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What happened to Mint?

fastcompany.com

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#191

Post by robpegoraro »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #164
s17n wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, just wondering: was the fast company article was placed there by your PR people? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just curious.

No, this wasn't placed. Fast Company was already working on the article and just reached out to our CEO for comment.

I wrote the story and I can confirm that. It's been on my to-do list for a while--I had another client turn down the idea--and I finally remembered to pitch it to my editor at FC after being irked yet again at Mint telling me to install Flash, tweeting out my frustration and deciding I should monetize that frustration.

(Val made his way into the post when another ex-Mint dev tweeted his apologies for what had become of the site; I got in touch with him and he suggested I talk to Val.)

Re: What happened to Mint?

#193

Post by alanlovestea »

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…

> Many personal finance products are free, but make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product that is overpriced [2]). This is what happened with Mint. It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products.

Question about MonarchMoney. Is it going to be a cloud service or a standalone old-fashion desktop software? Most of serious personal finance people would prefer desktop software in order to protect their own data. However, most consumers prefer a free and hosted solution. Which market is MonarchMoney going after?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#194

Post by andreyk »

sithlord wrote: post #103
koboll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personal Capital is free, works amazingly - not really a budgeting tool - but more an aggregating tool. Depends what you want to use it for, it does have some* budgeting capabilities.

+1 for Personal Capital, I used to use Mint but hated how buggy it was, Personal Capital has worked like a charm and I think their UI is great

Re: What happened to Mint?

#195

Post by pfranz »

eegilbert wrote: post #56
koboll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had a Mint account almost since launch. I've tried multiple times over the years to pick up YNAB. Last week I started taking another stab at it. The two aren't quite equivalent.

YNAB seems to pretty actively want you to "Fresh Start." One of the giant values for me with Mint is historical information. I often will dump a CSV or troll through old transactions since I can't remember which account was used. After not touching Mint for a year I could go through and touch up categories and answer if "eating out" was something I'm doing more of in Nov/Dec than January. Or I could skim through and mark deductions when filing taxes or looking for medical expenses.

My needs have changed a lot since I was clawing out of debt. I don't really see myself setting a budget, but more tracking categories to find outliers. I guess kind of like changing my diet instead of trying to make my next meal "healthy."

That said, I'd love to ditch Mint. There are so many ads garbaging up the interface. I never found their charts all that useful. Their offers seem to be whoever bought ad space this month instead of what would improve my financial situation. YNAB is way better at things like bi-montly bills that use income split up each month.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#196

Post by freeone3000 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #184
freeone3000 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value is in automatically adding transactions live, which requires access to live transaction streams from all of your accounts. If you want to do it manually... Excel, maybe?

Seems like all the big banks already have that functionality.

Wells-Fargo sure doesn't, nor does BMO, nor does American Express... so I'm not sure what you mean here?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#197

Post by mv1 »

ASinclair wrote: post #135
sshumaker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

> 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. You Need a Budget (YNAB) is proof of this. I don't believe they've taken any VC funding and are a pretty successful lifestyle business in the Budgeting/Finance space.

The question is what happens to these lifestyle businesses when a VC backed company comes along with a $100MM raise in the space and a free product. Do they survive? Does the team lose their livelihood?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#199

Post by ausjke »

sithlord wrote: post #103
koboll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personal Capital is free, works amazingly - not really a budgeting tool - but more an aggregating tool. Depends what you want to use it for, it does have some* budgeting capabilities.

+1 for personal capital, a bug free Mint basically

Re: What happened to Mint?

#200

Post by briffle »

dangus wrote: post #180
ASinclair wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You Need a Budget (YNAB) is proof of this. I don't believe they've taken any VC funding and are a pretty successful lifestyle business in the Budgeting/Finance space.

They’re great, but they aren’t super quick with features and I wish the product had more, especially when it comes to the graphical reports. It’s also an expensive product for most people. But we do need more of these sustainable low-growth non-VC style SaaS companies out there.

I just wish their imports were a bit more reliable. Although some of that comes down to the fact they use 3rd parties that scrape the screen of your bank, so any time something changes, it breaks the imports. (it would be great to get an API standard, with proper authentication, etc)

Also, there is a plugin that gives you more reports: https://www.toolkitforynab.com/

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