At the start of 2008 the primary goals for Mint.com were to deliver a complete personal finance solution, increase customer acquisition, and grow its revenue. What this meant in terms of features was that we would put out an investments tab, increase or PR efforts to have Mint known as a name brand in every American household, and improve our offer management system by introducing “Way to Save”.
What started out as a problem for Aaron Patzer, managing personal finances quickly and gaining insight easily into spending habits, soon became an issue for the entire nation. With the recession looming Mint’s efforts became crucial for Americans everywhere. However, the recession brought on concerns about funding for Mint, and larger competitors started to gain on us. We were the underdog in the personal finance space going into 2008.
January 2008 – In its efforts to appease the neglected Mac users and join in on the trend towards web-based applications, Intuit launched Quicken Online, a direct competitor to Mint.com. Unlike its free competitor, Quicken Online was a subscription model that charged $3 a month. Aaron’s vision had always been to keep Mint.com a free product for its users. His goal was to only make money by saving his users money.
Mint.com hit 100,000 users, and continued to grow by tens of thousands every month, as Aaron continued to go on press tours and gain media coverage.
March 2008 – As momentum started building up, Aaron started thinking about raising another round of funding. The recession in the US was still nascent, but he wasn’t sure how it would impact the growth of the company. To avoid having to fund raise during the recession, he decided to preemptively seek a series B round of funding.
Mint raised $11.4 in series B funding from Benchmark Capital.
April 2008 – Mint launches a beta version of its investments feature and decides to increase its presence by co-branding with Motley Fool.
May 2008 – After a long month of coding the Mint teams decides to celebrate funding and the launch of investments by going to Sky High Sports and playing several games of trampoline dodgeball, femgineer came out unscathed, I wouldn’t say the same for the mengineers 😀
June 2008 – As the teams size continued to grow we began to outgrow the cubicles that housed the downstairs Minters. Instead of moving out of our down town Mountain View digs we decided to remodel by tearing down the cubicles and having a more open floor plan. This was also done to foster a more collaborative work environment.
September 2008 – The worst financial debacle since the Great Depression strikes Americans. Crises in the credit and housing markets cause stocks to decline, increase unemployment, and leave hundreds of thousands of Americans with no savings to fallback on. Many turn to Mint.com to help them understand their spending habits, make cutbacks, and hopefully weather the painful maelstrom.
As banks continue to go under and consolidate, Mint is forced to pull many offers, and find new ways of helping users find savings.
October 2008 – Unable to compete with Mint’s growing user base and unwilling to surrender Quicken Online decides to release a free version with fewer features. Mint continues to lead online personal finance in terms of user engagement and user growth.
December 2008 – In Mint’s quest to continue to keep user’s engaged and increase distribution the team decides to create an iPhone app. The app is a condensed version of the website, featuring alerts, budgets, and account balances. The team works hard to get the release out before Christmas time.
After the launch of the iPhone app Mint.com becomes one of PC World’s 25 most innovative products.
Where did you get your blog layout from? I’d like to get one like it for my blog.
Its called Hemingway: http://warpspire.com/hemingway/
It’s weird that your blog has such a terrible layout. White text on black background is impossible to read. Are you sure you work for mint?
Trying to appease the vocal minority… Also I’m not a designer, I’m a femgineer, but point taken. Hope this helps 🙂
@Poornima Vijayashanker
Unbelievable that you are telling this incredible story and the only thing people can focus on is the blog template? That’s like asking what kind of shoes Billy the Kid wore. What a shame.
At the same time, I feel like the points you raised above are some of the things that we read about in other sources, and it has a lot to do with Aaron.
I would love to hear even more from your perspective, the personal side of the journey…things that only you would know or have observed going on in a successful startup.
Well that led me to change my layout to what it is today. Always interesting to see how people will react to a post and the things that will throw them off. Gotta please the readers…
When I started this series last year no one really asked to hear my perspective they all wanted to know Aaron’s journey, which is why I wrote them the way I did. I suppose if people like yourself want to know my journey I could do a few posts. I mostly try to focus on my current startup and be candid about it. Only re-tweeted these posts because of the sudden debate going on in the twitterverse.