This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.
This line of thinking is what spawned 100 me too YouTube clones.
Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
31–40 of 106 posts
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
170 Million is long term victory.
Crushing your enemy, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentations of their women is victory (e.g. Larry Ellison). $170 million is retirement.
I'm sure it's a thrill to crush an enemy, but I think I'd rather take a few million and have some women console my "loss." Lamenting women just doesn't do it for me.
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product launched and still have some stock. They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and have a strong data privacy angle.
There's also http://www.buxfer.com , a YC company.
Talk about not giving up- the Buxfer guy just keeps going.
Anybody know how Buxfer is doing?
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The days of billion-dollar exits for zero-revenue companies are gone, and will probably continue to be gone for a long while to come.
Mint was making a rather significant amount of money as a credit card affiliate. (They also hawked other financial products, but that is almost certainly the most lucrative one. They have a lucrative CPA, a wider reach than home loans, and more repeat business in the demographics inclined to hand all their financial info to a Web 2.0 site.) Many, many affiliates who look at a million dollars as "Meh, not a lot of mon…
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Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#35Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The days of billion-dollar exits for zero-revenue companies are gone, and will probably continue to be gone for a long while to come.
Was mint a zero-revenue company? They have at least three angles to cash in on what they have (aside from selling to Intuit): A) Pitching offers from banks for credit cards and accounts. Banks are willing to pay for these, and they have the information to match the right accounts with the right people. B) Offering tax-filing services like TurboTax. C) Sellign aggregate data from their customers (Not my favorite, but…
Nobody knows how much revenue they were bringing in, but I imagine it was something...they did have partnerships. My point is only that cashing out for $170M isn't necessarily a terrible idea when you're a fledgling startup with an unproven business model.
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#37what's up with the acquisition price ..Intuit's recent acquisitions - paycycle, homestead, and now mint.com all acquired for 170 millions!
nice round number
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#38what's up with the acquisition price ..Intuit's recent acquisitions - paycycle, homestead, and now mint.com all acquired for 170 millions!
Probably an initial asking price. If anything it strongly suggests that there wasn't much haggling on the price. It would be a huge coincidence if they all haggled on the price and just happened to end up with the same number.
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#39This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.
There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product launched and still have some stock. They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and have a strong data privacy angle.
Wesabe is not a good competitor IMO. When it first released it had a lot of promise (philosophy of data freedom, etc). Unfortunately that's pretty much completely been lost, which I guess to some extent because some of it was too hard to be realistically accomplished with limited resources and time (pulling your account data with software controlled by you rather than giving Wesabe your account password).
The core app itself has gotten continually worse. The "v2" that launched some months ago now was less usable, removed functionality (which may have been restored by now to some extent), was full of bugs, and was glacially slow and balky.
The only possible draw for Wesabe over Mint is the "community" part, which never interested me.
I guess I really see Wesabe as a money-management community with an app attached, not as a money-management app.
Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also http://www.buxfer.com , a YC company.
Talk about not giving up- the Buxfer guy just keeps going. Anybody know how Buxfer is doing?
Not well if you trust compete.com: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/buxfer.com+mint.com/