Intuit, the company behind the well-known Quicken suite of money management software that includes Quicken Online, can’t believe how well its competitor Mint is doing. In fact, they were so bewildered by Mint’s claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day and jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 users in a matter of months that they decided to send a threatening letter demanding an explanation for this apparently inconceivable feat.
We’ve obtained copies of both Intuit’s letter and Mint’s reply, which we’ve embedded below. From Intuit’s letter:
“While we do not wish to suggest that Mint.com is engaging in false advertising, the substantial difference in claimed user numbers over a short period time [from 600,000 to 800,000] is of some concern. As a result, we’re requesting that you provide us with the Substantiation and evidence that you rely upon to support the above reference claims… before February 6, 2009.”
Note that the letter says that Intuit doesn’t “wish to suggest that Mint is engaging in false advertising”, despite the fact that that was the entire purpose of the letter. Nice.
Aside from Mint’s remarkable growth rate, Intuit’s concerns focus on the startup’s definition of “users”. Mint’s reply states that the company considers anyone who has filled in an Email address, Zip code, and password to be a “user”, regardless of whether they’ve ever actually linked their bank account to their Mint user name. This figure obviously overstates the number of people who actually use Mint on a day-to-day basis, but it’s also a fairly standard way to define “users” for most web services. As an outside check, Comscore counts 416,000 monthly unique visitors worldwide, and growing rapidly (see chart below).
That said, Mint’s definition of “user” raised some concerns for me – I suspected that after entering their Email information and getting counted as a new member, many of them would jump ship when they realized they’d need to enter their bank account information. But CEO Aaron Patzer says that as of today around 680,000 of 934,000 registered users (over 70%) have linked at least one bank account to Mint, with most of them linking between 5-6 of their financial accounts. Frankly this number is far higher than I was expecting, and indicates that most people visit Mint with the full intention of entering their account information. Patzer also notes that while those users who haven’t linked their bank accounts to Mint will have access to less functionality, they still receive regular offers from Mint’s partners.
Could Mint have been more transparent with its user numbers? Probably, but their methodology for measuring user stats is par for the course here – certainly nothing worthy of Quicken’s demanding letter. The bottom line here is that Mint is growing so quickly (it will soon pass one million users—no doubt spurred by the bad economy and tax season), that its competitors literally can’t believe it. And for any startup, that’s not such a bad thing.
Update: Intuit spokesman Scott Gulbransen has offered the following response to this story:
We’d like to apologize to Mint.com if our letter came across as anything but a simple request to understand how they count their users. Businesses do this all the time and we appreciate their reply.
We are so pleased with the rapid growth of Quicken Online, we were just curious about how we’re doing. And now that we have a common yardstick by which to measure, we know we’re doing great based on an apples-to-apples comparison. Quicken Online now has more than 650,000 users and has been adding on average approximately 45,000 new users a week since Jan. 2009.
So now you know…customers are choosing Quicken Online more than ever before.
Thanks,
Scott
Here are the two letters:
This seems SO strange at first glance, do companies do this sort of thing often?
I believe this might be the first?
Who do Quicken think they are by requesting such information, I don’t believe that Mint should even have to consider handing that info over to Quicken.
TBH that info should be made available to customers so that they can assess the credibility but the way in which Quicken sorta demands the info is startling.
when is mint going to deadpool?
I think the question you should be asking is “when is Quicken going to deadpool?”
Before anyone jumps to any conclusion I dont work for Mint. But its the only financial management software I started using and still using (for the last 6 months)…
Many of my friends also followed on my advice… I dont know but their claims can be true.
Only in America…
Quicken is a truly horrible product. Pretty funny!
My first though as a CEO was “Tell them to go screw themselves” but Mint is smart and you can almost be assured they’ll talk about being acquired by Intuit at some point.
The response from Mint:
“Thanks for noticing Mint.com and the growth we’ve experienced over the past few months”
Is pretty much legalese for “go screw yourself”.
Jealous with a big J. Schlicken!!
The asking price for Mint is most assuredly going up with user numbers…
I found it amusing that Intuit claimed that businesses do this all the time. Really? Why would a business embarrass itself publicly by making fallacious demands?
My official and legal response to Intiut’s letter would have been; POUND SAND!
Intuit’s arrogance never ceases to amaze me. First the TurboTax DRM disaster and now stunts like this.
I’m happy to say that while I did use and enjoy Quicken when it first came out, I have not used any Intuit product since 2000 and never will again.
If Mint were to sell to Intuit, I would be pretty sad. Intuit sucks, and this nutball narcissistic painful spectacle just adds a new dark twist to the suckage.
You were right!
Dude, we can now say: you called it!
Take a bow, Peter.
Surprised we didn’t get a letter for http://WeAllHateQuickbooks.com
the ironic thing for me is that I purchased Quicken software about 3 years ago. After getting an email stating that they no longer supporthis product and if I wanted to continue to use it I would need to pay an additional $40. Unhappy with they way they hijacked my account andemanded more money I dropped them and went to mint.com just a couple months ago. This is sweet justice in my opinion.
you want to really get Intuit riled up? release a version of Mint for businesses and tie in invoicing and billing and go after their bread and butter, quickbooks.
MINT, please expand your services to Canada. We are tiny in comparison, only a few banks! We need you!
They just began offering services for RBC customers in the United States. I was one of those that had signed up but never entered banking information only because RBC wasn’t yet supported.
I’m with Peter Corbett. Intuit can shrug off. If you want to start some garbage, sue me, that allows me to counter-sue when you are in error.
Hey MINT, can you make it to Global market too. I did sigh up but unfortunately you dun cover Singapore….sigh…someone should not somethings about this.
I’m all over it.because, your right, someone should not something. this is so much for his nice for him.I can not believe it is how much something is not for more better. believe under last for more much something and not left for less over. done for his nice.
English is obviously his second language, jerk. As would be expected in Singapore.
Never mind, after doing some research I stand corrected. However, your actions remain just as rude.
If you don’t feel like waiting for Mint to grace us with a .ca presence, just start a Canadian competitor. Our market is large enough to sustain a business like this on its own, and then you could expand to other territories where Mint has decided not to bother competing yet.
Hilarious! Oh Quicken, you’re so cute when you feel threatened.
That was my first reaction, too.
Since when does one company need to lecture or educate another about advertising claims? More to the point… what makes Intuit think another firm needs to answer up to them? They’re not Federal regulators.
Intuit was fishing for any excuse in hoping Mint would decline to respond and that would be Intuit’s next press release: that Mint is afraid to respond. That, of course, did not happen.
Intuit is embarrassing themselves with this move. Mint had a great response and outmaneuvered them.
Desperate measures.
What’s old is what’s new again perhaps?
I can only wonder the fine folks at Quicken (Pizza Hut) are really more concerned with a claim of better experience (ingredients) by Mint (Papa John’s).
If Quicken (Pizza Hut) was to start offering more compelling coupons for upgrades (free bread sticks) or even honoring the movement of licenses more easily between systems (free 16 oz. Coke Zero) or the promise of streamlined interaction with banking (30 minutes or less or your money back) then this kind of stunt might not seem so half… baked.
mmm…bread sticks…
this is quite possibly the oddest story in awhile. Google, I would like to demand immediately what information you collect on every individual, and to hand it over to me immediately. I would of told Intuit to piss off
I thought the mint response was a MUCH better way of handling the situation then telling intuit to piss off. The response is basically saying:
“I know your overwhelmed and threatened by our success but guess what – it’s even bigger than you thought. AND, we don’t mind telling you exactly how successful we are because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway”
you’re a liar
no we’re not here’s the numbers
ok
I signed up for mint in the beginning. I still get emails from them letting me know my account is dangerously low, but I haven’t visited it since.
I”m probably still counted as a user. The number of users doesn’t mean anything. They key is how many active users they have, and what is the definition of an active user.
thats why they use the ‘user’ count and not the ‘active user’ count.
Yes, but if you look at the full article, you will see that Mint’s active user rate is 70%. I run a forum (no services attached) with only 700 users and I seriously doubt 70% of them are active.
the problem is, what’s considered an “active user”. log in once every 6 months? I bet that’s what Mint is using to count active members.
aaron is an arrogant fuck anyway
Heh, so you work for Intuit then, do you?
Whoever greenlighted this letter did his investors a disservice. What great advertising for Mint! This will cause a lot of people to jump on the bandwagon.
“Hi, we are serving you with a demand of information. We don’t believe this information is correct but we don’t want to call you a liar just incase you are correct and we don’t want to get sued”
“Hello, thanks for attempting to extract information form us without suggesting we are liars but clearly stating it. Our users are 800K+”
” … ”
“Our acqusition price is around $100 million. We will accept both share or cash offers or a combination of either. Also, we love quicken and hope we can create synergies together in the future”
haha
fyi: Mint is worth WAY more than $100M at this point… Benchmark wouldn’t have invested in the B round if they didn’t think it would be much bigger that that.
(and as an investor in the A round, i’m really happy with Intuit’s incredibly stupid move… that’s the best marketing Mint could buy, except they didn’t have to
The manipulation of statistics is an artform. The definition of user is not uncommon = lets glance at the Facebook vs MySpace battle for supremacy. Number of users number of accounts, time spent logged in, number of spam applications employed? Where is it all going? Targetted advertising, predictive advertising if you will…….
@calli
Get a grip Intuit {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/FOHIf70aF8_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Get a grip Intuit ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/K49fmoT96s”}}}
You’re point makes sense, but you could be more concise in your delivery.
I’ll keep that in mind. I thought it was concise:)
seemed concise and to the point – well said.
What do you do in these situations? Does Mint need to explain anything to Intuit and if so, why?
I mean who the hell is Intuit to explain anything to them?
I don’t get it…
i subscribed to mint about a year ago
i tried using them for several months
mint has so many bugs – it is not usable
I wish I never gave them my banking info.
I wish they pay *me* for all the hours I wasted trying to make their piece-of-shit-buggy-application-never-really-worked to work. well… and they keep ‘changing’ things. just hire a decent coder, you idiots. on another hand, maybe this is yet another social experiment, to see if people are willing to tolerate a non-working *financial* application.
But then again – they did not charge me anything, so it is my problem that I still believe things I read on the internetz.
Intunit – you have my support for calling the bluff!
Keep up the good work
huh? mint works flawlessly for me. i have 10 accounts link. it’s so nice. try it again.
u don’t drill down
if all u need is 5 numbers – mint works ok
They’re not trying to be SAGE, you know.
Same here. I have 5 checking accounts, 2 savings, all my stocks, and paypal accounts linked in and all work flawlessly. Thinking about giving the mortgage thing a try – just got an email on it a few days ago i think…
Mint works perfect for me too!
mint works great for me. luv it!
That’s probably because the service was in beta then, its been improved a lot since then
I have three bank accounts, a paypal account, a credit card, my student loans, and my company IRA on Mint. I think maybe three times in the six months I have been using it, one or two accounts did not update at the time I logged on. Service has been flawless in all other instances. The only thing that bugs me is that they’re not very good at divining my spending habits and therefore categorize some things strangely. But honestly, if that’s the biggest problem I have, then I don’t have a problem.
Your experience may have been due to Beta stage kind of issues. Try again and I think you will be amazed. Mint is the best thing that I have ever done for my familiy’s finances
Apparently, paul works for intuit.
Mint still has a few bugs here and there (not the best at learning how to automatically categorize things, store refunds not deducted from spending, etc), but overall it works like a charm for me. Now that you can include assets such as homes and cars which finally makes the net worth calculation meaningful, I’m very much looking into abandoning quicken
Mint had a bug with Guaranty Bank (yes thats how they spell it) where it would track transactions but state you have a $0 ballance all the time. I submitted a bug report and in a week they fixed it. Maybe you should try to go through the correct channels for help before swearing off a product. besides ITS FREE.. You lost no money and ghained experience.
I love Mint, and tip my hat to them for responding. I also love the face-slap in “correcting” the numbers in Intuit’s letter. Snarky.
Dear Intuit,
While we find this to be an unusual approach to acquisition due diligence, we are intrigued about your interest in our company. We will continue to deliver phenomenal results, and demand a significantly higher valuation in our next round of financing now that Silicon Valley VCs are aware of your interest in our company. Thank you for increasing the value of our stock options.
Sincerely,
Mint.com Employees
p.s. We hope this won’t cause any of your top employees to take an interest in joining our company.
Rachel, that was hilarious… cheers
Comment of the year, love it!
This post is funny on so many levels…
It has to be at least mildly interesting that the mint.com web site now reads “600,000″ total people and “2,000″ per day.
/looks at the website
No it doesn’t.
Remember Tyler Cavell and his claims on Techcrunch.
Canadians think they can run Americans, but in reality they have no stake in the business of the United States.
Just as we bought Tim Hortons and the Hudson bay company, America will buy intuit and turn it into a parking lot.
Keep talking Canadian friends.
Your dirty friends at the government of Canada public works department and ITAC can’t help you here.
So f*ck off back to winnepeg.
I think I speak for everyone when I say,
“Huh?”
Intuit’s headquarters is in Mountain View. In fact, their campus is touching Google’s campus.
I have no idea why you think they are in Winnepeg.
Perhaps you’re thinking of the Inuit, not Intuit?
LOL
That’s Dick foy ya’.
Ever since he rolled out of the White House he’s been getting mighty feisty.
Hey, at least you guys recognize good donuts when you try them! Timmy Ho’s beats the crap out of those Krispy Kreme “oil sandwich” donuts.
Brilliant.
Great !
Mint is a killer service. Love it…. what a great tag line too “Refreshing Money Management”… using mint is like sticking a tic tack in your mouth
Curious as to why Mint would share this with the world? Good content for this site, but kind of odd they share it
FTA: Because they’re legally obliged to if they’re advertising their numbers.
Like Foobar said, if Mint has any US shareholders, it is required by various securities laws to confirm the truth of any and all marketing and PR claims made by the company or its senior executives.
I meant share it with sites like this. I want Mint to be above reproach since they are directly accessing ALL of my banking info. Quickbooks is an app that I can hide all personal data from it (or from the web) if I so choose. I think Intuit is invasive and don’t really like QB but I also don’t think very highly of Mint overall here either.
I might have sent them a reply that was a short clip of Al Swearengen from Deadwood about telling them to go blank themselves
I may be missing something but I think the line in the post that reads “Compete counts 416,000 monthly unique visitors worldwide” is a mistake. The graph looks like it is provided by ComScore , not Compete (see copyright on graph). I just looked at Compete’s numbers for Mint and they are much higher than the numbers provided by the graph above.
Thanks for the catch, our mistake (it’s Comscore). In any case I was paying more attention to the strong upwards trend rather than the absolute numbers.
http://www.itac...r_members/P125/
+
Government of Canada in Gatineau
==
mafia
The head of the department Intuit meets with was the leader of the Montreal division of the Banano crime family(A. Gagliano) and the whole public works department is still full of italian mafia figures.
Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. Where they do business, it’s not about innovation. The Canada IT sector is the equivalent of organized crime here in the US.
Sullying themselves like this by sending this letter to Mint will only work here in the US where free enterprise is allowed to reign. Back home in Canada the powers that be will pretend this didn’t happen.
Mint Canada has to open despite resistance from their government ponies, and Mint has to fight and kill them on their home soil.
Just like Tim Hortons, Just like the Bay. Knock down all the dominos.
We don’t have the same sales tax, gas prices, food prices, or brokerage fees on non-north american produced items.
We can easily produce technology cheaper and better here in America, we just have to knock down their ponies in Gatineau that protect them like rooks.
Oh, and QBXML is total and complete garbage.
Good luck finding documentation on that. Which is why they have such overwhelming support from the developer community.
It must make you cry now that Intuit has acquired Mint, eh?
Quicken = bitch slapped.
OWNED!
I joined Mint. Then realised that I couldn’t use it because I was geographically challenged. I still count as a user? Nice for them.
I own a copy of QuickBooks Pro. I don’t like it, and don’t use it, but it’s installed on my computer. What do you want to be Intuit counts me as a user?
Incidentally, I use Mint. I signed up, and let it sit for months before I got around to doing anything with it. Love it.
Bet. What do you want to *bet*?
That’s it, I’m going to bed.
Quicken, here’s a piece of advice for you; instead wasting energy on this, why don’t you hire a few developers and produce a usable web-product (no, an IE-only accounting software is barely a web-product). I heard there are quite a few developers looking for a gig right now… =)
If they’re worried about Mint, Intuit likely has bigger problems than hiring a few developers.
Somebody should dig this.
Mint is annoying. What good is a service that cannot get your current balance and sends your “updates” with old figures that are irrelevant? I went back to Quicken.
Thank you for your comment, Liza Emin Levitt!
I signed up for Mint but never linked my bank account or credit card. I guess it is a little misleading to count registrations as users as I never use mint yet i am technically a “user”.
“special relationships” with Canada and the ITAC public sector, offerer of no bid contracts
A. http://www.sust...mp;n=35544FEF-1
another “special relationship” with government of Canadia
B. http://www.cana...pr_061201-e.asp
Bonjour where competiteoneee ne pas de bid on contract
They even made software to handle all the no proposal contracts they got
http://marketpl...-solutions.aspx
You can in Canada, if you’re intuit.
What a depressing nation.
lol just kidding, they had another company make that.
dude, you sure got some canadian chip on your shoulder. do you post these to threads talking about maple syrup, too?
Maybe his Canadian girlfriend dumped him?
i dont use mint because i live overseas but i login and show people all the time because their web design is amazing- truly impressive..
What about all those boxes of Quicken and Quickbooks rotting in the shelves – does’t Intuit count them as sold copies although the software is not (or actually never was) used?
What a screw up by the author of the original letter – a bit of simple fact checking could have identified the traffic info, putting the user figures into context. I wonder whether Quicken Online’s user base reporting only counts recently active users who have provided their financial account info?
A couple of comments ask why a response was provided and so publicly. Aside from the obvious PR coup here; false advertising is a serious charge (yes, a lot of people really do believe in advertising messages – really!)
I would expect relevant authorities might take an interest if genuinely inaccurate advertising was taking place with various sanctions (fines, retractions, charges of fraud at the extreme etc.) aimed at the advertising organisation if found to be at fault.
For reasons of customer and consumer trust and ongoing credibility, companies must be honest in their communications, especially those in the financial sector.
Tx.
You’re not a success until someone sends you a mean letter that says you’re doing way to good that it boggles their mind. Go Mint!
it never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to give something as sensitive as all of their bank, brokerage, mortgage, etc accounts to just about anyone. good luck with that.
Intuit should worry more about actually releasing a usable product for the Mac. If they hadn’t noticed Macs have been gaining steam lately. Their last Mac product release was Quicken 2007 and it is virtually unusable. They’ve been touting a new product for about 1.5 years now and keep pushing the delivery date (now supposedly coming in the summer of 2009).
I dumped Quicken when I moved to a Mac about a year ago. Started using Mint about 3 months ago and love it. It isn’t a fully fledged product quite yet, but it does enough to help me keep my money better managed and its really easy to use.
Intuit could certainly learn a few things from the Mint guys – too bad they decided to interact in this pointless way instead…
this is a good point. Quicken’s mac software has sucked since their last product (2006 for Mac i think). there are some major omissions verus the windows version.
Looks like Intuit spent a little too long on the Six Sigma this time and forgot about the customer..mint please come to Canada!
kthx you kick butt!
mint is great!
VERY SIMPLE SOLUTION:
I’ll uninstall QUICKEN from my PC and never use them again. The idiots DONT UNDERSTAND what they’re doing
“Patzer also notes that while those users who haven’t linked their bank accounts to Mint will have access to less functionality, they still receive regular offers from Mint’s partners.” – Just to clarify, for international banks there is NO functionality, not less.
How many Intuit employees have Mint accounts, that would be an interesting figure.
Bah, I thought such shit happens only in my end of the world. Would give them the finger right away, at the very least.
I want to know when Mint will be moving into Europe …
Well, Mint are counting me and I’ve never done anything except sign up for the service. Why not? Because they don’t make it clear anywhere prior to sign-up that the service doesn’t work outside of the US.
Same here. I’d be interested to hear how many other users are in the same situation yet still counting towards these statistics.
Shame – everything I’ve heard about Mint is good.
honestly, if i were in mint`s CEO position, i`d tell Intuit to fuck off and take care of their own business.
Madness!
I wish I could use mint but they don’t support UK banks so I have to use quicken online instead