
Why Wesabe Lost to Mint - Concours
http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint
======
lionhearted
He doesn't give the name element enough credit. It's _huge_. Mint is one of
the two examples I give of best brand names ever.

Not kidding. _Ever_. Silk Soymilk is the other example I use.

Mint's a killer brand name, I think it'd be literally impossible to beat Mint
on natural branding in personal finance, it's the most perfect name I could
imagine. It has double, good meanings - "Mint" as in a place where coins/money
are minted, and of course the plant/candy. Then the plant/candy is associated
with being fresh, clean, safe, and it's colored green, again like money.

It's just genius. It's also only four letters, easy to remember, relevant, and
they got the domain name for it. It's really, really good. The only other name
so good is "silk soymilk", for basically all the same reasons. (soymilk
-SoymILK - easy to remember, silk is clean/smooth/elegant/upscale, four
letters, hard to forget, etc).

Seriously, Mint might be the best named/naturally branded online company ever.
I'm not joking. If I ever had to do a lecture on naming and branding, I'd 100%
for sure use Mint as an example.

~~~
precipice
(This is Marc, author of the linked post.)

I think people attribute success to a name because that fits the mental model
people have for success: You just choose the right name! And then you win!

That's nonsense. Winning is a long series of decisions that have to go right
far more often than not. I pulled out the decisions I thought really were
critical and irreparable turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot
of analysis and a lot of work to fulfill, _both_ for us and for Mint.

You'd like to believe the name is all that matters because then the path to
success is so short and so clear. It just isn't so. (And there are
counterexamples galore that you're emphatically ignoring -- companies with
fantastic names that never got anywhere.)

To be clear: they did have a better name. I say so in the article. But that's
not enough to win.

~~~
lionhearted
> I pulled out the decisions I thought were really, critical and irreperable
> turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot
> of work to fulfill, both for us and for Mint.

Buying mint.com was a hard and critical decision for Mint - they paid $2
million for it in equity during their series A. I think you massively
underestimate it as a reason they won. I think if the names are flipped - if
your company was named mint.com, theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you
win. I did enjoy the article a lot though and thought it was very honest and
good reading and insightful. But maybe you underestimate the power of their
name and branding? Mint might be the best naturally-branded website of all
time (edit: maybe ask.com is better, which also proves that branding and name
isn't everything). But that was a big advantage.

I thought the rest of your post was very good and insightful and I agree with
a lot of it, but I do think you underestimated the name effect. It's big, it
has a multiplier on everything - more press, more PR, more virality, more
trust, more conversion, more desirability, more user retention, etc, etc, etc,
etc.

~~~
csallen
> I think if the names are flipped - if your company was named mint.com,
> theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win.

Whoa there, you're jumping to extreme, unsupported conclusions. No one
disagrees that Mint's branding is great. But to count that as the main reason
why they won? Even top 3-5 reasons? That flies in the face of the wisdom given
by _every_ successful startup veteran: _it's all about execution._ If Mint.com
hadn't provided the instant gratification that got people talking, if they
hadn't won TC50, if they hadn't spent heaps of money on marketing, they would
have been dead in the water.

Don't get me wrong: branding is important. But if your product+marketing is
inferior, you'll probably lose, and if it's superior, you'll overcome all but
the most disastrous names. (Nobody knew what a googol was, most people still
don't, and look who's running the show.) You're focusing on the name to such
an extent that you're ignoring most of the factors that lead a business to
success or death... it's like MBA guys who've never built a product in their
lives, yet say things like, "Oh I'll just outsource it, it's not important."
Yeah right.

~~~
ora600
Supporting evidence:

Two years back I tried Mint, Wesabe and the new Quicken online.

From those three sites, only Mint could retrieve data for my WellsFargo visa.
So I stayed.

Quicken was the worse - they actually made changes to my account (for which WF
notified me by email) and their support was basically useless when I asked
them about it.

So, the name had almost nothing to do with my decision - if Wesabe had the
same scrapper as Mint, things would have been different.

(I misspelled Wesabe twice while writing this post - so maybe the name does
matter... but I still maintain that a working product matters more)

~~~
Xurinos
Until this post, I thought we were talking about the Mint linux distro.

Today I learned that people use a program called Mint for handling their
finances. I would have expected, at least, a program called "Money".

~~~
JoachimSchipper
That name would just get them sued by Microsoft.

------
vagostino
Hi, I was one of the early Mint.com product guys.

I just want to say thanks to Marc for sharing this. I know how difficult it is
to be objective in a post-mortem analysis, and I think your post is a very
balanced (and dignified) assessment.

There's one more important differentiator, however, that hasn't been discussed
yet and which pre-empts a lot of this commentary, that I thought I'd share:
Mint intentionally targeted a different market.

Most consumer spending in the US is managed by middle aged men and women that
are not especially financially nor technically savvy. It was our view that
previous personal finance solutions (Quicken, MS Money, and the following web-
based solutions) catered more towards the technically/financially proficient,
and had therefore missed the larger market opportunity.

So we tried our best to ignore the Silicon Valley drivel around "viral
distribution" and "cloud security" and focus instead on issues like "How can
we make it easier for a soccer Mom in Kansas to set and meet her monthly
grocery budget?".

The Mint brand (including the name, visuals, and user experience) were all
designed with this in Mind. They were definitely supportive, as Marc correctly
points out, but in no way were they determinate.

I think Mint and Wesabe were both strong products that served their users'
needs well. We just happened to target different users, and ultimately there
were more of ours.

------
pg
The essential point seems to be that Mint was easier for users. This is
something we constantly emphasize at YC. You care a lot about your startup.
You have no idea how little a potential user cares. So you can't let the
activation energy be high.

Plus users are mostly not programmers. They're terrified by software. Most
software they've tried in their lives has caused them pain, either by not
working right or by being incomprehensible (which are indistinguishable to the
victim).

So imagine you're designing your app for someone who's both apathetic and
cringing with fear at the same time. You cannot make it too easy. If there's
something you can do that will take a week and make your app 1% easier to
start using, it's worth doing.

~~~
johnrob
Your reasoning can be applied on a micro level also, comparing the name mint
to wesabe. The former is unquestionably easier to remember, type, and tell
friends. Is it worth spending a lot of money to get a premium domain? The
question sounds very similar to asking 'how much effort should I spend making
1% improvements in usability?'.

One of my friends spent (from what I heard) over 200K for a very good domain.
It seems wasteful on one hand, but on the other hand they must get a lot of
credibility because of it.

~~~
pg
Depends on the situation and the name. I can't imagine many situations where
it would be worth paying 200k. You can get good enough names for free usually,
or at most 10k. It just takes some ingenuity.

~~~
mikeklaas
Perhaps, but most high-priced domains will retain a significant chunk of their
value if not appreciate over time. In the worst case, you resell it.

~~~
pg
Interesting point. For most startups though the opportunity cost of having
that cash tied up is a problem.

------
ryanwaggoner
This is a really good article and it does cover a few things that were
probably factors, but I remember looking at both Wesabe and Mint back when
they were both new and I chose Mint for two reasons:

1\. The design was better, which made me feel more comfortable about handing
over my data (Mint's designer Jason Purtorti talks about this here:
<http://vimeo.com/15066599>)

2\. Mint seemed more focused on being a really simple-to-use webapp to analyze
my finances, whereas Wesabe's messaging indicated that they were trying to
leverage the wisdom of crowds to help people make better financial decisions.
I don't want the crowd analyzing or managing my finances, and it wasn't clear
at a glance how their goal could be accomplished while protecting my privacy.

Also, as he mentions regarding the Yodlee thing, Wesabe had a "download this
application and it'll retrieve your bank data" thing, but Mint just worked
with thousands of financial institutions, and that seemed much easier and more
reliable.

Regardless, this was a great blog post and I wish we could see more
introspective posts like this when ventures don't work out the way the
founders hoped.

------
edw519
_Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all...Their approach
completely kicked our approach's ass...Changing people's behavior is really
hard_

Hmmm, reminds me of an old saying, "When in doubt, leave it out." Now I'm
going back to all my forms and mockups, wondering if there's anything else
that can be removed. Short attention spans, human nature, and plain old
laziness make "Keep It Simple Stupid" more relevant than ever.

 _A domain name doesn't win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth
doesn't lose you a market. You can't blame your competitors or your board or
the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making
users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much
as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there
you'll win._

Bulletin board material. Front and center. (I really should be spending more
time writing code and less worrying about the market or reading Hacker News.)

[EDIT: We complain a lot here about "survivor bias". This is an excellent post
and a great counterexample with much to be learned. Wesabe may have lost, but
AFAIC, Marc is most definitely a winner.]

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_I really should be spending more time writing code and less worrying about
the market or reading Hacker News._

I couldn't disagree more. Worrying about your market is how you know _what_ to
code. I think the number of startups who fail because they don't get sales,
marketing, and product-market fit outnumber those who fail because they didn't
write enough code or good enough code 100:1.

~~~
edw519
_Worrying about your market is how you know what to code._

You're absolutely right, Ryan, in theory all the time and in practice most of
the time. But there are exceptions...

OP is an exception. When it came to understanding his market and satisfying
their needs he did so many things right and still got his ass kicked. By
someone who "dumbed it down".

I can't tell you how many times I've beaten enterprisey competitors with teams
of marketing and domain experts because the customer understood my simple
offering over their complex one.

I really hate that old Henry Ford quote, "If I had asked my customers what
they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses,'" but there's a grain of
truth in it. At some point, you just gotta stop asking everyone what they
think, say "fuck it", build what you think is right, get it out there, and
find out for real. I believe I'm at that point, that's all. Whether others
think they're also at that point is for them to decide for themselves.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Fair enough; I understand that there are a variety of cases, and I was
responding to what I perceived when I read it as a general statement, rather
than a self-assessment of your particular situation.

 _because the customer understood my simple offering over their complex one_

This is a good example of a better product-market fit. My problem is that I
have a tendency to do what a lot of hacker-entrepreneurs do: hack. But that's
often not what's most needed.

------
Sukotto
I looked at both Wesabe and Mint when trying to decide on a aggregation
service. I ended up choosing Mint.

\- Mint was easy to remember, and easy to spell. Wesabe was neither. I often
typoed the name as "wasabi"

\- Mint didn't make me do any real work. Wesabe made me do all the work.

\- Mint felt private. Wesabe wanted me to work with "the crowd" of other users

\- Mint was simple and beautiful. Wesabe looked rough around the edges

So I went with Mint.

~~~
AmericanOP
This is the most important comment in this thread. Wesabe should have listened
to potential customers like you without being defensive of their offering and
adjusted UX/positioning/messaging accordingly.

------
mikeryan
This "Myth": _Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a
factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough
to explain the different outcomes,_

Is contradicted by this: _Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no
work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing
the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate
gratification as soon as they possibly could_

UX design isn't just pretty pictures - which is why its now called "user
experience" as opposed to "user interface" now.

I think a lot of people dismiss ux considerations because they think its just
the part of the site thats "pretty" and its not.

~~~
precipice
(This is Marc, the author of the linked post.)

You're right, I both credited and dismissed a very large category with the
word "design." In my view some people believe that it was just the visual
appeal of Mint's site that did us in. In my view that helped them but not
enough to kill us. I do think that we spent our usability effort (as I say in
the post) in the wrong place, making editing, for instance, easy, instead of
making editing totally optional.

~~~
nanijoe
Too bad you did not have the funds to continue, I thought it was pretty a
useful service.

------
hyperbovine
To me, the larger story is about risk. A lot of people here, if directed to
build a personal finance startup, would go about it in much the same way that
Wesabe did. Launch early, attempt to build a community of enthusiasts, and
grow the site organically (through word of mouth) as opposed to advertising.
This is the time-honored way, and a lot of startups have succeeded by it.

What did Patser do? He went and dropped $2 million on the domain name before
he even had a single user, and then inked a sweetheart deal with Yodlee to
gain an overnight technical advantage on the competition. He spent money on
advertising, artwork, and design. (Interestingly, the claim that Mint spent
$1/user conflicts with something I read earlier:
<http://www.slate.com/id/2228846/>. Not sure where the truth lay.)

He did everything that the 37 Signals / MVP crowd says you shouldn't. I'm not
criticizing, but in their pursuit of instant profitability / dislike of VC
money, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the value of gambling big. Patser
took risks, and the market rewarded him for it.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
Is that about risk then? Or is it about the advantage of being the guy with
$2million in his pocket to drop on the business before he even starts, and the
connections to get the sweetheart deal with Yodlee?

~~~
hyperbovine
I don't know anything about the guy other than what I have read, but nothing I
have read suggests to me that a) he started out rich or b) he had any sort of
insider connection to Yodlee. (TFA plainly states that they could have gone
the Yodlee route first, but chose not to.)

He just strikes me as someone who is a smart businessman, better at it than
your average hacker.

------
btucker
I LOVED the wesabe downloadable data import client. The fact that I didn't
have to fork over the login credentials to my financial accounts was a huge
win & what kept me away from Mint until wesabe closed. But clearly this was
not an issue for most people and hence why the simplicity of the yodlee backed
solution ultimately won.

Wesabe did one very interesting thing when they launched which was that the
CEO had open office hours when you could call and talk to him. They were one
of the first "Web 2.0" companies to do this. I think they stopped this at some
point, but I always loved the concept.

~~~
king_jester
Handing over bank usernames and passwords in order to use Mint was the one
thing I thought would be a barrier for Mint compared to Wesabe, esp. since for
my banks I can't provide one (limited) credential for Mint while keeping one
for myself. It's interesting that a tool like Mint, which is designed to
empower people with control over their finances, asks people to give up
control over their financial information and most people seem to be OK with
that.

~~~
tapp
Same. As an aside, does anyone know any banks that _do_ offer this? It seems
like a no-brainer to me to allow users a set of read-only credentials for
online account access.

~~~
dunham
A lot of banks offer OFX access, it's what stuff like Money and Quicken talk
to. It's mostly read only, although I think there are a couple of banks that
can do bill pay over OFX. This is pretty common knowledge if you're writing
this kind of software.

Some vendors, like Ameritrade use different credentials for OFX.

Mint/Yodlee asked for front door passwords and security answers that give them
the ability to trade securities and empty my account, rather than the OFX
id/pin that would give them access to a standard API to retrieve transactions
and balances. This made me seriously doubt their competence, and I never
became a customer.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange> for details.

------
holychiz
Thank you Marc for your insightful article. It must stung like the beejesus to
work so hard and still get your head handed to you. It seems like your
decisions were guided by your high-mindedness, believe in the best in the
people, for the people, for example: people should work and understand closely
their financial data. Betcha learned people are f@!#$%ing sloth, eh? Perhaps
this is a case of self-project yourself onto your target market, then finds
out that people are not like you at all, because if they were, they'd get off
their asses and start a company, change the world or something like that :)

I tried wesabe and mint. Mint was easier to use. However, now that you
explained a little bit about your Yodlee decision, I can sympathize w/ your
conclusion. It turns out to be strategically deadly wrong but given your high-
mindedness, don't beat yourself up too much. You can always take comfort in
the fact that you were not "Webvan" :).

To get websabe to where it was, you must have made a number of "right"
decisions also so you should reviews those too. You'll be back, I'm sure, and
we look forward to your next venture. good luck.

ps. do consider the whole user-experience next time. pps. I ditched mint and
went back to quicken for better control of my data and mint haven't got the
cash account feature to fully work yet.

------
mycroftiv
The key lesson seems to be that ease-of-use is of absolutely paramount
importance. Maybe this can even be expressed in mathematical terms: you can't
just look at the "raw value" provided by a service, you have to look at the
_ratio_ of value received to time and effort invested.

------
city41
Maybe I'm just ignorant but I never even heard of Wesabe until this HN post.
I've been an unhappy Mint user for years though (I still argue Mint is nowhere
near as good as Microsoft Money was).

So if I'm representative of "average people", then lack of marketing may have
been a folly too.

~~~
hoop
I'm in the same boat as you. I'm a happy Mint user and had never, ever heard
of Wesabe.

~~~
mikeklaas
Yes, this is equivalent to the statement "Mint succeeded and Wesabe failed",
and not the reason it did.

Mint reached probably an order-magnitude more people ultimately, so it isn't
surprising that most of us haven't heard of wesabe.

~~~
hoop
I disagree. I see mint reaching that "more people" as the reason why it
succeeded, not a side effect

------
hariis
From the article: When we talked to Yodlee in 2006, the company was crumbling,
having failed to get acquired and losing executives. They were also very
aggressive in negotiation, telling us they would give us six months' service
nearly free and then tell us the final price we'd be charged going forward.
\--

This is pretty disturbing to me. It seems what Marc and Wesabe did was the
right thing to do to not trust Yodlee HOWEVER, it also appears that the user
doesn't care a damn.

How do you handle such situations?

~~~
andreyf
You weigh the cost/risk of dealing with Yodlee against making it yourself.
Marc seems to have used a usually sound heuristic - I don't trust these
people, I don't want to bother working with them. Personally, I would have
agreed - a partner that's an aggressive negotiator with high executive
turnover can end up being an enormous liability in more ways than one. Better
avoid them.

But heuristics are by definition imperfect. If Yodlee really gave Mint as much
momentum as Marc thinks they did, this might have been an exception to the
rule.

------
thevinsatta
The one thing to resonate with me the most is "No one, in my view, solved the
financial problems of consumers."

Marc is right. Financial literacy is a huge problem for a country that's
supposed to be the richest in the world. How do we teach people the importance
of personal finance management or change their spending habits? We teach all
sorts of things in school except this.

Personally, I have been on a campaign for the last 9 months to teach people
about the importance of planning, budgeting and saving. It's been difficult
convincing people that they should think about their future. Even when I'm
sitting down at the kitchen table face to face, it is difficult to establish
the reasoning why they should care in the first place.

There are 4 types of people I encounter with the most:

1\. I don't know how to take care of my finances and I don't care about my
future.

2\. I do know that it is important, but everything is going to be okay even I
remain ignorant.

3\. I don't know, but I would like to learn more, but don't know how.

4\. I know some, I think I have a good idea, but still want to learn more, but
don't have somebody to turn to.

The common problem between all of them:

1\. Most people don't know WHY they should care about their personal finance.

2\. Most people don't know where to get trust worthy information to help them
or have access to professionals.

I have been trying to solve these problems with one family at a time. If you
can do the same with power of reach through the internet, it would be golden.

------
aamar
Excellent, clear thinking; thank you for this analysis. I wanted to ask more
about:

 _we both totally failed at... actually helping people._

 _Changing people's behavior is really hard._

Yes, but it seemed to me -- and this post confirms -- that Wesabe was
genuinely thinking about this problem of how to get people to change behavior,
to improve their lives. Mint seemed (and still seems) to have a much lower
ambition in this respect.

Question #1: Was Wesabe actively engaging in experiments in how to help
people/change behavior? I know the support community did help some people, but
it sounds from your post that in its existing form it didn't do something
palpably different from what people would do on their own. So it seems that
Wesabe ought to have been building as many experiments as possible, hoping for
something that seemed (at least anecdotally, at first) to help some subset of
users above-and-beyond what they were able to do elsewhere.

I suspect Wesabe was running some experiments but too few. If that's true,
what prevented those experiments from happening? Infrastructure work/scaling
challenges/security concerns? Was the employee or user count too high to
efficiently run experiments?

Question #2: If Wesabe was running a good number of experiments, why was
Wesabe unable to secure investment for a longer runway of more experiments?
After fixing the Yodlee problem (which I agree was a major problem), Wesabe
seemed well positioned to lead in experiments to change behavior. The space
still seems enormously ripe for innovation. So why did new funding not happen?
Was Mint's success demotivating? Was the timing bad, given the economic
downturn?

------
HectorRamos
I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who
attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website.

I had some exchanges with Marc and he was great and helpful. I was taking a
big risk on signing up with Wesabe so I conviced my superiors to give me one
month to set it up, and a second month to run an internal pilot and then
decide if we would launch the PFM integration to all customers.

Unfortunately we ran into some issues, that were minor in my mind, but my
employer being in the financial services industry they have a very low
tolerance for risk when working with customer's financial data, so they called
off the Wesabe integration within two weeks into the first month.

This was for the enterprise Wesabe product, mind you, and was around six
months ago so I guess Wesabe was already in its last run anyway, but I guess
not having a stable enough MVP for their enterprise customers might not have
helped much.

I wish you great success in your next endeavor, precipice!

~~~
rwhitman
Oh, shoot I just made a comment about this. I was suggesting if they had
focused squarely on enterprise earlier, they might have been fine.

Do you think a future finance aggregation tool, that was focused entirely on
enterprise (with subsequent accountability), would have had a better chance of
success?

So many smaller banks have online banking that is lacking, I'm always
frustrated that there aren't more companies trying to make that experience
better.

~~~
HectorRamos
That's actually what BankSimple is trying to solve, right?

The problem with enterprise is, like I said, they have so many regulations and
tight tolerances, they are not very startup friendly.

However, if Wesabe was bought by Intuit and in turn Intuit offered exactly the
same product that Wesabe already had, the banks would easily pay $10,000 a
month for it just based on the name.

For reference, Wesabe was around $2,500 for their most expensive enterprise
plan, which was very inexpensive when compared to having Intuit add your bank
to Quicken for $10,000 a month.

~~~
rwhitman
I thought BankSimple was its own online bank.

Yea, I imagine you could get away with a very hefty license fee. I know of one
company that charges affiliate TV stations $5m a year license for essentially
a glorified hosted CMS. If they can get that for something that doesn't even
remotely require the kind of privacy a bank system needs, the price tag for an
online banking tool should be pretty high. Even $500k-$1m+ a year seems
reasonable by comparison. Its really all a matter of support and sales prowess

~~~
HectorRamos
An actual BankSimple employee might be able to explain it better, so I welcome
any corrections, and I might be very wrong since I believe that only during
the last two weeks or so is that the whole team has been built and started
wholly working on the product, but this is what I knew about BankSimple from a
few months back.

They are working on a great online front end, focusing on awesome user
experience, while partnering with another financial institution (just one, or
more, I'm not really sure) to handle the back end: all of the transfers,
payments, ACH handling, and so on.

So basically you have this awesome online "bank" with a great web PFM but the
business processes are actually being handled by an established brick and
mortar bank.

There are many banks and they do one thing great - handle money - but many of
them have awful web/internet teams. So in comes BankSimple, they solve the web
part of the equation and partner up with one or more banks.

If you think about it, it kinda sounds like what Mint could be if they were
more than an aggregator and closer to an online bank.

------
mattmaroon
On the name thing I see a lot of misunderstanding about this. A name can be a
little silly, sure. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Mint. People use this to justify
terrible domain names all the time.

There are a few things the above have in common that Wesabe doesn't:

1\. They're real words. (Technically Google isn't, but it's a misspelling of a
real word that probably more people than not would make.Very few people, if
told about it, would type in googol.com). Look at the Alexa top 100 in the US,
it's almost entirely real words.

2\. They're easily pronounced. If I tell my friend about Yahoo.com, he's going
to be able to type it in or easily Google for it. I assume Wesabe is similar
to wasabi, but I'm still not even sure about that.

~~~
DevX101
Nothing silly about the name "Mint"

------
arthurdent
Its fun to look back and enumerate the reasons for success or failure, but
dumb luck is just such a huge part of this game as well.

Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had
won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to
shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by _"build[ing] tools that would
eventually help people change their financial behavior for the better, which I
believed required people to more closely work with and understand their
data."_

A startup can't implement every feature perfectly, and will ultimately have to
make choices without knowing which was the "right" one.

~~~
ronb
I'm surprised the winning of TC40 isn't cited more strongly - That's where I
first heard about Mint. You can argue that they wouldn't have won had they not
done many of the other things right, but what's the adoption curve of Mint
like before and after that event?

~~~
precipice
It was huge for them. My point, though, was that we made our own mistakes. If
we had had a better user experience before TC40, they either wouldn't have
made such an impression at the event or wouldn't have overtaken us so quickly.

~~~
blusie
Very nice article - many lessons learned and I think you're on the mark there,
TC40 gave Mint social proof - if they can win within their own community then
it must be ok.

I wonder if personal financial software is a tougher market for adoption than
business financial software is.

It seems to me that many of Wesabe's features are also relevant to small
businesses who are already used to making more input decisions and "wrestling"
with their financial software and who might be more willing to adopt if
benefits exceed costs.

I am working on a financial system that is directed more toward business than
individuals (however still relevant to individuals) and I am looking for a co-
founder. If you're interested Marc, I'm @blusie on twitter.

------
vaksel
seems like their mistake was ignoring yodlee and trying to make their own
stuff...which lost them a lot of traction.

had they launched with yodlee, Mint would have been nothing more but a "better
designed wesabe"

seems to me like they should have spent the cash to subscribe to yodlee, and
then spent their effort building their own version like they ended up doing.

~~~
sandipc
yes, but even before Mint, there was Yodlee MoneyCenter... so you could say
that Mint was really nothing more than a "better designed MoneyCenter"

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Yodlee MoneyCenter was a surprising discovery for me. Sure, I had head of them
because of Mint, but I didn't know that they supported most Indian banks. I've
been using them for some time and quite satisfied with it.

------
rwhitman
I thought that wesabe's integrating at the bank level might have been a
smarter approach. For instance Bank of America has a mint-like finance
aggregation tool built into their online banking. I already entrust them with
my finances why not use their tool?

As far as I recall, Wesabe was providing a similar service to smaller banks,
as their solution for this, right? Personally I would guess that market
opportunity would be at the bank level, you sell $500k-$1m/yr licenses to
integrate the tool directly with a banking website, you don't even need
consumers, just a really friggin good sales team...

~~~
wiredfool
It might work, but you'd need a hell of a runway. Think year plus sales
cycles, if you're lucky. Not a real good fit for an agile, non-vc backed
startup. Banks are slow, conservative, and no two are alike under the covers,
even the ones running the same outsourced core software.

~~~
rwhitman
Very true, and you'd really need a team with a serious track record in
banking. I imagine half of selling the product would be based on the
perception of trust and experience.

------
kyro
So, recently, as I started pulling loans out for school and creating budgets,
I went on the look for a money management service and tried out Wesabe among a
few others. Mint ultimately won, and I'll tell you why, from my personal
opinion as a user. Maybe it might help somebody somewhere.

A) Design

Perhaps the biggest selling point for me was how polished Mint was in
comparison to Wesabe. It felt professional. I felt I could trust Mint with my
personal financial data. Wesabe seemed unfinished, rough around the edges.
Sure, it played more to my irrational mind, but I just felt more comfortable
using Mint. Just hook in my various accounts, let me create a budget, and do
the rest for me, which is what Mint did. I was guided through the profile
filling process, and there was a strangely human quality about Mint -- as if
it were my own personal accountant.

So the first thing I learned was that a good design and user experience can be
very effective in developing trust within a potential user for your service.
Second was that lots of time should go into capturing a user's attention upon
first laying eyes on your app, placing guides along the way, etc, ensuring
initial and continual engagement.

B) iPhone App

At the time, Wesabe didn't have a native iPhone app (I don't think they ever
did come out with one). They had a webapp, but it wasn't good enough for me,
especially when Mint had a native app. This played a bigger role than I
thought it would. Having a native app just feels better. Just the feeling of
launching the app is rewarding. I don't know about you, but I really try to
avoid using webapps in mobile Safari as much as possible; they tend not to be
as polished and snappy.

So, if your app and users create the need for a mobile interface, don't settle
for webapp.

C) Focus (Personal/Community in this case)

Wesabe seemed to have a communal element, which I really didn't care for. Mint
came across as a more walled-off made-only-for-me personal assistant, and I
liked that feeling. I didn't want to share my tips on saving cash with others;
I just wanted a service to manage my money, nothing else. In that respect,
Mint felt more refined and catered to my needs -- it was more focused.

Give your app laser-focus.

------
userk
Found this blog post to very revealing, although not entirely the way others
do. Expressing openly and owning these two decisions (to focus on build vs.
buy & simplicity vs. user customization) is admirable, but the slippery
rhetoric undermines these mightily. There are many shrewdly baked-in messages
and denials that are far afield from above: \- No has solved the problem that
we set out to solve in personal finance. In other words, yeah, I know I said
Mint won, but we didn’t really lose to Mint – no one has won! \- Circumstances
conspired to make me CEO. Er, perhaps another decision was to not have the
humility to bring in a more qualified CEO. Since we’re all being so honest. \-
Our product was just as good as there’s other than these 2 facts. In other
words, I created and know how to execute at the level that Mint did. Of course
you do – you’re in the job market! I’ve heard this 'falling on the sword'
rhetoric from CEOs of a failed company as a public way of engendering praise.
It’s politically disingenuous because -of course you’re responsible- –
everyone knows that claiming otherwise is horrible PR for yourself. The
purpose of the post to bake in all the rationalization of how the decisions
were right given in the information, you’re of high character, and get that
personal brand out there in a controlled way. And that’s the way to ‘keep the
focus on making the user happy’

------
jack910
"Mint aggressively acquired users by paying for search engine marketing
(reportedly spending over $1 for each user), while Wesabe spent almost nothing
on marketing".

Startups need to realize that customer acquisition is an important part of the
equation too. Sure technology,UX, and a memorable name is important too but
too many people are still thinking if they build a good product, start a blog,
twitter everyday is all that is needed to succeed.

~~~
tapp
I'd rework that statement slightly. If you're building an actual company, then
customer acquisition is not merely "part of the equation," it's the whole ball
game.

All other factors you list (tech, UX, naming, etc.) should primarily be
evaluated as means to that end.

------
robbieco
First interesting read. However, overly simplified. Name, product and UX are
all good reasons but they can all be fixed. Companies succeed or fail for two
reasons - CEO and cash flow. The importance of a CEO is usually understated
but the CEO is critical. Being a visionary, cracking the whip when necessary
and instilling values (excellence is the first) cant be replaced. He is
driving the company forward. He can be a coder but he should not write single
line of code. His role is to manage not to develop. As per Cash flow. Given
enough cash flow, anything can be fixed. Company can relaunched, product
improved and marketing invested. As per Wesabe vs. Mint. In this day and age
people who give control of their accounts to ANY third party are plain crazy.
However, the buzz instilled confidence in people and they think Mint is safe.
Wesabe could have had a place in the market with people who don’t trust Mint's
approach. The issue was, it was not "sexy" and the people who might have been
interested didn’t hear about it. Good Marketing could have addressed that
(positioning, PR etc). Which goes back to the CEO being a CEO and not focus on
coding.

------
NZ_Matt
There is still plenty of innovation happening in this space for those outside
of the US. I know of three New Zealand based startups
<http://www.pocketsmith.com> , <http://www.xero.com> and
<http://www.heaps.co.nz>

------
db911
Winning the DEMO contest put Mint on the radar for me. First time I heard of
such a business. Knew of Quicken but the idea of taking it to web was 'a ha!'.
Never heard of wesabe - and I consider myself web savy - flickr, delicious
etc.

I loved the idea but did not trust putting such info online. Then I saw yodlee
relationship. I knew banks trusted Yodlee so I gave them (mint) extra trust
because of that. I read through their TOC and it gave me more confidence.

On a related thread...I wanted to do online bill pay some time earlier and
knew that there was some independent company-yodlee (not wanting to tie myself
to my bank) that did it but darned if I could remember the name). So yodlee
lost business because of that odd name (in my - survey of 1- case). Love the
post and cmts. Good luck with your next venture. Bring same passion - and
invest in good URL<g>

------
bfung
Web 2.0 personal financing tools:

Mint - Aquired by Intuit

Buxfer - not actively maintained, founders working @ facebook

Wesabe - shut down

Anyone want to speculate on what went worked/didn't work and might work in the
future in this space? As mentioned in the article, it seems like users don't
really care about digging into their data, but seeing pretty graphs is good
enough.

------
neolefty
I'm impressed with Marc's lack of rancor towards Mint -- very classy. It lends
credibility to the whole article.

------
Aegean
Very insightful read. But I don't understand why he didn't continue the
startup. He even identifies a yet unsolved problem. I would have cut the costs
and continue in my own direction and try gaining traction. There is probably
room for this. I dont see how mint success has to mean a failure for wesabe.

------
bluethunder
This is an amazing post.

Thanks for laying out your version of the story which I feel is definitely
more accurate. Why did you not decide to not pursue Wesabe for the long term ?

As I understand, Mind did well in some places like immidiate gratification but
was bad in accurately aggregating financial statistics. You could have
reworked your UI to provide the immidiate gratification and over time also
made a more robust aggregator.

Also, the fact as you state is that Mint/Wesabe both did not really make a
dent in the market. Additionally, the fact that Mint has got acquired, most
likely they never will. It is extremely unlikely that Mint after being
acquired will be able to keep pace with Wesabe. More so the fact that you guys
had substantial revenue , you could have cut the fat and dumbed down for a
long haul easily.

------
petenixey
Marc I remember hearing you speak at a conference in '07 and being very
impressed at how exaustively you interviewed potential users before building.

Do you feel in retrospect that there was anything obvious you could have done
and monitored post-launch that would have let you out-manoeuvre Mint?

------
rokhayakebe
_Wesabe built our own data acquisition system, first using downloadable client
programs (partially because that was easier and partially to preserve users'
privacy) and later using a Yodlee-like web interface_

That is the real product, the real company, launch it.

------
RudeBaldGuy
It is clear that Wesabe lost. What is not clear to me is that Mint won. Yes,
Patzer got $170M out of Intuit for the investors, got his share, and a nice
new job at Intuit. But now what? Mint's revenues were not that great, and as
for profits....who knows. Now it is being absorbed into the Intuit Borg.
Intuit is still trying to figure out what the heck it did when it bought
Digital Insight. Will Intuit ever see an ROI on its $170M? Oh I forgot, this
is Silicon Valley. ROI doesn't matter. But Mint is a neat name. That and $5
will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

------
jdp23
Great analysis, very valuable -- thanks to Marc for taking the time to do it.
The points about the Yodlee tradeoff and focusing on the use case that
required a lot of work from people are very insightful.

I agree with the others here that Mint's name and design played a huge role in
its success. Years ago somebody mentioned Wesabe to me and from the way the
name sounded I couldn't find it on a quick web search, I gave up. When I
eventually saw the site my reaction was "looks complicated". By contrast Mint
was easy to find and looked very easy to use.

------
hcurtiss
While Mint is a great name, I totally agree that the difference was execution.
Several years ago I tried Wesabe, Mint, Quicken, MS Money (which, IIRC, used
yodlee), as well as Yodlee's site itself. I went with Mint because it just
worked. It had access to all of the Yodlee banks, with a far more intuitive
interface than yodlee. Frankly, at the time, there were no alternatives. I've
not bothered to look since.

------
jdrock
My 2 cents:

1\. Mint was viral to a degree. The service itself wasn't, but their blog was.
They put a lot of effort into building a community around their blog - posting
tips and guides on managing your finances, and so on.

2\. I wonder if Wesabe ever tried shifting to be a more power-user service. If
what he says is true, it sounds like they could made it into a service that
caters to people that really do want to actively manage their finances.

------
WesleyJohnson
I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure
how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most
people flock to it: it's automated and there isn't much you need to do to get
existing transactions and analyze them. Maybe it's changed since Intuit bought
them, but I signed up for their service two different times and toyed with it
for a few hours before canceling on both occasions. To me, true finance
management is not only analyzing existing spending, but preparing for future
spending.

I want to be able to setup a budget.

I want to be able to setup recurring transactions and future bill payments so
when I look at my finances at any given moment, I can see what I have coming
due today, tomorrow, in two weeks.

I don't want to rely on my bank to tell me how much cash I have available,
because it doesn't know the $1 pending gas charge from yesterday is actually a
$45 fill up that hasn't cleared, but I do.

I want to keep track of all aspects of my paycheck so I can estimate my taxes
all year long and adjust my withholdings accordingly or save if I'm going to
have to pay in.

I'm sure I could go on and on. I realize we're moving towards (or are already
in) the era of webapps and people are moving away from desktop apps, but I've
yet to find a decent online finance manager that does what MS Money can do.
It's a shame they discontinued it, because in my opinion it kicks the crap out
of Mint.

I'm not really sure how this relates to the article, I just think it's a shame
that Wasabe lost out to Mint because Mint was dumbed down enough that users
don't have to do much of anything. Properly manging your finances should most
certainly require user interaction to do it properly and it sounds like Wasabe
was trying to do just that. Maybe that's why so many people struggle with
finances, because they don't take an active enough roll in managing them and I
fear something like Mint just aids in that passiveness.

As the Marc says in the article, "Changing people's behavior is really hard.
No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon
of personal finance." It's been a while since I've given it a look, but last I
check Mint wasn't even close. If Wasabe was, it's truly a shame they were beat
out by Mint catering to and lazy users and enabling them to stay lazy when
IMHO, the problem they're allegedly trying to solve requires exactly the
opposite.

~~~
frossie
I want banksimple.com, or some other kind of 21st century bank that will let
me do all this stuff natively from my primary banking....

~~~
bfish
If you qualify for membership, USAA has added a lot of Mint-like features to
their online banking service.

------
rblion
"Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at
doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance. Can you succeed
where we failed? Please do -- the problems are absolutely huge and the help
consumers have is absolutely abysmal. Learn from the above and go help people
(after making them immediately happy, first)."

------
vincell1
I humbly disagree with you guys. I personally don’t think the name played that
much of a role. In my opinion Mint won because of 3 reasons.. 1) They won
techcrunch disrupt and had people buzzing 2) They gave customer what they
wanted. They had the right "easy" approach to the problem. 3) They got higher
value users by doing SEM.

------
mg1313
"A domain name doesn't win you a market" - he clearly didn't understand the
domain name field. That's why he got that crappy Wesabe name. Mint gave hares
to the owner of Mint.com so he let Mint use it.

A domain doesn't win you a market but CAN help you quite much! Otherwise, you
put more money in the marketing...

------
rodh257
I only used Wesabe because I'm from Australia and Mint doesn't support my
bank, the Firefox uploader was great (a bit more control over access to your
bank account, sort of) but the actual website wasn't useful enough for me to
keep using it. Would love to see what Mint is like.

------
nl
For those who haven't seen, it appears this blog post was prompted by this
Quora discussion: [http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Wesabe-shut-down-while-Mint-
did...](http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Wesabe-shut-down-while-Mint-did-so-well)

------
otwixto
I found the most interesting part to be when the author admitted to
overlooking the idea that users might want instant gratification from a
useable site. seems like in this day and age that would be the #1 priority of
any company/website/startup.

------
recampbell
"No one, in my view, solved the financial problems of consumers. No one even
got close. "

Completely disagree. Mint's easy budgeting tools helped me cut expenses and
start an aggressive savings plan. That, plus INGDirect's multiple sub-
accounts.

------
neolefty
To summarize:

\- Give instant gratification; require as little work as possible from your
users

\- Be visible; Mint advertised heavily; neither site was viral

Other smaller factors too, but those seem to be the biggies, based on Marc's
article and comments here.

------
kevinpet
Reading the article, it sounds like Marc set out to change people's behavior.
I don't think Mint did that. There's a lot more money in giving people what
they want rather than what you think they need.

------
gsiener
Marc,

Thanks for putting your thoughts out there like this. We are currently
tackling the small business finance space (Profitably.com) and it's
interesting to see your comparison to Mint.

What are you up to now?

------
robertgaal
I really loved reading this post. Thanks Marc, for sharing! I'm sure that
brought back some painful memories. Totally worth it to us ;)

------
rwhitman
Isn't the attitude of "If Company A Wins, Company B Loses" kind of a dangerous
mindset to have when you're running a startup?

------
chris123
Acquiring customers for $1 a pop is cheap. If customer lifetime value is < $1
then something is terribly wrong.

------
neolefty
Question: Is there a way a financial management site can be viral? Marc claims
that neither Mint nor Wesabe was.

------
bretthellman
The name Wesabe had a huge part to do with losing. Patzer is right, with a
name like Wesabe you have ZERO chances of capitalizing on word of mouth.
Before you buy a domain for your business, find 10 random people and ask them
to type out the domain. If they fail or have to stop to even think about how
to type out the domain, it's a failure.

~~~
bretthellman
Also, Mint didn't ignore the power of SEO... Even before the product had
launched they had a blog that was providing inbound traffic.

------
rbpasker
my response to Marc's post based on being an investor in Mint and a colleague
of Marc's

[http://blog.pasker.net/2010/10/02/why-wesabe-lost-to-
mint-%e...](http://blog.pasker.net/2010/10/02/why-wesabe-lost-to-
mint-%e2%80%93-a-second-opinion/)

------
michaelhalligan
I had a phone interview with Marc sometime in 2007, I think just after TC40.
During the interview they made me aware of Mint.com, so I spent the afternoon
playing with Mint & Wesabe.

By the end of the afternoon I had begun using Mint to track all of my finances
and had only managed to get Wesabe to recognize 1/3 of my accounts. Wesabe had
a fantastic team, but Mint was the clear winner, so I decided not to go
forward.

------
Thangorodrim
The name is an albatross.

