Mint, an online personal finance site, has gotten a facelift. The new site sports a much cleaner design than the previous iteration, and appears to be focused on describing what Mint actually does rather than presenting pretty (but somewhat overwhelming) graphics. For now the improvements are mainly on the external portion of the site (for non-members), with the members’ portion switching to the new design in the next few weeks.

That normally isn’t big news, but what caught my attention is that Mint has been bucket testing various redesign formats with some users and is seeing conversion rates increase by 20% over the current site.

That equals “hundreds of thousands” of more registered users over the course of a year given their current growth rates, says CEO Aaron Patzer. When we last checked in with them, they had 350,000 registered users and were tracking $11 billion in assets. Those numbers are likely substantially higher now.

Most startups have very limited resources and are so busy building and maintaining core features that they can’t spend too much time doing user testing on various concepts. Sometimes it makes sense to just take a step back and think about usability, though. It can pay off in the end.

Since the site’s launch last year, it has added a number of new features including loan tracking and investment tracking. However, most of these functions haven’t been readily apparent to most users - something the new design is looking to remedy.

Mint allows users to keep track of their finances, presenting spending history with attractive graphs and typically requiring much less effort compared to programs like Quicken. Unfortunately, while the site serves its purpose well, it is currently unable to actually transfer any funds to pay bills - you’ll have to go to your bank’s website to do that.

As part of the update, Mint is also releasing a handful of new guides to personal finance, ranging from “reducing credit card debt” to the seemingly obvious “saving money while dining out”.

Mint, which has now raised $17 million in venture capital, was the overall winner of the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

The new designs are below. In the first image the old is on left, new is on right.

Mint, the popular personal finance site that won TechCrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. Users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported institutions. In addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, Mint also monitors users’ savings accounts, credit cards, and investments.

Mint doesn’t deal with any actual fund transfers. Instead, it monitors users’ spending habits, producing coherent graphs that are designed to help people save their money (or at least know where it’s all going). Users can also elect to receive SMS and email alerts when bills are due or their balance drops below a certain level.

Mint has seen extremely quick growth since its launch at TechCrunch40, and is now
monitoring a total of $11 billion in assets, with 350,000 registered users, it says. CEO Aaron Patzer says that Mint will eventually be able to move money around, but that functionality won’t be coming until 2009. Until then, Patzer says that the addition of mortgage and loan tracking will let Mint users effectively monitor their entire financial portfolio. It’s too bad we’ll still have to rely on our banks’ websites to actually pay the bills.

Aaron Patzer launched his new startup Mint.com at TechCrunch40 last year. As the top company he received a cash award of $50,000 and a ton of press attention.

Since TechCrunch40 the company has raised over $17 million in venture financing and 10,000 or so new users sign up each week.

We asked Aaron to write about his experience at TechCrunch40 - the good, the bad, and everything else. We’re striving to preserve the magic for our upcoming event, TechCrunch50. And not repeat our rookie errors.

His post is below.

Presenting at TechCrunch 40 last September was probably the most important 7 minutes of my professional life. I’m not exaggerating here. It’s where Mint.com launched.

Rewind a bit. I started Mint in March of 2006 out of frustration. Existing tools like Quicken and MS Money took way too much work, and provided very little real insight on your finances. Like many a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I quit my job, invested half my life savings in the company, and convinced a few friends to join me for very meager pay.

By September 2006, we had enough of a prototype for seed funding. We spent the next year solid building the product, working and re-working the UI, and trying to come up with an elegant way to connect to 6,500 financial institutions. Mint was ready – well, almost ready – to launch. TechCrunch 40 gave us a good line in the sand, an absolute hard date that everyone could rally around. In a startup, that means focus, and focus is everything.

That was nine months ago, and we were at zero. Now Mint.com is up to nearly 300,000 users, we’re leading our all competitors by a factor of at least 5x, and we’ve raised $17m in funding from Benchmark, Shasta, Sherpalo, First Round, and more. Presenting at (and winning) TechCrunch 40 helped us get to where we are today. Here’s how:

1. TechCrunch is a Massive Press Platform

The event is well attended by press. Even prior to winning, we did at least 10 interviews, including Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0, VentureBeat, and CNET. I even got suckered into a fake-interview (which I didn’t realize was fake until they asked me to explain the difference between a geek and a nerd).

The event is loaded with bloggers. And for startups, the blogosphere probably matters more than traditional media for the first few months. According to Technorati, Mint.com had nearly 1,000 posts during or immediately after TechCrunch.

Expect a spike in traffic – even if you don’t win. If you do win, have some servers on standby. And for all you engineers out there, make sure you increase MySQL’s in memory DB cache to at least a few GB: we got slammed with over 80,000 visits and 15,000 sign-ups in a 12-hour window and our machines started to crawl.

2. $$$ Attracting Investors $$$

Investors of all sizes attended TechCrunch 40. That includes angels like former Google VP Aydin Senkut, seed stage firms like First Round Capital, and plenty of traditional early stage venture firms. Have your 30-second pitch down, and be prepared to recite it a hundred times.

Also, if you’re not selected as one of the on-stage presenters, don’t worry, the demo-pit has its own advantages: you have the time and space to walk investors through your product one on one.

3. Being Challenged by Experts

After Mint’s 7-minute on-stage presentation, we went back up on stage with Xobni, Orgoo, App2You, and KerPoof. Here, Esther Dyson, Roelof Botha, and Guy Kawasaki challenged each of us – in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. It’s nerve racking for sure, but it hones your skill, and all the sudden, VC meetings seem relatively tame by comparison.

Toughest question: Describe your revenue model…in five words or less.

4. Competitive Analysis

Over 700 companies applied to TechCrunch 40 last year. 40 presented, with another 100 in the demo pit. Chances are, you’re going to find out about a new competitor. We did (SpendView), and sizing up the competition is a very good thing.

5. Winning Helps

Winning TechCrunch gave us more than a stratospheric jump in traffic; it gave us outside validation. Mint’s win gave us an “in” to pitch the Mint story to any tech or business publication. TechCrunch, with a few million monthly readers, has that kind of influence now.

Oh, and as a pre-profit startup, the $50,000 check for grand prize is nice too!

—–

Launching at TechCrunch is free, gives you tons of press exposure, lots of feedback from users, and can help pique the interest of the venture community. Not to be a shill, but if you’re a tech company and the timing is about right, why would you launch anywhere else?

Strands has made a second recruitment in its effort to develop a Mint competitor called moneyStrands that leverages the same recommendation engine behind its video and music products.

Just over two weeks ago Strands acquired Expensr, and now the company is announcing its acquisition of NetworthIQ. Both are personal finance applications that Strands wanted mostly for their human capital, but also for some of their technology assets. The terms of both deals were not disclosed.

While the media has yet to get its hands on moneyStrands and give it a spin, the product has been in development since December and it marks Strands’ attempt to aggressively apply its recommendation technology to new fields.

Just how that technology will be applied to personal finance is not altogether clear. The core Strands technology digests and analyzes behavioral information to make its recommendations. This is fairly straightforward when it comes to music: frequently play two or more songs with one another and Strands will learn something about how you prefer to experience music.

Apparently this technique will transfer over into personal finance by analyzing the sets of purchases that consumers make and then recommending how they can make better purchases. This analysis will not only consider the various purchases that one consumer makes; it will also compare these purchases to those made by others.

Aside from detailed personalized recommendations, Strands hopes to differentiate itself from competitors like Mint and Wesabe by providing superior mobile support and widget integration.

Strands is mum on the fate of NetworthIQ as a stand alone service, but I think we can safely assume it will shut down eventually as its team focuses on the development of moneyStrands.

Silicon Valley-based startup Mint, which provides a service that lets users manage their checking, savings and credit card accounts online, will launch a new product on May 6 that lets users track virtually any type of investment account as well. Users will now be able to manage all of their financial assets on the Mint site. With this change, Mint says, 6,500 US financial institutions: 2,520 banks, 1,621 credit cards, and 2,381 investment accounts are supported.

Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 assets can be managed. For now, only student loan accounts and mortgages are left off, although support for those types of accounts is coming soon. The site will show all your buys, sells, dividend distributions, etc. across multiple accounts. Dive into a single account or equity for its individual performance. Account performance v. the S&P and other indexes is graphed, and account charges are also shown.

There are some things you still won’t be able to do with Mint, such as stock trades, bill payments and funds transfers. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says those features will eventually be added, with a focus on bill payments first. Funds transfers and stock trades are a little stickier, though, and may eventually require state and/or federal regulation of the company.

Investments will soft launch on May 6 for very active Mint users and roll out from there. Anyone who wants to be in the beta right at launch (whether they are a current Mint user or not) can sign up at mint.com/techcrunch and will be added on May 6.

Other services, including Cake Financial (another TechCrunch40 startup) Vestopia, Covestor, and UpDown also offer investment tracking.

We’ve been tracking Mint since their launch at TechCrunch40 last year. The 20-person company has now raised $17 million in venture capital and has 230,000 registered users (40% of which are active, Patzer says). 10,000 new users sign up each week (13,000 last week)

TechCrunch40-winner and Benchmark-funded startup Mint is having a good year. Their user base has grown 25% in the last month to 200,000. And today they’re getting access to 4 million more via a co-branded partnership with The Motley Fool, a popular finance portal.

The deal includes a co-branded version of Mint and promotion of the site on Motley Fool. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says the deal is not exclusive, but wouldn’t give other details.

More than anything this is a sign of credibility for Mint, which continues to win ground v. competitors. Expect more partnerships soon.

Silicon Valley based Mint, an “online Quicken” that also suggest to users different ways to save money by searching for deals on credit cards, bank accounts, etc., will announce a third round of funding today - $12.1 million from new investor Benchmark Capital and all previous investors, including Shasta Ventures, Sherpalo, Felicis Ventures, Hite Capital and First Round Capital. The company has now raised a total of $17 million, most of it since October of 2007. Benchmark’s Bob Kagle is joining the Mint board.

Mint has grown to 160,000 users just six months after launching and taking the $50,000 top prize at the TechCrunch40 conference. CEO Aaron Patzer says the company is adding 10,000 new users per week, has organized over $10 billion in purchasing activity and has identified around $100 million in savings opportunities for users.

The average user logs in twice per week, Patzer says, and 10% have opted in for SMS alerts.

The company makes money via lead generations, and Patzer says users are clicking on presented opportunities 12-15% of the time.

We heard through a number of sources that venture capitalists were clamoring to get a piece of this deal. Patzer wouldn’t comment that, saying only that he was very happy to be working with Benchmark.

Online bill pay service Billeo has announced a $7 million Series B round of funding. ATA Ventures led the financing, with additional contributions from all of Billeo’s existing investors including Altos Ventures, Claremont Creek and Pacifica Fund.

There have been a lot of startups focused on enhancing your online personal finance, mostly around analyzing your investments (Cake, Zecco, Covestor) or expenditures (Mint, Wesabe). By contrast, Billeo functions as a straight forward tool for automating or remembering to pay your bills online.

You tell Billeo what bills you want to pay automatically or be reminded to pay and their service sends reminders and tracks you payment history online. Although a lot of banks offer online bill payment to third parties, Billeo also tracks your payment stats and compares them to the crowd. If you download the toolbar we previously covered, Billeo will also automatically fill out a lot of financial forms for you online. However, while other financial management tools haven’t incorporated online bill payment, it seems a clear feature addition that will compete with Billeo in the future.

Financial-planning startup Mint, winner of the TechCrunch40 Award, finally announced that it raised $4.7 million from Shasta Ventures (which led the round), First Round Capital, and angels including Google investor Ram Shriram, and executives from eBay, Intuit, Google, Yahoo, Charles Schwab, Wilson Sonsini, Reuters, Adteractive, and Weblogic/BEA.

Since it’s launch, Mint is already organizing more than $2 billion worth of people’s money. Now, it has some of its own to manage.

The round actually closed in April, but has not been announced until today (which means a second round may be around the corner). There was also a seed funding in October in which First Round Capital put in $325,000 (and then increased their ownership in the April round). CEO Aaron Patzer shares this tidbit with me how Shriram came aboard:

Ram Shriram actually came in about a month after we closed our round. At the time we only had about $200k open in the round. Unlike most investors (who wait a week, talk to their friends, bring you back for multiple meetings), Ram said “Okay, I’m in” before I was done with the presentation. He then explained that he had no upper limit on what he could invest (good problem to have!), but that his accountants lose track if he doesn’t invest at least $500k. So needless to say, we opened the round up a bit.

Needless to say.

Since launching and winning the top spot at our TechCrunch40 conference three weeks ago, personal-finance startup Mint has been on a roll. On Friday, Mint was named Best of Show at the 2007 Financial Innovations conference (along with peer-to-peer lender Prosper and mortgage-finder Mortgagebot).

CEO Aaron Patzer reports to us that, in just the past three weeks, Mint has already helped organize more than $2 billion worth of people’s personal financial accounts, and identified more than $40 million in potential savings for those members. (Mint helps you find better interest rates on bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial products). Interest in the site spiked right after TC40. At one point, Mint was signing up a new member every five seconds. Not bad for a service from a previously-unknown startup that asks for access to all of your private financial data, including your bank and credit-card accounts.

Apparently, getting consumers to give up that level of privacy, has not been an issue so far. (The old axiom is true: people really will do anything to save a buck). Now comes the hard part. Getting all those people to keep coming back past the initial stage of curiosity.

Update: I asked Mint CEO Patzer for some more details on how many people are using Mint, and he responded with the following data. Keep in mind, this is only 18 days worth of data and thus should be treated as extremely preliminary (these are early adopters, so they may be more likely to embrace such a service and use it more often than a mainstream user):

—That $2 billion is spread across 50,000 registered users.
—About 70 percent (or 35,000) have come back more than once.
—Those who have been in the system at least a week (including beta testers), visit Mint.com 2-3 times a week.
—About 10 percent (or 5,000) come to the site every day.
—And 10 percent have signed up for mobile alerts.

(See also his comments below about the lengths Mint goes to secure customer data).

Jason Calacanis just announced that Mint was chosen as the best presenting company at TechCrunch40. The provider of an impressive personal finance application will receive $50,000 as part of the award.

Mint presented its application this morning during Session 5, which was entitled “Productivity and Web Applications”. See our coverage of that session here.

Mint is a personal finance application that lets users track and monitor their financials in one place without the need of routine maintenance or accounting knowledge. Their application tracks bank, credit union and credit card transactions and alerts users to upcoming bills, low balances or unusual spending. Mint’s patent-pending technology automatically categorizes transactions, so users know with precision where they are spending money, what their bank and credit balances are, and how much interest they have earned.

Their application also helps people find ways to save money by constantly searching for deals on credit cards, bank accounts, etc. Mint’s technology also analyzes your finances and makes suggestions all while using the same security systems as top banks.