I was sent this link about the post-mortem that the founder of Wesabe (an online personal finance website like Mint) did after the company shut down recently. Mint the main competitor went on to be acquired by Intuit (makers of Quicken Online) for $170m.
I think the key nugget from the article is:
“Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.”
Where have I read that if you are the only seller in town and people want to buy a product to do what you sell, it does not matter if it looks like your product was developed by a six-year-old? Once you have competition, I agree that the product that is better marketed (but equivalent at addressing the pain of the customer) wins.
To link back to my recent blog article – what I think Mint did right:
1) Love the customer, make it easy for them (but not perfect)
2) Better marketing/presentation than competitor
3) Chose a simple name for the product/company
Other stuff, like using Yodlee for automating screen scraping of the bank websites … but that was only apparent in hindsight.
I also think that the article shows the need to have a business partner (which this guy did not towards the end) – if only to act as an alternative viewpoint / sounding board.
I tried to use Mint but last time I looked (a couple of years ago now) it could not handle UK banks well – shame as it would have been an awesome service. I’ve been crying out for something that can do analytics on my credit card bills, bank statements, utility bills etc. I tried using MS Money for a while but it was just too manual. Even a simple spreadsheet with some kind of Yodlee screen scraping would have been better – I’d pay for it!
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