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Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

blog.precipice.org

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Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#81

Post by hariis »

From the article: When we talked to Yodlee in 2006, the company was crumbling, having failed to get acquired and losing executives. They were also very aggressive in negotiation, telling us they would give us six months' service nearly free and then tell us the final price we'd be charged going forward. --

This is pretty disturbing to me. It seems what Marc and Wesabe did was the right thing to do to not trust Yodlee HOWEVER, it also appears that the user doesn't care a damn.

How do you handle such situations?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#82

Post by vyrotek »

csallen wrote: post #75
lionhearted wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pulled out the decisions I thought were really, critical and irreperable turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot of work to fulfill, both for us and for Mint. Buying mint.com was a hard and critical decision for Mint - they paid $2 million for it in equity during their series A. I think you massively underestimate it as a reason they won. I think if the names are flipped - if yo…

> I think if the names are flipped - if your company was named mint.com, theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win. Whoa there, you're jumping to extreme, unsupported conclusions. No one disagrees that Mint's branding is great. But to count that as the main reason why they won? Even top 3-5 reasons? That flies in the face of the wisdom given by every successful startup veteran: it's all about execution. If Mint.…

While I agree execution is important, it actually doesn't matter if no one can remember your products name or website. I could see how a name could break a company regardless of how good the product is. Why did I choose mint? Because it was the site that I actually remembered months after discovering it.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#83

Post by philwelch »

pg wrote: post #68
precipice wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(This is Marc, author of the linked post.) I think people attribute success to a name because that fits the mental model people have for success: You just choose the right name! And then you win! That's nonsense. Winning is a long series of decisions that have to go right far more often than not. I pulled out the decisions I thought really were critical and irreparable turning points -- hard decisions that required a…

I agree with Marc. Google is a mediocre name.

But it's a lot better than "Wesabe". "Wesabe" looks like "wasabi", which is completely irrelevant. (You can pull off irrelevance if you spell the name right--"Apple"? But misspelling plus irrelevance is pretty bad.) And I don't know how to pronounce it. How do I tell my friends about it? Google doesn't sound like anything (except "googol", which trivia buffs and nerds know is a large number but is otherwise unknown) and you know how to pronounce it, even before it got popular.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#84

Post by TimMontague »

gamble wrote: post #60
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…

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/

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#85

Post by draebek »

btucker wrote: post #56

I LOVED the wesabe downloadable data import client. The fact that I didn't have to fork over the login credentials to my financial accounts was a huge win & what kept me away from Mint until wesabe closed. But clearly this was not an issue for most people and hence why the simplicity of the yodlee backed solution ultimately won. Wesabe did one very interesting thing when they launched which was that the CEO had open…

I liked Wesabe's approach to my data, period. Wesabe let me export my all of my data, and even provided an API for it. Mint, last time I used it (a long time) did not.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#86

Post by precipice »

ronb wrote: post #66
arthurdent wrote: post #9

Its fun to look back and enumerate the reasons for success or failure, but dumb luck is just such a huge part of this game as well. Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by "build[ing] tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for…

I'm surprised the winning of TC40 isn't cited more strongly - That's where I first heard about Mint. You can argue that they wouldn't have won had they not done many of the other things right, but what's the adoption curve of Mint like before and after that event?

It was huge for them. My point, though, was that we made our own mistakes. If we had had a better user experience before TC40, they either wouldn't have made such an impression at the event or wouldn't have overtaken us so quickly.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#87

Post by gsiener »

Marc,

Thanks for putting your thoughts out there like this. We are currently tackling the small business finance space (Profitably.com) and it's interesting to see your comparison to Mint.

What are you up to now?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#88

Post by andreyf »

hariis wrote: post #81

From the article: When we talked to Yodlee in 2006, the company was crumbling, having failed to get acquired and losing executives. They were also very aggressive in negotiation, telling us they would give us six months' service nearly free and then tell us the final price we'd be charged going forward. -- This is pretty disturbing to me. It seems what Marc and Wesabe did was the right thing to do to not trust Yodlee…

You weigh the cost/risk of dealing with Yodlee against making it yourself. Marc seems to have used a usually sound heuristic - I don't trust these people, I don't want to bother working with them. Personally, I would have agreed - a partner that's an aggressive negotiator with high executive turnover can end up being an enormous liability in more ways than one. Better avoid them.

But heuristics are by definition imperfect. If Yodlee really gave Mint as much momentum as Marc thinks they did, this might have been an exception to the rule.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#89

Post by zaphoyd »

arthurdent wrote: post #9

Its fun to look back and enumerate the reasons for success or failure, but dumb luck is just such a huge part of this game as well. Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by "build[ing] tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for…

I firmly agree with Marc on the issue that to be truly effective personal finance requires people to work more closely with their data. I have been working on a web project of my own for my own personal finance use, as neither Mint, Wesabe, or other web based product do what I needed. The most common response from people I show it to is that it looks really helpful but that they don't have the discipline to organize their finances enough to be useful.

Mint definitely got the "no user thought required" down and this path has brought them [some] financial success. Is their overly simplified view of a complex process actually useful? The consensus for mass market web based personal finance systems so far seems to be

- Users don't care about privacy.

- Users don't care about data accuracy

- Users don't care about digging into their data at all.

- Users will pay for pretty graphs/charts with questionably-useful automatic analysis that is unlikely to make a significant difference in their financial situation.

What is the best thing to do in this case? Just give users what they want? Sell illusions because reality is too hard to deal with? I know there are some people who do care, how do you find them?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#90

Post by pg »

philwelch wrote: post #83
pg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with Marc. Google is a mediocre name.

But it's a lot better than "Wesabe". "Wesabe" looks like "wasabi", which is completely irrelevant. (You can pull off irrelevance if you spell the name right--"Apple"? But misspelling plus irrelevance is pretty bad.) And I don't know how to pronounce it. How do I tell my friends about it? Google doesn't sound like anything (except "googol", which trivia buffs and nerds know is a large number but is otherwise unknown)…

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