Why Wesabe Lost to Mint • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#91

Post by HectorRamos » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:24 PM UTC

I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website.

I had some exchanges with Marc and he was great and helpful. I was taking a big risk on signing up with Wesabe so I conviced my superiors to give me one month to set it up, and a second month to run an internal pilot and then decide if we would launch the PFM integration to all customers.

Unfortunately we ran into some issues, that were minor in my mind, but my employer being in the financial services industry they have a very low tolerance for risk when working with customer's financial data, so they called off the Wesabe integration within two weeks into the first month.

This was for the enterprise Wesabe product, mind you, and was around six months ago so I guess Wesabe was already in its last run anyway, but I guess not having a stable enough MVP for their enterprise customers might not have helped much.

I wish you great success in your next endeavor, precipice!

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#92

Post by Tichy » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:29 PM UTC

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 don't think the name is that great, to be honest. Not a native speaker, though.

I had to hear the name several times before I could remember that it is a company related to money management.

Wesabe is just extremely bad, though. I keep thinking it might be the scripting language of FogBugz, which is probably horrible (as most proprietary computer things are).

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#93

Post by ericb » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

It seems like making a bad decision was key to Mint's success. They built their service so that it relied on the existence of an insolvent, unstable company and got lucky. Yodlee didn't implode, so their shortcut paid off.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#94

Post by aamar » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:34 PM UTC

Excellent, clear thinking; thank you for this analysis. I wanted to ask more about:

we both totally failed at... actually helping people.

Changing people's behavior is really hard.

Yes, but it seemed to me -- and this post confirms -- that Wesabe was genuinely thinking about this problem of how to get people to change behavior, to improve their lives. Mint seemed (and still seems) to have a much lower ambition in this respect.

Question #1: Was Wesabe actively engaging in experiments in how to help people/change behavior? I know the support community did help some people, but it sounds from your post that in its existing form it didn't do something palpably different from what people would do on their own. So it seems that Wesabe ought to have been building as many experiments as possible, hoping for something that seemed (at least anecdotally, at first) to help some subset of users above-and-beyond what they were able to do elsewhere.

I suspect Wesabe was running some experiments but too few. If that's true, what prevented those experiments from happening? Infrastructure work/scaling challenges/security concerns? Was the employee or user count too high to efficiently run experiments?

Question #2: If Wesabe was running a good number of experiments, why was Wesabe unable to secure investment for a longer runway of more experiments? After fixing the Yodlee problem (which I agree was a major problem), Wesabe seemed well positioned to lead in experiments to change behavior. The space still seems enormously ripe for innovation. So why did new funding not happen? Was Mint's success demotivating? Was the timing bad, given the economic downturn?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#95

Post by brandnewlow » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:36 PM UTC

mikeryan wrote: post #4

This "Myth": Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough to explain the different outcomes, Is contradicted by this: Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratif…

I agree the design was a critical piece of Mint's victory.

So how does a startup find a designer who's THAT good vs. just PRETTY good?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#96

Post by jayliew » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:36 PM UTC

precipice wrote: post #79

njharman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marc, I suspect writing an article like that might be kind of hard. Thanks for sharing your inside view.

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.

As a startup entrepreneur I think it's tremendously helpful. By the way, when you mentioned about the $1 user acquisition by Mint, I couldn't but help think of Andreessen Horowitz's (as championed by Ben)'s view of "fat" startups - "sometimes you got to eat" (his counterpoint against being "lean").

I know this is all speculation since it's already played out, but suppose you decided to outspend Mint and when they spent $1, you spent $2 per user. How do you think that would have changed things in the equation for you?

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#97

Post by zaphoyd » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:37 PM UTC

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #57

I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most people flock to it: it's automated and there isn't much you need to do to get existing transactions and analyze them. Maybe it's changed since Intuit bought them, but I signed up for their service two different times and toyed with it for a few hours before canceling…

I completely agree here. Mint is too simple and automates too much that shouldn't be automated. I have been toying around a web based finance project of my own and if you'd be interested I'd love to talk more about what exactly you might find useful.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#98

Post by johnrob » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:39 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #73

The essential point seems to be that Mint was easier for users. This is something we constantly emphasize at YC. You care a lot about your startup. You have no idea how little a potential user cares. So you can't let the activation energy be high. Plus users are mostly not programmers. They're terrified by software. Most software they've tried in their lives has caused them pain, either by not working right or by bei…

Your reasoning can be applied on a micro level also, comparing the name mint to wesabe. The former is unquestionably easier to remember, type, and tell friends. Is it worth spending a lot of money to get a premium domain? The question sounds very similar to asking 'how much effort should I spend making 1% improvements in usability?'.

One of my friends spent (from what I heard) over 200K for a very good domain. It seems wasteful on one hand, but on the other hand they must get a lot of credibility because of it.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#99

Post by mortenjorck » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:39 PM UTC

Aetius wrote: post #54

bmelton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, in that case, I respectfully disagree. To me, the 'visual design' of a site is what it looks like in Photoshop, or Gimp, or what have you, before it is even necessarily sliced into even HTML bits. Once it is sliced into HTML, and the mouseovers, hover elements and all that jazz are added (or not, depending on your workflow), that's when I consider it a 'UI' instead of a 'design'. Before either of those happens, y…

You're wrong. Design is the graphics and user experience taken together. Most companies still have a designer that designs both UI (graphic element style and placement) and UX (dictation of frontend behavior).

Design makes a better verb than a noun.

Re: Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

#100

Post by JustinSeriously » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 5:45 PM UTC

atlbeer wrote: post #55

jdrock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great name, but 0 impact on their success.

You have to check out this website I used to manage my personal finances, I think you'd love it. - What's it called We-...we-seebe? Wasawbe? - How's that spelled? -------------------------------------- You have to check out this website I used to manage my personal finances, I think you'd love it. - What's it called Mint

As opposed to Google? I'm pretty sure everyone has spelled it gogle at one point. Whereas Ask.com is the possibly the best domain name in the world for the search business.