

Mint vs. Wesabe: A B-School Case Study - matthewphiong
http://jasonputorti.com/post/8218745754/mint-vs-wesabe-a-b-school-case-study

======
pge
This b-school case study strangely appears to ignore the customers. _User_ and
_customers_ are different things for these companies. Mint found a way early
on to sell the data it had to financial services companies that wanted to
target users. While Mint had to figure out how to take care of users (since
they were the product offered to the customers), their ability to find
_customers_ (i.e. companies that paid them) set them apart from other
solutions and enabled them to make money.

------
mountaineer
"And finally, it is unclear if the services of Mint or Wesabe were actually
making a difference for personal finance"

Amen to that. As well as Mint did, it's still not enough to change Americans'
bad fundamental financial habits (speaking from personal and professional
experience working on pf apps). There's still plenty of room for PF apps and
I'm encouraged to see new solutions that focus on saving or debt reduction.

~~~
leviathant
If it can get better, I can't see it getting that much better. The net income
chart on Mint let me compare actual values against my old-timey budget
spreadsheet - and then Mint added budgeting functionality, so I don't even
need that.

If one cannot wield Mint as a tool effectively at this point, I think the onus
is not on Intuit, but on the user.

------
pbreit
I never really got the sense that Wesabe was really trying to be successful. I
know that sounds odd but the web site was always in disarray and what was
being offered was not compelling. It seemed like there was a lot of focus on
providing universal bank APIs which sounds cool but is a different business.

Whereas Mint was simply QuickenWeb done (mostly) right.

