When I first heard about Mint.com back in November 2007, I thought it was a great idea but wondered if people would be willing to part with their financial data via an online platform. The market has spoken, Mint was acquired in Sept. 2009 for USD 170 million by personal finance software market leader Intuit.
So what is Mint? Mint takes your personal financial data and makes recommendations on your spending habits, investments, insurance, etc… Mint makes money via the service providers who want to sell products to the Mint audience. Simple and Sweet.
To get access to all that financial data they went to a single provider – Yodlee.com and then enticed users by slapping an amazingly simple user interface on the data.
It’s a remarkable story and exit for CEO Aaron Patzer. He recently talked about the journey, the video is below and I would highly recommend viewing the whole thing. I love his quote (about 5 minutes into the clip) about outsourcing the development to oDesk or India…”dead wrong.” The last 3 1/2 minutes are also really good.
celestri - virtual home of manish jain 