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Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

blog.precipice.org

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Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#191

Post by illumen »

philwelch wrote: post #120
pg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lot better. Possibly no better. But certainly much worse than "Excite" or "Yahoo," whose lunches Google ate. That's my point here.

My point here is that "Google" attains a level of adequacy that "Wesabe" doesn't seem to, for the reasons I pointed out. Past adequacy, I agree that "Google" was a worse brand than its competitors and that it didn't matter.

It sounds like goggles, and goggling - ie looking. It also means the large number 'googl' 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - vast scale. It's not meaningless, and does relate to their product.

The google brand and message - with its single input box, and 'just search' focus was awesome.

Wesabe is a completely wrong name on so many levels for a financial company. Any decent branding consultant would have told them that.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#192

Post by Untitled »

nextparadigms wrote: post #110
gamble wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If name alone could carry a company, sex.com would be a billion-dollar business.

Common words don't do well as names when they are words that describe exactly what the company does. Common words can be better used when they have nothing to do with what the company does. For example, Apple is a much better name for a computer company than "Computer", would be. Same Amazon is much better for an online bookstore, than "Bookstore.com" would be. The reason they are better is because they can be unique…

> How many Amazon's that sell books?

Maybe. I always thought the connection is that they cut down the Amazon rain-forest to make and sell high-quality books.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#193

Post by Grinnmarr »

lionhearted wrote: post #25

He 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…

I agree with many of the other respondents that you are grossly overstating the role the names played. Additionally, while I agree wholeheartedly that "Mint" is the better name, when considering the role the company names played (however large or small) in the eventual outcome, I think one needs to weigh Wesabe's poor choice of name at least as equally significant as Mint's good choice if not much more.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#195

Post by seunosewa »

TimMontague wrote: post #84
gamble wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If name alone could carry a company, sex.com would be a billion-dollar business.

"Sex.com was sold to Escom in January 2006 for a reported $14 million price, widely cited as the highest priced domain sale in history. [1]" Apparently it's up for sale again, so perhaps it's not worth quite that much... [1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/sex-com-sedo/

So clearly it's not a billion dollar business.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#196

Post by JoachimSchipper »

Xurinos wrote: post #155
ora600 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Until this post, I thought we were talking about the Mint linux distro. Today I learned that people use a program called Mint for handling their finances. I would have expected, at least, a program called "Money".

That name would just get them sued by Microsoft.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#197

Post by wacheena »

AmitinLA wrote: post #176
precipice wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is possibly the single best blog post about entrepreneurship I've read in the last...I can't even remember. Thanks.

Agreed. Its fantastic to see someone publish such a raw inside account of how their startup failed so that others can learn from it.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#198

Post by dunham »

tapp wrote: post #168
king_jester wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

A lot of banks offer OFX access, it's what stuff like Money and Quicken talk to. It's mostly read only, although I think there are a couple of banks that can do bill pay over OFX. This is pretty common knowledge if you're writing this kind of software.

Some vendors, like Ameritrade use different credentials for OFX.

Mint/Yodlee asked for front door passwords and security answers that give them the ability to trade securities and empty my account, rather than the OFX id/pin that would give them access to a standard API to retrieve transactions and balances. This made me seriously doubt their competence, and I never became a customer.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange for details.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#200

Post by rwhitman »

wiredfool wrote: post #184
rwhitman wrote: post #134

I 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.

Very true, and you'd really need a team with a serious track record in banking. I imagine half of selling the product would be based on the perception of trust and experience.
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