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Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

blog.precipice.org

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Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#61

Post by 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.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#62

Post by 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.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#63

Post by king_jester »

btucker wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#64

Post by lionhearted »

precipice wrote: post #58
lionhearted wrote: post #25

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 a…

(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…

> 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.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#65

Post by natrius »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #57

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…

Mint has budgets. In fact, I'd say it's their killer feature. They also added pending transactions recently, though I don't really use them.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#66

Post by ronb »

arthurdent wrote: post #9

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…

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?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#68

Post by pg »

precipice wrote: post #58
lionhearted wrote: post #25

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 a…

(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…

I agree with Marc. Google is a mediocre name.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#69

Post by rohi81 »

My impression, from my limited in person interaction with Marc,he was fanatic about user privacy. He and, I think, his team spent a great deal just on this subject and the sad truth is/was the users really did not care that much. Touching on an other topic is the aggregation service, Marc and his team seemed to have spent a great deal on the technology and work around methods so that they did not infringe on any patents. In hindsight contracting with Yodlee would have been better.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#70

Post by stackthat »

lionhearted wrote: post #42
stackthat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mint is a great name agreed but what's the actual impact? 5%? 10%? 50%? Possibly not even 5%

> Mint is a great name agreed but what's the actual impact? 5%? 10%? 50%? Possibly not even 5% Impossible to measure that, because you can't do controlled experiments. But if you're asking, "Why did Mint make the first blockbuster web-based personal finance product?" I think you'd have to have their name/branding in the top 3-5 reasons. Edit: But if you put a gun to my head and demand that I guess - then 35%. Totally…

So you think a startup's 35% of success is based on their name?
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