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.
Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
181–190 of 206 posts
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
I don't know of any many trusted services, but I actually use Bank of America's tools to do the online budgeting thing. They built it into the site pretty well.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Really? I've only ever heard it pronounced to rhyme with "mikey". What other variants have you hears?
In a number of countries I've heard it pronounced to rhyme with "Mike."
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#184I 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 wo…
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.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#185I 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.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#186seems 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.
I'm not sure I agree. Some perspective: Mint sucked at supporting the long-tail of financial institutions when they were using Yodlee.
Wesabe decided to not use Yodlee in the beginning, but it seems certain Mint recently did the same.
Mint announced vastly expanded FI support on May 5th. I suspect this is when they made the Yodlee -> Intuit conversion. (FWIW, I consider this a matter of fact: Mint's crawler now originates from cc.intuit.com.)
Following this conversion, my small (~$150mil) credit union was supported by Mint for the first time, along with 200+ other FIs which use the same core+online banking system.
To this day, Yodlee MoneyCenter doesn't support my account.
The puzzling thing is that the 200+ FIs I refer to would seem trivial to support: that particular core stack has a sane OFX 1.0x interface accessible over the web. Wesabe always struck me as focusing more on OFX, and I know they supported some of these CUs when Mint didn't.
Mint scrapes the OFX file from the online banking interface, a design decision I never fully understood.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#187He 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…
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.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#188"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)."
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#189This 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.
Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Really? I can understand different people having different pronunciations, but you have two yourself? Based on your mood or something?