2007 began slowly, but started to pick up as the year progressed. Originally, Aaron Patzer wanted to launch Mint.com before tax time, because he envisioned that at the start of the year users are very keen on making New Years resolutions, especially those that deal with finances, ultimately leading up to tax time. Although Mint was not going to compete with Turbo Tax product, Aaron still thought that the beginning of the year was the right time to launch. He also started to foresee a recession looming, and thought it might impact a Series A round of funding, but help to attract users who wanted to manage their finances quickly and effortlessly. However, the product met neither of these two criteria, and hence a launch in April seemed impossible.
January 2007 – Aaron had built up his engineering division well, and under the leadership of David Michaels it was growing. But his todo list continued to be frought with demands for marketing and product ideas, items that he simply could not check off. He first started to look for a designer, who could also play a heavy hand in defining the product and coming up with features. Noah introduced Aaron to Jason Putorti, a designer based on Pittsburgh. Aaron liked Jason’s sense of design and product and decided to first hire him on as a contractor, his first commission is to redesign the Mint logo.
After their alpha release impressed their investors, the Minters took time off to enjoy a meal together, and celebrate their success.
February & March 2007 – Aaron and David realize they need to grow the team faster if they want to meet an April deadline. While the team of Matt and Poornima forge ahead, it was hard for the two of them to keep up with the product roadmap, and also solve a lot of important issues such as scalability and security. Despite being in Silicon Valley David found it surprisingly hard to recruit hungry, dedicated, and smart engineers. Mint needed an architect and another back-end developer. David started heavily recruiting for both positions, no resume or contact went unexplored. Aaron’s, realizing that it was going to be hard to pay for more engineers, once again shifts his focus to fund-raising. By this point he spent less time coding and all his time either fund raising or working on product development.
April 2007 – Mint receives a Series A term sheet from Shasta Ventures. Finally the money they need to start building up the team and developing the product! The team starts to take over the ground floor in hopes to expand fully. Tuan Le, an architect, and Atish Mehta, a back-end engineer both join the same day, and start contributing to the engineering culture at Mint. Its time for some new blood! Tuan gets to work on re-architecting the entire back-end. Tiers are created out of the once modularized code base. There is separation between the web tier, business logic, and data tier.
May 2007 – Geezeo the second competitor to Mint launches. Still unthwarted by competitors Mint focuses on its own product features and mission. By this point Aaron is hoping for a summer launch, but its very likely to be pushed out. After serving as an advisor to Aaron for a little less than a year, Anton Commissaris comes on board as the VP of Business Development. Anton focuses on lead generation, but his first task as an ex-lawyer is to help negotiate and acquire the website: www.mint.com, which the New York based hedge fund Height Capital is squatting on. Up to this point Mint has been operating as www.myMint.com, a name that I cringed at every time I heard someone say I worked at myMint, and I abhorred the thought of launching without the url Mint.com! The name was the basis for building the brand, and attracting users to simplicity of the product, which was supposed to be epitomized by its very short name and url. Aaron now fully funded, went back to focusing on product development, and recruiting for more product and marketing positions, as well as figuring out when to launch!
