How Mint Beat Wesabe In Online Personal Finance

I recently had an article sent to be me about why Wesabe lost and a few people asked me for a response since I was #5 at Mint.

I initially saw Mint with Aaron Patzer and Dave McClure in November/December of 2006. Instantly, I was in love. It was a unique approach to a massive problem and Aaron already had a working prototype. Note: Aaron spent the previous six months building it alone in his apartment. Most people never realize there were way more competitors than just Wesabe: Geezeo, Buxfer, Yodlee (data-aggregation company used by Mint), Quicken Online, MS Money online and a few others I can’t remember.

So what did it take for Mint to win?

1. Instant Value. This is easily the most important thing. All the other solutions required work. Facebook was our secret weapon that trained people to share their personal information online. Thanks Zuck. Within three minutes of using Mint you get your full financial picture and ways to increase your own money. All for free. Basically, too good to be true. No other service came close to doing this.

2. Name. Next to family and health, personal finance it is one of the top three most sensitive things in life. The site was originally called mymint.com. I was initially against buying Mint.com but Aaron / Anton spent months acquiring the domain. This may seem inconsequential, but would you feel more comfortable entering your bank details on Wesabe.com or Mint.com?

The idea that we could buy / use that domain showed people we had money and aren’t as likely to just steal their information. The shortness of the domain in and of itself [chase.com, mint.com] signals legitimacy. Think about companies adding ‘as seen on tv’ stickers to their boxes. Shows they had the money to buy the tv spots.

3. Trust / Design. This goes along with the name. This seems to be discounted but sometimes I talk about Mint as a design / marketing company whose product is personal finance. Think of Zappos as a Customer Support company that happens to sell shoes. Jason’s clean design style helped make users feel comfortable with giving Mint their financial information. I’ll cover this in more detail another time, but for now here’s a few key things we did to increase trust:

• SEO. People trust Google, so we knew they’d trust us more if they came to Mint from there, so we used search engine optimization to get Mint to the front page of Google searches.
• Authority. We got thought leaders in personal finance to back us.
• Security. We actually promoted security front and center.

To drive this point on design & trust home, compare these two sites (names removed) and tell me which one makes you warm and fuzzy about sharing your financial data.