People who have knowledge of the deal say total payments from Mint to Yodlee over the last couple of years are around $2 million/year. So Yodlee made $4ish million off of Mint... The final insult: Yodlee won’t even be able to collect those small fees any longer from Mint. Intuit has it’s own back-end account aggregation service that it will use instead of Yodlee.Makes me kind of wonder how in-touch he really is with the SV tech and startup communities. (And yes I know $4M isn't peanuts, but remember that Mint was acquired for over 40 times that amount.)
Buying mint.com was a hard and critical decision for Mint - they paid $2 million for it in equity during their series A.That's a pretty shocking number. It's easy to say it was the right decision in retrospect, but if mint hadn't succeeded, I suspect that purchase would be viewed now in the same light as all those crazy Superbowl ad buys during the first dotcom era.
Oh, I found the problem - he built a paternalistic tool to help people achieve his ideal of how they should live their lives. Mint meets people where they are and gives them tools to achieve their own goals, not the goals the founders of the company have for them. Looks like the good guys won this one.Geez, it's software not a girlfriend.
You know, the service that doesn't actually provide a free credit report without leading you through some Dark Patterns that deceive you into signing up for a non-free credit report?I did know, but I'd never heard of the term "Dark Pattern" before and I have to say it's fucking awesome.
His dichotomy of "make the users happy quickly" vs. "help the users" is what ultimately sank him, because adding that second option in there is completely unnecessary.From reading the comments in this thread -- admittedly by the guy's friends -- it sounds like he just got out assholed. He refused to use web-scrapers that put his users at risk, Mint didn't. He didn't spend a ton of money on advertising, mint did. They didn't blogspam, mint did. He didn't scam his users with freecredit report, mint did. Same story with Zynga and the company that originally came up with Farmville. It's not surprising at all that they won, that's how capitalism works.
Everything I've mentioned -- not being dependent on a single source provider, preserving users' privacy, helping users actually make positive change in their financial lives -- all of those things are great, rational reasons to pursue what we pursued. But none of them matter if the product is harder to use, since most people simply won't care enough or get enough benefit from long-term features if a shorter-term alternative is available.He had the long-term plan in place, but there were barriers to new customers just getting started with his product. If you can't get people past the first hurdle, it doesn't really matter how awesome things are later on. Mint on the other hand, was successful (i.e. made lots of money) by getting people fast-tracked and involved. By the time they discover the long-term disadvantages, they've already invested time and energy in getting set up and inertia stops them from switching to some other product.
"I don't agree with those who say you should learn from your successes and mostly ignore your failures"Two people who say that are Jason Fried and Kathy Sierra, both friends who have made that point to me several times. Here's Jason's post on the topic.
And I concur that nobody says that.
"Brooks: You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality."I think you should learn from both failure and successes equally. That's what I meant in my post.
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Oh, I found the problem - he built a paternalistic tool to help people achieve his ideal of how they should live their lives. Mint meets people where they are and gives them tools to achieve their own goals, not the goals the founders of the company have for them. Looks like the good guys won this one.
posted by AlsoMike at 4:45 PM on October 4, 2010 [4 favorites]