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?
Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
131–140 of 206 posts
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marc, I suspect writing an article like that might be kind of hard. Thanks for sharing your inside view.
Thanks. I'm naive - I thought it would mostly be of interest to friends and family. I was wrong, but I'm glad if it's helpful.
Marc, thanks for the post-mortem. We make the best decisions we can w/ the info we have at the time - this is definitely a useful piece for other founders to read. Hopefully airing things out like that serves an "expunging" purpose and helps you clear it and move on. Best of luck in whatever your next pursuit is.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 yo…
> 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.…
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)
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#134I 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...
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#135I 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.…
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.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nor does he seem to understand the difference design can make. He hints that he understands, but I don't think he really gets just how much of a difference the stunning first impression of Mint made. It's like the difference between meeting your favorite actress, and meeting some b-list reality star like Paris or Snooki. Per your assertion, I think Nike (greek goddess of victory) is the best brand name of all time, a…
Wow, I'm a native greek speaker and I never made the connection Nike -> Νίκη; they're pronounced completely differently.
I think you mean that _you_ pronounce them differently. I've heard 'Nike' pronounced in more ways than any other brand name; I myself pronounce it in at least two different ways.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#137I 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.…
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 t…
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.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#138He 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…
There was a stock trading startup with the domain trade.com (this was 10 years ago, when day trading was en vogue and E-Trade was going to put Schwab and Merrill Lynch out of business, etc.).
They also spent a lot of money acquiring the domain, thinking it was perfect.
But they executed poorly, and was gone in a few years.
The name is such a small part of it.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#139The 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 bei…
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 see…
I know the dude himself says it wasn't the domain name that killed it, but I was a wesabe user and I too can tell you the founder's assessment was spot on - financial data import was too tricky with wesabe. And I tell you as someone who did NOT jump to mint as a result - I admired the morals ("noble purpose") that wesabe had, and when I couldn't really get it to work for me, I just gave up on that kind of product.
The sad thing is, and I know this is easy to say in retrospect, was that if they had polled their users at the time, especially ones like me that spent some time on the system and then faded away, I would have told them that was my showstopper (though granted by that point it was probably too late to change their whole business approach).
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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.
In addition, let us remember that Google is a misspelling as well for "Googol".