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Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

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Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#81

Post by abossy »

jaytee_clone wrote: post #78
mechanical_fish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yodlee is the service that took on the painful and expensive problem of actually building an engine that can securely store bank and brokerage passwords and use them to scrape hundreds of different financial sites. They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint,…

That to me sounds like a better model than Mint. Sure Yodlee doesn't have the media buzz or "explosive" growth (Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.), but the infrastructure is extremely useful and will be around for a long time. If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.

> Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.

Wow - if Mint's growth doesn't impress you, then what has?

I felt their timing couldn't have been better. Their product matured as a recession hit and demand for money-saving financial services skyrocketed.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#82

Post by timr »

patio11 wrote: post #27
timr wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

You're giving me reasons why they could be profitable, not proof that they are. Having a good story for future revenue is not the same thing as having revenue.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#83

Post by timr »

asnyder wrote: post #65
fjabre wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is this yet another reason to keep your web app basically free for the masses..? $170 million in 2 years seems like reason enough for me.. but as Inaka points out: their execution was brilliant. So if you do have a brilliant app maybe you should keep it free.

Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream. They're able to offer you alternative financial services targeted towards you based on the information they have about your current financial products. I'm sure the financial companies offering their products on mint pay more than your average ad or click through.Most webapps don't have this sort of opportunity.

"Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream"

People keep saying this as if it were fact, but never provide evidence. From what I've seen, Mint has a great potential for revenue. I've not seen any public statements about their financials.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#84

Post by run4yourlives »

jaytee_clone wrote: post #78
mechanical_fish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yodlee is the service that took on the painful and expensive problem of actually building an engine that can securely store bank and brokerage passwords and use them to scrape hundreds of different financial sites. They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint,…

That to me sounds like a better model than Mint. Sure Yodlee doesn't have the media buzz or "explosive" growth (Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.), but the infrastructure is extremely useful and will be around for a long time. If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.

That to me sounds like a better model than Mint.

Mint just received $170 million. Yodlee did not.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#85

Post by adw »

jhancock wrote: post #54
cvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$170 million is why. There was a good amount invested over a few rounds, but what's left is probably enough FU money for Aaron and team.

I hope they do manage to pull something out of this. At $31M invested, a $170M sale could end up getting sopped up by investors. Anyway, congrats to them and I hope it works out.

They just raised $14m at 140; unless they're being done over on liquidation prefs - and who knows, but on a succession of up rounds, doesn't seem that likely - they should be doing pretty well!

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#86

Post by mattmaroon »

fallentimes wrote: post #71
mattmaroon wrote: post #67

I'm not sure I'd call $170m a great exit considering they were last valued at $140m. Generally VCs are looking for much more than a 20% ROI. I'd love to know if there were some special terms that make the VCs get more than their share here. Otherwise you'd think that either Mint was in trouble and needed this, or there was something else going on.

But the 20% ROI was only for the last round of investors who hadn't participated before not all the investors.

Right, but even then that's small right?

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#87

Post by rg »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #73
gruseom wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea that Mint was a layer on top of another product. Can you explain this in greater detail? What is Yodlee? (I realize I'm proving your point by asking!) And what is the nature of Mint/Yodlee's relationship?

Yodlee is the service that took on the painful and expensive problem of actually building an engine that can securely store bank and brokerage passwords and use them to scrape hundreds of different financial sites. They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint,…

I have used Yodlee.com directly (and free) for two years; it has functioned extraordinarily well, and is invaluable--it saves hours of time dealing with personal finances, and provides very usable reports. I avoided Mint because I thought that Mint's very thin layer over Yodlee's services was apt to be an unstable business, and now we see that Mint users have been tossed to Intuit. I was also reluctant to expose all my financial details to Mint unnecessarily. Yodlee's own security credentials are high--good enough to convince just about all the large banks, brokerage houses, and credit issuers to trust them. Try a Yodlee account yourself, and you will see that Mint has been adding relatively little distinctive value over Yodlee's unique base.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#88

Post by bmelton »

run4yourlives wrote: post #84
jaytee_clone wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That to me sounds like a better model than Mint. Sure Yodlee doesn't have the media buzz or "explosive" growth (Mint's growth didn't really impress me either.), but the infrastructure is extremely useful and will be around for a long time. If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.

That to me sounds like a better model than Mint. Mint just received $170 million. Yodlee did not.

But we don't know that Yodlee isn't doing 170M revenues a year either. Getting aquired and making money don't necessarily equate to each other in the most obvious ways.

Youtube was a huge money sink, and got a huge acquisition. Mint is, I believe at least, somewhat profitable, and only got $170M. The timing had a lot more to do with it than anything, but as a consumer, I'm a LOT more likely to give money to Mint than Youtube, and the YouTube founders are arguably a lot richer than the Mint founders.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#89

Post by tedunangst »

shiranaihito wrote: post #43
Tiktaalik wrote: post #15

Hopefully this means that Mint will be finally be available outside the US.

The banks where I live use one time pads for authentication, which makes it impossible for Mint to work.

How do they deliver your copy of the pad to you?

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#90

Post by wavesplash »

timr wrote: post #83
asnyder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream. They're able to offer you alternative financial services targeted towards you based on the information they have about your current financial products. I'm sure the financial companies offering their products on mint pay more than your average ad or click through.Most webapps don't have this sort of opportunity.

"Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream" People keep saying this as if it were fact, but never provide evidence. From what I've seen, Mint has a great potential for revenue. I've not seen any public statements about their financials.

For a privately held entity, how exactly would you like a 3rd party to provide evidence? You have to either know someone on the inside or work by proxy. Assuming you don't know someone, your best proxy is the 10x valuation jump. The $145million valuation wouldn't come without proof of the revenue model to an unproven team.

They were executing revenue, and executing very well.

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