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

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maukdaddy
"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.

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QuantumGood
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."

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

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alsomike
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.

