Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to Mint?

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 456 posts

Re: What happened to Mint?

#51

Post by Ozzie_osman »

teej wrote: post #42
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

> It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products If I recall correctly, the original pitch deck for Mint stated that this was the plan. Weird to say it morphed into something that was just the original vision. Edit: found the deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-de...

Totally. But, and I'm speaking more generically than Mint here, in the early days of a company, a team (esp the founder) can more easily navigate the tension between revenue generation and building a great product. That's a lot harder to do as part of a larger (and especially publicly-traded) company.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#52

Post by roywiggins »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

Mint never really lost its soul. It always seemed like it was going to try and upsell me on stuff, but that was fine by me because I'm not in the market for new credit cards or whatever. But I guess that's part of the problem, and they're just not making much money off referrals and therefore can't be bothered to improve the product?

The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the visualizations are not configurable at all, so if you want something that looks a bit different, or doesn't use a pie chart, or shows more things at once, you just can't do it. And it's all in Flash! I ended up building a crappy set of graphs in Excel and using Mint's csv output to try and get a more useful view of the data.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#53

Post by koboll »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

I gotta say, a Mint-that-doesn't-suck is something I could absolutely see myself paying $5 a month for, for the rest of my life.

The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Plaid's been around just as long.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#54

Post by LaserToy »

It broke. I have 2 BoA accounts and some time ago it made 1 of them inactive and I just couldn’t make them both work. The one I re add becomes the one Mint sees and another one becomes inactive.

It also miscalculated cash flow. Graph shows negative when in reality it is positive.

I guess it is a price to pay for acquisition.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#55

Post by sschueller »

Off Topic, most of the services mentioned here use Plaid to connect to banks. This means that Plaid (now Visa) has full access to your entire banking history. Combined with credit card data they know almost everything you purchase.

I find that fact quite unsettling.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#56

Post by eegilbert »

koboll wrote: post #53
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

I gotta say, a Mint-that-doesn't-suck is something I could absolutely see myself paying $5 a month for, for the rest of my life. The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Pl…

That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#57

Post by sshumaker »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong monetization engine that will work incredibly well at only ~10mm user range, you’re in trouble. Lead-gen isn’t sufficient here; Credit Karma has 10x the userbase and much stronger signals of intent, which is why they dominate digitize acquisition. When I was there, we put a lot of thought into how to crack personal finance, and ultimately felt that “spending” was too complex and too niche. The fact is you need radically different products for different parts of your consumer audience. That’s why you’ve seen a rise of more focused products like Robinhood, Wealthfront (going after the high end), savings apps like Acorn and digits, banking apps like Chime, etc (being a bank is profitable) that have incredibly strong revenue models attached.

I think you could run a reasonable lifestyle business here if you don’t take VC, but I’m skeptical this can ever be truly mass-market.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#58

Post by harikb »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

1. Is your new service still based on Yodlee backend? Everyone else who provides any consolidation service seems to. I am not saying they are bad, but it is better to be clear upfront.

2. Are their any features for Pro consumers who are not looking for budgeting or retirement planning? I don’t mind paying $100 a year for a good service. I would rather not have it free.

3. I am ready to switch banks or even brokerage firms if they provide a saner integration with your service

Re: What happened to Mint?

#59

Post by prsy »

Raphmedia wrote: post #40
brighton36 wrote: post #3

I switched to http://plaintextaccounting.org/ and couldn't be happier.

It seems that this side is a faq of plaintext accounting tools. What do you personally use?

Not OP but I use hledger and I love it. It has a learning curve (especially if you're new to double entry accounting) but it's rewarding.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#60

Post by josefresco »

I've used Mint for years. It started as a cool tool to track you transactions. It then turned into a tool to sell me credit cards. The transaction logging never got "smarter".

Example: I use a credit card for everyday purchases and then pay it off each month. Mint counted every transaction AND my payment at debits therefore each month it showed I was spending double. Despite my efforts to train Mint to stop this, it never worked.

Last year I tried adding all my financial accounts, but it fell flat on it's face and never resolved the issue I had with double reporting (despite Mint knowing everything about my financial world).

I recently pulled all my accounts and added back only my primary credit card. I'll now use it only for the occasional "gotcha" such as a bank fee, double transaction or unrecognized transaction. I no longer am interested in fixing miscategorization.

Post reply on HN