

Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million - adityakothadiya
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-former-techcrunch50-winner-mint-for-170-million/

======
inaka
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.

~~~
gruseom
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?

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

~~~
jaytee_clone
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.

~~~
run4yourlives
_That to me sounds like a better model than Mint._

Mint just received $170 million. Yodlee did not.

~~~
bmelton
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.

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vaksel
personally I'm disappointed with this, I just don't see Intuit as the right
company to run Mint

~~~
plinkplonk
" just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint"

It isn't. But (due disclosure: I worked at Intuit once and while I have no
special knowledge about this deal, I know how Intuit works)

Intuit had no choice really. Mint was _high_ on management's radar and they
were always scared of it. Intuit doesn't "get" the web, the whole company is
structured around its success on the desktop and there are too many layers of
management to make any kind of innovation successful (One on team I saw, there
were 22 managers and 3 developers! I kid you not!).

Intuit _talks_ a lot about "innovation", but the fact is that Mint (and
FreshBooks) have been chipping away marketshare every quarter and they
couldn't build a mint clone/mint killer (they tried a few times).

Intuit has no _choice_ but to acquire mint if they wanted to have a _solid_
web offering. Will they run it into the ground? certainly, over time, as soon
as the mint devs vest and leave and the regular Intuit folks take over. Of
course this leaves the space open for _another_ competitor!

Congratulations to the mint team! The one thing Intuit has in plenty (for now
;-)) is money! Enjoy!

EDIT: If I were Intuit and I wanted to make this work, I'd keep the Mint.com
team around and let them work in their own fashion, _outside_ the regular
Intuit corporate structure. Knowing Intuit this will _never_ happen.

~~~
davidmathers
The part I don't get is why Mint would take the quick exit rather than fight
the fight. It looked to me like they were well positioned for a long term
victory.

~~~
coliveira
The reason is that Mint was created for an exit like this. They had no clear
business model other than getting as many users as possible in order to scare
Intuit. They have a great product, but I see no plan to make money with it.

Of course they have the thing of suggesting credit cards to users, but it
doesn't seem that they were making any money on that...

In summary, if Mint was profitable, they wouldn't sell the company in the
first opportunity.

~~~
wavesplash
Mint made referral fees on every offer they made "You can make 3% more a year
by switching to ING Direct, etc". They made plenty of money, and all they
needed was scale (which they proved they could do). The brilliance was that
the offers were aligned with the user's wants/desires/needs and were super
well qualified so Mint could charge more per referral.

They weren't created to flip - it was a solid business.

------
ojbyrne
Lest we forget: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/google-in-final-
negotia...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/google-in-final-negotiations-
to-acquire-digg-for-around-200-million/)

Just because Mike Arrington says something is true doesn't mean it is. I'll
believe it when there's an official announcement.

~~~
agripa
Official press release from Intuit:
[http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_releas...](http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_release/articles/2009/IntuitToAcquireMint.html)

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falsestprophet
This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet
Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.

~~~
tonystubblebine
There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product
launched and still have some stock.

They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and
have a strong data privacy angle.

~~~
jrbedard
There's also <http://www.buxfer.com>, a YC company.

~~~
mingdingo
Talk about not giving up- the Buxfer guy just keeps going.

Anybody know how Buxfer is doing?

~~~
apgwoz
Not well if you trust compete.com:
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/buxfer.com+mint.com/>

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davidmathers
_This is a terrific exit for Mint_

Seriously? Maybe I don't get it but if Yahoo had bought Google or Facebook had
bought Twitter would those have been terrific exits? Why are they selling out
so quickly?

I don't trust Intuit and will probably stop using Mint (I was just getting
started in the past few months).

~~~
timr
The days of billion-dollar exits for zero-revenue companies are gone, and will
probably continue to be gone for a long while to come.

~~~
patio11
Mint was making a rather significant amount of money as a credit card
affiliate. (They also hawked other financial products, but that is almost
certainly the most lucrative one. They have a lucrative CPA, a wider reach
than home loans, and more repeat business in the demographics inclined to hand
all their financial info to a Web 2.0 site.)

Many, many affiliates who look at a million dollars as "Meh, not a lot of
money to me anymore" physically drooled when they heard of Mint's model,
principally because almost _nobody realizes_ they're an affiliate marketer. As
an affiliate, you (potentially) make a lot of money but defensibility of your
revenue is a constant driving concern since Google, the merchant, or other
affiliates can always disintermediate you. But who can disintermediate the guy
you've already given full read access to your financial life to?

~~~
Poiesis
Do you have a source? Where do affiliates hang out and talk about business
models?

~~~
encoderer
the trouble is cutting thru the sleaze in the industry. But if you're willing
to tolerate it, you can find gems in their communities. Wickedfire.com.
Shoemoney. DMConfidential. On and On, really.

~~~
Poiesis
Yes, that was the point--cutting through the sleaze. Thanks for the pointers.

------
fnid
This has "buy'em to squash'em" written all over it.

~~~
bkudria
I'm going to have to disagree with that. Wish I could tell you why.

~~~
dkokelley
_Wish I could tell you why._

Is this because you have some secret knowledge about the deal, or just because
you have a gut feeling about it? Your last sentence seemed a little
suspicious, which is why I ask.

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run4yourlives
So, it seems that the market for a mint clone will be open pretty soon.

I'd imagine there will be a lot of disaffected users here eventually.

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SwellJoe
They also acquired PayCycle (among the leading online payroll companies, and
one I used for a couple of years) a little while back. I switched all of our
books and payroll over to Intuit products recently, mainly so the part-time
bookkeeper will be happy, but haven't been able to figure out how PayCycle
fits into the lineup, or whether they will be merging Intuit online payroll
(which costs a measly $9.95/month) with PayCycle (which is about fifty bucks
per month).

------
Tiktaalik
Hopefully this means that Mint will be finally be available outside the US.

~~~
shiranaihito
The banks where I live use one time pads for authentication, which makes it
impossible for Mint to work.

~~~
brown9-2
Which country?

~~~
dhoe
In Germany it seems common to mail lists of transaction authentication numbers
to customers, and in the Netherlands smart card readers that read your card
and generate a TAN seem standard. There are companies built around
circumventing this and allowing third parties access to your account
(sofortueberweisung.de, for example), but it usually is against the bank EULA.

------
jlm382
The question isn't so much why Intuit would buy Mint, but why would Mint allow
themselves to be acquired so soon?

If Mint was doing so well, they'd continue on their path to completely
outplace Quicken. Something about this just doesn't add up.

~~~
wpietri
It's important to remember that companies are run for the benefit of
investors. These folks just took a C round, so I'd guess the majority of the
shares are held by venture capitalists.

VCs don't fund startups to achieve competitive victory per se. Their job is to
make money for the people who invested in their funds, and they do that by
selling the shares they bought for more than they paid for them. The main
routes for that are acquisition and IPO.

Right now, the IPO market is not looking healthy, and won't be for a while.
Given that Mint's revenue comes from getting consumers to sign up for credit
cards and other financial offers, their market will be anemic for a while. So
they're an especially poor IPO candidate for the next few years.

That leaves getting bought. If that's what your after, and Intuit comes along
and offers you a great price, why wouldn't you take it? Intuit needs Mint a
lot right now, but maybe later Mint's bargaining position will be worse.

------
mattmaroon
I'm not sure I'd call $170m a great exit considering they were last valued at
$140m. Generally VCs are looking for much more than a 20% ROI. I'd love to
know if there were some special terms that make the VCs get more than their
share here. Otherwise you'd think that either Mint was in trouble and needed
this, or there was something else going on.

~~~
fallentimes
But the 20% ROI was only for the last round of investors who hadn't
participated before not all the investors.

~~~
mattmaroon
Right, but even then that's small right?

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veteran
what's up with the acquisition price ..Intuit's recent acquisitions -
paycycle, homestead, and now mint.com all acquired for 170 millions!

~~~
pyre
Probably an initial asking price. If anything it strongly suggests that there
wasn't much haggling on the price. It would be a _huge_ coincidence if they
all haggled on the price and just happened to end up with the same number.

------
dmor
couldn't have benefited better people, congrats to Aaron and the whole team

------
scotch_drinker
This is terrible news for consumers of the software. Quicken is a horrible
product if you like good user interfaces and software that just does the job.
You have to constantly handhold Quicken and on top of that, many times your
bank will charge you to let Quicken have access to your data. The big two
(Quicken and Money) personal finance software suites had no way of competing
with Mint. I would rather have had Mint start charging a fee for the service
instead of selling out their users. Intuit will probably do both.

Obviously, if your reason for starting a business is to get a huge lottery
ticket payout, keeping it free and hoping some megacorp buys you is a great
idea. I'm disappointed that this was the plan from Mint. I had hopes they
would find a business plan that made them money AND that was good for users.

Of course, if Intuit doesn't fundamentally change Mint, maybe all my
handwringing will be for naught. I hope I'm wrong.

------
Elepsis
I think it's interesting to see people's reactions here -- a good dose of "oh
no Intuit" paranoia. But honestly, did anyone not see this acquisition coming?
I was expecting them to have to pay more, honestly, but I think it was fairly
apparent that Intuit was the obvious buyer and would do what it takes.

The other odd angle to this paranoia: How big do people really think the
market of "people who don't trust Intuit with their financial information" is?
For millions of people, it's already in Quicken... the step to doing that
online, especially for a non-technical user, is not that big.

~~~
njharman
I don't think it's about not trusting Intuit with financial information. It's
about believing Intuit will make a mess of mint.com ruining good and useful
about that site.

~~~
lurkinggrue
I just see them not getting Mint and I am reminded when they first added
product activation to Turbo Tax.

The DRM would fail and support would tell you to buy the software again. That
was enough to drive me from Intuit for good as it just seemed they were far
too interested in profit over customer service.

That was enough to drive me from Intuit for good.

------
gruseom
I'm a little surprised by the fact that they sold now for what seems like a
low price compared to what Mint would surely have grown into, given all the
momentum they'd built up. It seems like they'd solved the hard problem of
getting millions of people to let them into their bank accounts and were fast
on their way to becoming a household word. I don't see why they couldn't have
become a billion dollar company; the competitive landscape was favorable to
them. This seems like a home run that turned into a double. I'd be interested
to know the back story behind it.

------
FreeRadical
I also think there is a good opportunity to take on the UK equivalent; Kublax.
It's a seedcamp company that I tried to use a few times but it was too 'rigid'
so I ended up going back to a google spreadsheet.

~~~
asb
Yodlee will work with UK accounts, for whatever reason (perhaps legal?) Mint
still haven't added UK support.

------
dca
Wait - this is techcrunch. Didn't they just the other day also boldly claim
that Facebook allows faxing of photos? Did they allow both Intuit and Mint a
chance to respond? I'll be waiting a few days before cancelling my Mint
account before I found out whether or not this is just another bad rumor.

~~~
jcl
To be fair, Facebook _did_ allow Techcrunch to fax photos. Their article was
accurate, if not complete.

------
joez
It just got confirmed at Techcrunch50. They will running Quicken Desktop as
well.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-
forme...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-former-
techcrunch50-winner-mint-for-170-million/)

------
lurkinggrue
As a Mint user I must say this: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

------
rgrieselhuber
Goodbye, Mint.

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ryanpetrich
Perhaps now we'll finally get support for Canadian Banks?

------
epall
Wow! Nice exit, guys.

------
ecq
congratulations!

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dkokelley
I have just one word: Damn.

