Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that launched two years ago at TechCrunch40. Last night the news broke that Mint is being acquired for $170 million by Intuit. Patzer has written two previous guest posts for TechCrunch.
Today, exactly two years after launching at TechCrunch40, I’m excited to announce that Mint.com has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Intuit for about $170m. Intuit, a $10b company (NASDAQ: INTU) is perhaps best known as the maker of Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax.
This is a great opportunity to bring Mint’s technology and easy-to-use personal financial management system to potentially tens of millions of consumers, an eventually small businesses and banking customers as well.
What’s perhaps even more amazing about this opportunity is that we made it to this point just three years after the company started: one year to build, and two years in operation. I doubt this could have happened anywhere but Silicon Valley.
Mint was built in the Silicon Valley way. It started in my apartment, with Matt Snider and Poornima Vijayashanker. We interviewed the first real “professional,” our VP of Engineering, David Michaels in our kitchen.
Our technology was all open source, and essentially all free: MySQL at the bottom, Hibernate to avoid the need to hire a DBA, Tomcat on Apache, Yahoo’s YUI served as the base for our AJAXy goodness.
We didn’t have money for a lawyer, but no fewer than three offered to help us incorporate and accrue $25k in legal fees for a little bit of the company. We shared office space in a type of incubator, renting by the cube to avoid a long-term lease.
We didn’t have money for advertising, so we started a blog. We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters.
To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.
When it came time to launch, we choose TechCrunch 40 – why pay $20k for DEMO?
We decided not to do SEM – it’s too easy and too additive. Instead, we relied on press. It’s where I spent 20% of my time. I’m spending it right now while writing this.
The net result has been millions of visitors and 1.5m users essentially for free. Mint is not inherently viral like a social network – but all good things are viral by word of mouth.
And so here we are two years later. We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases. Most importantly, we’ve helped a lot of people better understand and do more with their money. Thousands of people have told us that Mint.com has helped them pay off debt, control their spending, manage job loss, and even resolve money disputes with their significant other.
Expect all of this goodness to increase after the acquisition closes. And yes, expect Mint.com and Quicken Online to remain free.
So that’s the Mint story. $0 to $170m in three years flat. While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people. Make something that is faster, more efficient, cheaper (in this case free), and innovate on technology or business model to make a healthy revenue stream doing it.
Without the free (for a while) lawyers, free advertising (winning TechCrunch sent us sky high right from the start), and most importantly, people who come to Silicon Valley, we couldn’t have done it in this time frame, if at all.
Here’s to the Mint team, from New Zealand, from France, Tunisia, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Canada, Greece, and all over the U.S. I’m proud of you all today, and I’m very happy to live in this Valley.
oh hi michael!
Congrats!
Greetings from Kyiv to #tc50
Yay.
Loving the way that this was published live on TC50 stage. Great way of using real time media to get a bit of extra traffic. Congrats to Mint as well
Congratulations! Very well done.
Congratulations, you deserved it Aaron and Mint.com team!
Congrats!! I mint my money.
congrats Mint! I’ll be asking for an interview under my focus “what they dont teach you at B-school”
congrats from TC50 guys. HYER!!! yerevan!!!
Congrats Aaron! I definitely believe in the power of Mint.com and it is amazing to look back at just three years of awesome success!
Nice work.
Taylor Barr
well done, love the wrap up article and all that frugality and focus on execution that helped you guys get to the green.
Congratulations Aaron and Mint.com team. Loved the on stage presentation
Aaron seems like such a smart, ambitious and hard working guy. How he’s able to find millions of people who are willing to hand over bank account and credit card information is beyond me. Well deserved pay day!
This is kind of like Microsoft buying Apple and then announcing that now millions more people will have the chance to experience Apple’s incredible line up of great products and services.
Didn’t Mint attract its customers based on a growing dissatisfaction with Quicken? Good thing Mint is a web app, or we’d be waiting until 2015 for a Mac version.
Every entrepreneur should print out this sentence and put it up somewhere visible:
“While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people.”
Aaron and Mint are way up there. Hope to meet the guys one day.
Bastian
Completely agree with you.
Bingo Bastian – I agree with you. People get too sucked up in trends. Find someone’s pain, and help them relieve it.
First of all congratulations to the people whose names and faces will never appear on news sites like this and who are behind Mint’s success, really.
However, secondly – to the point – You Sir, helped me relieve my pain by saying this, a little bit but is not Mint the ultimate trend? I say this because I gather – do they not owe their success to the fact that there is a financial crises going for most people (for most, not to me personally)?
If there would be a financial boom, there would have been not such a substantial demand for an alternative to Intuit and it’s products. The crisis was the best thing that, I think, helped Mint grow.
Catch my drift?
Great story. What next?
Aaron mentions that he used MySQL, but doesnt mention the most important thing underneath Mint — Yodlee. Why is that? Yodlee has done the hardest work (connecting to financial institutions). Mint is just the pretty UI on top of Yodlee with ads.
Great point, James. I’m a Yodlee user and have been wondering if I should be trying out Mint.com because they may have better access to the financial systems. Well, turns out there’s no point, other than the flashier UI. Thanks for pointing that out.
Interesting, so mint.com is just a GUI layer solution over yodlees api work?
This is incorrect. The secret sauce in Mint, our core value, is what we do with your data once we retrieve it. This is certainly represented in the UI itself, but moreover it is how our product learns the correct names of your transactions, their categories, and so on. Mint removes the multiple hours each week it previously took users to sanitize, categorize, and correct their own data imports from their banks, and we provide much more insight about that data.
“So that’s the Mint story. $0 to $170m in three years flat. While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people.”
Holy words.
Congratulations and thanks for the inspiring post.
Great work! Mint is very well done and very easy-to-use. I hope that it continues that way after its acquisition. Too many products with great potential got destroyed after being acquired.
How much private equity did they raise?
$32M according to the earlier TechCrunch post.
http://www.tech...or-170-million/
Totally bummed about this, Intuit is going to destroy the site.
I’m happy for the folks who labored to create Mint. I like the site. I, like Joseph, am concerned about Intuit mucking it up. It seems that a good number of people have become increasingly dissatisfied with Quicken. Mint had a perfect storm of MS ceasing to offer Money and Quicken losing customer satisfaction.
I guess we’ll see what happens.
Congrats, but I think Intuit paid too little. Mint has a boat load of suscribers, me included, a wonderful site that intuit would never match. It was only until recently that intuit’s site became free while mint has been free since day one. I think you could have gotten more money for your leap of faith and hard work. Now lets hope intuit builds on mint’s success rather than simply shutting it down.
Have to agree. Intuit got Mint on the cheap. I like Mint.com and expect it to go in the toilet now that Intuit has their hands on it. oh well…
Simple idea + simple solution +simple execution = bags of cash.
I wonder if they will be using their own software to manage all those millions!
Well Done.
it’s too bad. i used to like Mint. I’m sure Intuit will run it under in no time at all.
This is really interesting for a few reasons:
1. Mint is built on Yodlee. I use both Mint and Yodlee, actually prefer Yodlee for actual work/transactions. What does this mean for Yodlee?
2. I started using Yodlee/Mint precisely because Quicken and Quicken online do such a poor job for me. Quicken/Intuit are masters of the “pay us $6.95 a month extra to get these valuable features”. There is no doubt about what is going to happen to Mint in their hands.
I saw Aaron at his launch at TC50 2 years ago and you knew right then this would be a success for him and his backers.
Congrats to the mint team!
Congrats Aaron. Solving a problem is the key to building a successful company.
Mint does that. I love the software and tell everyone about it when the topic of financial management comes up.
Great for you guys and great for Intuit, but I’m worried this now won’t be great for us. I guess you’ll have money to improve, but I’m scared you’re gonna suck now.
It’s a great success story, but headline is a bit ludicrous. How about something like Mint: If they went with Demo, they’d have sold for $210m. TC coverage is huge for sure, but you also have a great product. There’s no telling the specific impact of TC40.
I came to Mint after I finally couldn’t stand Intuit and Quicken any more. So I’ll be sad if, as I fear, Quicken turns Mint into the bloated POS that Quicken has become.
I hadn’t even heard of the company “mint” until tech crucnh broke this story on twitter! This is proof that social media is a HUGE business inteligence tool and more and more executives need to get on board and realize the possibilites. thanks for your insight and write up on this Tech Crunchy, you guys are awesome!
Justin
CEO Social Networking San Diego
Hopefully this will add some validity for some institutions that are not yet supporting Mint (vice versa). I’ve been waiting for months for certain investment firms to be added to Mint and this might be the chance.
Anyways, congrats. Hard work and persistence pays off.
Great for the Mint people, but since Intuit is such a customer-hostile, terrible company with a crap product, I’d imagine that it won’t be that great a deal for users. Expect fees, bloat, and basically a transformation into a horribly branded POS.
So who is second best after Mint? I think I’ll move.
Thank you for mint.com , I loved this website.
Do you really care about “helping people to better understand…” and “help people better control …” and blah blah blah ?
In fact, I think you just wanted to get rich and fast. And it’s probably why you’re selling your company today.
Yes three years is fast and 170 millions is a lot but don’t you think you could have had more “balls” and really take advantage of the potential of mint.com in the next years ? especially if it was such a profitable business. Why hurry to sell ?
Well, I guess I am just a sad (ex?)user…
Good thing. I love Mint, concept/principle is great. But the implementation/interface sucks and has shown little improvement over many months. Intuit is great at that, so could be the perfect thing for Mint.
As a Quicken and Mint user, I am optimistically hoping that Intuit’s experience in finance software will positively influence the development of Mint and that they won’t screw it up. It will be interesting to watch how it plays out between Quicken’s free online service and Mint.com.
Keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best…
Also, great article and congratulations Aaron…
I’ve always liked their name “Mint” its short, memorable, and has a clear fresh feeling. FOUR LETTERS! I thought our mintio.com was good.
I hope Intuit will create positive advancements, please let it only go up from here!
Oh goodie. Maybe now someone can make it faster and get it to work with ING Direct?
I’m not thrilled with Mint anymore, and with this news, I’m seriously considering canceling my account.
For one, I don’t trust Intuit with my personal info, as they’ve never proven they can keep it secure.
But I’ve had problems with Mint recently, too. Being a student and working not-quite full time on an hourly pay scale, I live mostly paycheck to paycheck. I began relying on Mint to track spending and keep an eye on my bank balance, which looked like something Mint was offering service-wise due to the simple and fast iPhone app. But really, Mint’s “statements” are sometimes days out of sync, and the result is overdraft fees — Mint says “you’ve got plenty of money to buy a pizza” and the reality is I have seven bucks in my account.
This has happened twice now with Mint since I started “seriously” using it to track my income, and it’s not working. I’ve emailed Mint’s customer service “yeah, we know it’s slow” is the response I got back.
“We know it’s slow.” Great, tell me that last month. Add that to the iPhone app: “DO NOT USE TO TRACK DAILY SPENDING!! IT’S SLOW!”
Perhaps Mint isn’t meant for people living paycheck to paycheck, and is better aimed at $170 millionaires. I don’t know, but I wish Intuit all the best on this iffy web service.
Congrats… from day 1 you managed Mint.com the right way. It’s a template for other startup founders.
Mint used to tell me 2 weeks late that I was low on cash.. however there are alot of things I like about mint. One being their ability to refresh a stale/boring industry and make something exciting out of it.
Great job and well done!
Congrats! i am thrilled u have Arab team from Tunisia i just learned that and i would like to connect with them send me @ 3GFaclon
Nice early exit, fellas!
What of their glorious UI and their simplified and fun interface? Mint’s large text fields made me so happy, I actually enjoyed submitting my passwords and usernames to all my financial institutions.
The conscious decision of uniting programmers and designers to one great cause gave MInt a great presentation with a powerful plot.
I now struggle with the sad fact that Intuit manages all my passwords and usernames for my financial institutions…It’s like giving my wallet and entire life savings to an obese rich guy on a street teeming with pick-pockets.