Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out.

“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss.

It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move. (Both help consumers keep track of their money and spending by monitoring their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts).

Quicken Online has roughly 1.5 million registered users, but only about 100,000 are active in any given month. In contrast, Mint has about the same number of registered users (1.7 million), but nearly 700,000 are active every 30 days. “The biggest opportunity for us is to reactivate those users who thought that maybe Quicken Online wasn’t for them,” says Patzer. (Read his account of how he built Mint over the past two years after winning TechCrunch40).

Other than Quicken Online’s users, is there anything that he’d like to keep? Patzer can only think of one feature Quicken Online has that Mint doesn’t and which he wants: the ability to manually enter cash transactions or record checks which have not yet cleared.

The fact that Intuit put him in charge of Quicken’s desktop products as well as its online services says a lot about where it thinks the future of that business is going. The growth is definitely in the online portion of the business. And now Intuit can start cross-selling Mint from its Quicken desktop products, as well as TurboTax. Some consumers, however, will always prefer the perceived security of a desktop app when it comes to their personal finances, which is why Patzer is starting to think about ways to store some information from Mint locally by using something like Google Gears, Adobe Air, or Microsoft Silverlight.

Building hooks into TurboTax will present other opportunities beyond simply signing up new members. When a TurboTax user decides to sign up for an IRA to save on taxes or want to know what to do with their tax return, Mint can present the best rates and offers from competing financial institutions and earn a hefty fee for finding one of them a new customer.

Patzer has other ideas for connecting Mint and TurboTax as well: “What I want to do is to take your stock transactions and everything you’ve tagged in Mint as a medical expense or business expense and push that over to see if you should itemize deductions. If we pull in your 1099s and deductions, we have done half your taxes for you. We could reduce the time it takes you to do your taxes to 20 minutes or less.”

The next step after that would be to get into financial planning for big life goals such as paying down debt, saving for college, buying a house or car, or saving for a home renovation or a big vacation. He wants Mint to be at the center of every major financial decision a person makes.

When he sold to Intuit, he took some flak for not going it alone, but Patzer believes he made the right choice because he can build a bigger business much faster at Intuit. He wants to keep pushing online, as well as mobile, desktop apps, and international (which is hard to do in finance with a 38-person startup). Mint already has a popular iPhone app which has been downloaded more than 350,000 times, and is now working on an Android app.

But the biggest reason Patzer sold is because Intuit will help Mint get to scale faster. Mint’s value is in the personal financial data that it tracks, and that data will be much more valuable with 5 million active users than with under one million. Getting to 5 million and 10 million and beyond is the game. And however popular Mint was among younger, Web-savvy consumers, some people were never going to trust it with their financial lives. About 25 million people a year already trust Intuit with their taxes, half of those online. That’s the most sensitive financial data a person has to give. If you already trust Intuit with your taxes, making the jump to Mint becomes a lot easier for those who might have been hesitating before.

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Last night I posted the video of Mint CEO Aaron Patzer’s 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up. If you are an aspiring startup entrepreneur, you’ll want to watch that more than a few times. The candid disclosures and advice he gives is rarely seen in Silicon Valley.

Some readers requested to see the presentation deck as well, so here it is. Patzer shows how he raised and spent money, and generated revenue, throughout the lifecycle of Mint, from the very beginning to the $170 million acquisition. He also showed historical slides from early presentations to investors and compares those to the actual results.

I’m also re-embedding the full video below.

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Let’s say you have an idea for a startup. How do you begin the process of finding cofounders and employees, creating a corporation, handing investors, growing the company, etc.? There are lots of details about building a startyp that are usually a mystery to the newly initiated founder. Usually you have to learn this stuff on the job, making mistakes along the way.

But not anymore. Last night I saw a 45 minute presentation by Mint CEO Aaron Patzer at a startup competition event called Juice Pitcher on the Microsoft campus. The event, which is put on by TheFunded and Vator.tv, put a handful of new startups on stage to show their stuff and compete for a top prize. Between pitches, Patzer took the stage and told the story of Mint, in detail. His company just sold for $170 million to Intuit.

Patzer takes the audience (and now you) from the beginning of Mint, and gives some incredibly useful device. He talks about the early days of Mint, where he lived on $30,000/yr and hired engineers at just a little more salary by offering them significant equity. He also says that, as a rule of thumb, every engineer in a pre-revenue startup adds $500,000 in valuation. Every business guy lowers the valuation by $250,000, he half jokingly quipped. In its earliest days, Mint was burning $150,000/year, he says, for 2 founders and 1 engineer/contractor.

Patzer also spoke about financial modeling, keeping costs low throughout the life cycle of the company, and Mint’s revenue model. He also gives suggested goals and milestones for each successive funding round. One interesting fact – today Mint, which is free, generates $30/year/user from various offers and value added services.

There are lots of additional details, including, for example, various hidden costs in financings (mostly legal).

If you are a startup founder, you’ll want to bookmark this and refer back to it. It’s absolute gold.

Update: The full powerpoint presentation is here.

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With the new Yahoo homepage that was previewed last July and is now rolling out more broadly as part of Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” branding exercise, the main Yahoo homepage is taking on more of the personalization features on MyYahoo. There are all sorts of handy widgets in the left-hand column ranging from Facebook status updates to Gmail to any news feed (just type in a URL like Techcrunch.com and it will add the feed). When you hover over any of the widgets, a box opens up covering most of the homepage with information from that widget.

Today, Yahoo is making it possible to add applications made on the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) to that sidebar as well. One of the first apps it is launching with is from personal finance tracker Mint, with its Budget by Mint widget. Other YAP apps launching today on the homepage include A-Z Wine Pairings from MyRecipes & Snooth, Books weRead by WeRead, Brain Trainer by Lumosity, a social version of the Flood-it game by LabPixies, kaChing’s virtual stock portfolio app, Movies by Flixster, and WordPRess QuickPress. YAP is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy that it kicked off last year.

The Budget by Mint widget and other YAP apps are already available on MyYahoo, but getting on the main Yahoo homepage potentially puts it on front of 118 million American users a month, versus 25 million for My Yahoo (comScore). The app ties into your Mint account, and shows pie charts and bar graphs of your budget, spending trends, and alerts. You can see the percentage of your budget that is going to taxes, shopping, dining, bills, and other expenses, and even share that with your friends if you are into that sort of personal financial transparency.

Mint launched two years ago at TechCrunch40, and was bought by Intuit for $170 million earlier this month.

Here is what the Budget by Mint widget looks like when it opens up in Yahoo:

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Mint, which sold to Intuit earlier this week for $170 million, is Yodlee’s YouTube. That’s because, like YouTube, the core technology behind Mint wasn’t developed in house. It was licensed from Yodlee, who got paid very little for what they provided.

Yodlee, which has raised at least $116 million over its 10-year lifespan (a lot of that was written off in a recapitalization), is the leading provider to account aggregation for banks. If you log into your bank’s website and they offer you the ability to aggregate accounts from other banks and financial institutions, it’s likely Yodlee is powering it.

Very early in Mint’s life they signed a sweet deal with Yodlee to provide all that back end technology. Mint focused on the front end user experience, and did a great job with marketing. People who have knowledge of the deal say total payments from Mint to Yodlee over the last couple of years are around $2 million/year. So Yodlee made $4ish million off of Mint.

And Yodlee never thought to ask for equity in Mint in the early days of the company, so they didn’t make anything from the acquisition.

To make things worse, Mint gave a “substantial” amount of Series A stock to Hite Capital in exchange for the Mint.com domain name. That stock was worth a “couple of million dollars,” says one source, after the acquisition.

The final insult: Yodlee won’t even be able to collect those small fees any longer from Mint. Intuit has it’s own back-end account aggregation service that it will use instead of Yodlee.

To be fair to Yodlee, the situation isn’t quite identical to Adobe/YouTube. The specifications, called OFX, for transferring account information between financial institutions was created in the 1990’s and any company is free to build on them. There are a few competitors to Yodlee, but for the most part they dominate the market.

But what Yodlee didn’t forsee is that sometimes having an enterprise approach isn’t the best. Mint focused on design and user experience and sold for $170 million two years after launching. Yodlee, after a ten-year fight and more $116 million or more in venture capital, is still looking for an exit.

And don’t just call this luck. Mint founder Aaron Patzer has nerves of steel and knows how to leverage risk. The rumor is he turned down an offer from Intuit earlier this year for $130 million. I’m not sure many entrepreneurs would have been able to do that. But the bet paid off, and he and his investors made another $40 million.

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Now more than ever, personal finance education and help is crucial to anyone’s financial health. Mint.com, a former TechCrunch 40 company who won the top prize at the conference, has grown incredibly since its launch and was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. TechCrunch50 startup LearnVest is serving a different purpose when it comes to online finances; the startup focuses on helping users, particularly women, organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like the online version of financial planner Suze Orman.

When you first log in to LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level (i.e. have you checked your credit score lately). LearnVest will use all this information to diagnose your financial health and education level and will then give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve.

LearnVest will then give you a customized plan of things you need to do to do and read via a checklist. Sort of like a cheat sheet, the checklist will help you navigate a range of issues such as getting out of credit card debt, budgeting for a wedding, buying a house and much more. As you complete the tasks on the list, you check off each box and earn points for your improvements. Points will give you status in LearnVest’s community and you can eventually trade in points for rewards.

As you keep logging on to LearnVest, the site will be completely customized for your financial profile, providing you with news articles that relate to your specific financial goals. LearnVest also aims to be a social community of sorts, where users can ask questions on discussion forums to other users and to experts as well, although I’m not sure how many women will want to share their financial woes with others.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Lior Zorea, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose

BH: This didn’t resonate with me. I don’t know any one who wants to do gaming on this site.

KR: I don’t think people will want to admit to debt with a profile.

A: we are going after targeted audience, there’s no resource online for financial advice. financial services online for women is a huge market and need.

LZ: I like the financial education part of this. I think it will be hard to get people to stay.

A: You can open accounts through us, you can execute as well. We are learning from uur user’s behavior. Currently, there is no one helping women forecast their financial future. LearnVest stops this problem.

Images:

Video:

Other Coverage:
TC50: LearnVest walks users through life’s financial milestones VentureBeat.
TechCrunch50: Women get short shrift LA Times.

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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.

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Update: CEO Aaron Patzer has just confirmed the deal on-stage at TechCrunch50, and written a guest post describing The Value of TechCrunch50 that contains more details.

This is a terrific exit for Mint, which first launched two years ago at TechCrunch50. Mint took the top prize at that event and has been growing fast ever since. Their last round of financing valued the company at $140 million.

In all, Mint has raised $32 million over three venture rounds.

Earlier this year Mint and Intuit had a humorous clash over Mint advertising claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day and jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 users in a matter of months. Intuit sent a letter to Mint demanding an explanation for this apparently inconceivable feat, which we obtained and printed here.

We have just one question for founder and CEO Aaron Patzer, though. Can we please have our $50,000 grand prize back? It seems like you don’t really need it any more.

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That’s not bad for a company that launched just two years ago – Mint won the top prize at TechCrunch50 2007.

In a “normal” round of financing a company would dilute by 25-35%, meaning the expected valuation on a $14 million round would be, roughly, $45 million – $60 million. The $140 million valuation shows two things – Mint is on a roll, and they don’t seem to need much capital.

Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet.

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Personal finance tracking site Mint.com added a bunch of new budgeting and trending features today. Mint presents consumers with a financial dashboard based on spending and income data from their bank, credit card, and other financial accounts. It expanded its charts to include spending over time, income history, asset allocation, and net worth over time.

You can now plan for irregular expenses such as property taxes, auto insurance, or vacations. Budgeted items can be rolled over into the next month if they haven’t been used up, and Mint now figures out your income based on your paycheck. It takes all of this data and projects your savings or shortfall over time.

All of these new features will be appreciated by Mint’s 1.4 million registered (and 550,000 active) users, but they also point to a new direction for the site: bookkeeping for small businesses. Mint now has pretty robust reporting for personal expenses, income, and savings. These same tools could very easily be tweaked to help small businesses track costs, revenues, and profits.

All Mint needs to do is change the names of the categories, and add an invoicing feature to go after basic accounting sites like FreshBooks or Outright, which are in turn going after Intuit’s more fully-featured QuickBooks.

For entrepreneurs with limited time on their hands, the ability to track both personal and business finances in one place would have obvious appeal.

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The $14 million round was led by DAG Ventures, and also includes newcomer Founder’s Fund. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures all participated as well. Patzer declined to comment on the company’s valuation, but says that it is “decidedly an up round” and that it was preemptive. Mint hasn’t disclosed its revenues, but Patzer says that they’re up 8x year over year.

Since launching at TechCrunch40 in 2007, Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet.

Because Mint pulls data directly from financial institutions, it knows where people are shopping and how much they’re spending. It can use this anonymized data in aggregate to track performance of entire industries or even individual stores. Up until now Mint hasn’t done anything with its merchant level data, but it’s beginning to open that up to press (see the chart below for a look at how the downturn is affecting grocery stores, which shows high end stores like Whole Foods and Bristol Farms taking a big hit in the down economy). This kind of data can be very valuable — don’t be surprised if we start seeing Mint leverage in other, more lucrative ways.

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Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.

The underlying apps will benefit from getting extra exposure on MyYahoo, but it won’t drive much traffic to their sites. People who want to go deeper into the apps will simply open up a canvas page, much like they do on Facebook. But that is okay, because it shouldn’t really matter where your users interact with your service. For Yahoo, this is yet another step in its effort to be the starting point on the Web for its users. The nice thing about the OpenSocial apps is that users don’t have to leave Yahoo to engage with them. So it is really Yahoo’s way of remaining a destination site and keeping its users within its walls, even if they are using non-Yahoo services. Today, Yahoo is also bringing some new add-ons into Yahoo! Mail, including PayPal and Picnik. And Yahoo! TV (which is built into some Samsung and LG TVs) now lets you watch YouTube videos.

The apps are built on top of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). The canvas views at least support OpenSocial, but app developers still have to tweak the apps to make them Yahoo-friendly. For instance, the “small view” (i.e. the widgets which actually appear on the MyYahoo page) must be developed using “Yahoo! Markup Language” (YML), which is an extension of HTML with more bells and whistles. Yahoo is trying to bring together YML and the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML), but right now they are forked. But turning an OpenSocial app into one that works inside Yahoo is getting easier. Yahoo joined OpenSocial last year. No word yet on when MyYahoo will start supporting Facebook apps. Oh right, cause that’s never gonna happen.

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Mint, the popular personal finance site that won 2007’s TechCrunch40, is launching a new feature called “Financial Fitness” which, strange as it may sound, adds an element of gaming to the service. Yes, it may sound like a bizarre combination at first – personal finance and fun aren’t exactly two things that go hand in hand. But it’s also a smart move on Mint’s part, as it looks to turn the mundane and often confusing activity of getting your financial affairs in order into something a bit more tolerable while increasing Mint’s engagement in the process. Mint is running the new feature in a private beta for a few weeks, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to Email techcrunch-getfit@mint.com with the Email address they use on Mint.com will gain access.

The game itself is fairly simple. It outlines five main principles that users should focus on on the road to financial fitness, including ’spend less than you earn’, ‘manage credit and debt wisely’, and so on. Each of these core principles has a number of tasks associated with it, like ‘Avoid Bank Fees’ and ‘Come in under budget’. As you complete tasks, you are rewarded with points. Over time, you can earn merit badges for completing more difficult tasks, like being named as a “Financial Guru” for maintaining a 100% health status for an extended period of time. And then there’s the more tangible bonus of likely having more money than you started with.

Mint has studied the reward systems of games including Wii Fit, Warcraft, and Nike Fit as they built the game, looking to turn their virtual financial advisor into something a little more interesting than a wall of text. Of course, solving each of these tasks often involves the user interacting with a Mint feature or a referral to a partner site, which means Mint can effectively monetize the game as well.

I’m sure many people will initially react to the game with skepticism, as it isn’t exactly the first thing you’d expect at a finance site. But seemingly pointless gaming elements can be useful nonetheless: one need only take a look at foursquare, a fairly new application that is quite addictive because of its game-like nature. That said, these kind of point systems tend to work best when there is some kind of social element involved – be it through a rivalry with friends or an aggregated leader board. As a financial site Mint doesn’t seem well suited for this kind of competition (it would be a bit strange to make fun of my friends for having a poorer financial health than me), but I think the gaming aspect should work nonetheless.

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So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic. What I mean by that is, with Mint’s iPhone app you can only see an overview of your finances, and look at things like the budget you set up online. With Wesabe’s iPhone app, everything is editable. And that’s a nice feature because more than a few times with Mint, I have seen a transaction categorized wrong, but had to login on my computer to edit it.

One cool feature that comes out of this ability to edit and add transactions from the app is that you can use your phone’s GPS to geo-locate wherever you made a purchase. This means you won’t have to type out the name of every merchant if you really want to take a hands-on approach and enter every purchase you make manually. The app also allows you to tag items on the fly, which is core to Wesabe’s offering.

If you’re really worried about security, you’re probably not going to use either of these apps. But one nice thing Wesabe’s features is a separate security layer that allows you to set a password for accessing the app. This is great if you don’t have a password set on your iPhone and worry about losing your phone and someone seeing your finances.

Wesabe’s iPhone app gives you access to all the accounts you set up online through the service. Unfortunately, while you can sign up for a Wesabe account through the app, you cannot import any bank accounts or credit card accounts through it — you’ll have to go to a computer to do that. Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund tells me that functionality will be available in an upcoming release of the iPhone app.

Ultimately, the choice of which app you’re going to use on the iPhone will come down to which service you use. But if you’re deciding which to sign up for and being able to edit your finances easily on a mobile device is important to you, than Wesabe may be a good choice.

Find the Wesabe app available for free in the iTunes App Store.

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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:

mintpdf1 – Free Legal Forms

mintpdf2 – Free Legal Forms

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Tree.com Chairman and CEO Doug Lebda commented that the acquisition of Thrive is a perfect fit with the strategic vision of Tree.com, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that he has a point there. Tree.com operates a number of strong brands in the financial and real estate space, and its customer base can clearly benefit from free tools like Thrive which enable users to better monitor, manage and improve their personal financial health, particularly in the tough economic times we’re in.

According to its website (which also includes funny bios for their team members), $225,209,097 is currently managed with the help of Thrive at the time of this writing. For the sake of comparison, Mint says it’s tracking $50 billion in transactions, $15 billion in assets and has identified more than $100 million in potential savings for its users.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and are said not to have had a material impact on the operations of Tree.com. According to the about-page, Thrive’s investors included current and former executives from Paypal, Citigroup Investment Banking and Limewire.

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Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that helps 900,000 consumers keep track of their spending. Mint’s data is a snapshot of the consumer economy. In the guest post below, Aaron parses the data to tell us what the economy looks like from consumer’s eyes.

(Mint was the the winner of our first TechCrunch40 conference, an experience Aaron wrote about in another guest post ).

At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts.

As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents?

Fortunately, Mint.com is in a unique position to answer this question – quantitatively. Since the crisis first hit in September, our user registration rate has more than quadrupled, giving us 900,000 sample points on the economy. That’s close to 1% of US households. All told, Mint.com tracks more than $50B in assets & liabilities.

For the past year, we’ve been using this data to help people set budgets using our SpendSpace feature. For example, do you spend more or less on coffee than the average San Franciscan? Or, how does your average purchase price and purchase frequency at Amazon.com, Starbucks, and JetBlue compare to other Mint users?

We’ve discovered this data – in aggregate and entirely anonymous of course – is tremendously valuable in serving as a consumer advocate: the WSJ used our empirical data on bank fees to identify the worst banking offenders. As of late, it also provides a tremendous insight into consumer spending trends, and that’s valuable for all of us.

Looking across spending as a whole in 2008, we can see a phase change beginning in the summer. After a bump in the May/June time frame from tax refunds and credits, we see spending declined by $400 / month / household. Spending eroded even further (a $200 drop) in November along with consumer confidence, bouncing back only slightly for the holidays.

Looking by category from January to November, we see greater than 20% declines in entertainment (-22%), Home – including furnishings, services, and home improvement (-21%), gas/fuel (-32%), and travel (-24%). Spending also declined in food, shopping, and bills/utilities, with the only increase being spending on financial advisors as people look for help during uncertain times.

Looking at average account balances is also interesting. From August to December, the average savings account was halved to $5,500. Fortunately, credit card debt remained roughly constant, but investments declined by 24%, while loans (mortgage, HELOC, student loans, and personal loans) increased by 11%.

Is it Great Depression bad? That’s a qualitative question I can’t answer. But what the data, the hard facts, mean for you – if you run a consumer business – is that your customers are spending $400 less each month than they were a year ago, have burned through half of their savings, and on average have taken on an additional $5k in debt.

Good decisions are based on good data. And data – in itself – may be one of the most valuable by-products of any startup.

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But how can you watch every penny during those few moments each day you aren’t sitting in front of your computer watching the stock markets tank? That’s where Mint for the iPhone comes in, which just launched. Check balances on your checking, savings, credit card and loan accounts. Track expenses and budgets. Watch the dismal performance of your 401(k), brokerage and IRA accounts, etc.

All of which may be a little much. But Mint will be very helpful in some situations, like alerting you asap if a large transaction is made on your credit card, or the ex husband just cleaned out your bank account.

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Mint, the personal financial site that won TechCrunch40, continues to thrive even as our economy sinks deeper into an economic decline. The company has just been selected as a TechPioneer by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – an honor only given to 34 companies worldwide (other winners in the tech space this year include Brightcove, Etsy, Mojix, and Slide, with past winners including Google, 23andMe, Infosys, and Mozilla). The World Economic Forum is an international organization aiming to help improve the world, and each TechPioneer is chosen for its contributions towards meeting that goal.

Since launching at TechCrunch40, Mint has amassed 620,000 users – 4 times more than its closest rival according to Compete. CEO Aaron Patzer says that the site is now tracking over $150 billion in total consumer spending, and has also revealed a number of telling trends that display how the economy seems to have impacted consumer spending.

According to Mint’s aggregated anonymized data, overall spending has dropped $400 in the last year, with half of that coming in the last two months. Starbucks spending has dropped around 10% (Starbucks has recently reported a 7% drop in month over month revenue). This kind of data could be incredibly valuable to businesses as a means of predicting spending trends – don’t be surprised if Mint begins offering a premium service for businesses who would gladly pay for aggregated spending totals.

Mint is also going increasingly mobile. Earlier this month the site added SMS support for account updates (text BAL to 696468 (MYMINT) for updates), and a native iPhone application is on the way.

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Mint, the personal finance startup that won last year’s TechCrunch 40, has launched a host of new features including investment tracking, 401k managment, and more flexible budget sheets. CEO Aaron Patzer says that the new features finally make Mint a one-stop place to get an overview on your entire financial portfolio, and will drop the site’s ‘Beta’ label accordingly. Patzer also notes that in the past few weeks of economic turmoil, Mint has been seeing its highest traffic ever -with registrations up 100% – as users scramble to save money wherever they can.

Mint originally released its investment tracking functionality to a small portion of its users, and will now be expanding the feature to everyone. Users can track their Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 accounts, and can drill down in each to see how their investments are performing relative to the market average.

The site is also opening an entirely new 401(k) management center, where users can identify present and past 401k accounts. Patzer says that old 401(k)s from past employers can lead to regular maintenance fees, which Mint will help users avoid by switching old accounts to rollover IRAs.

Finally, the site is also introducing what Patzer says is the site’s most oft-requested feature: user-defined transaction categories. Previously users of the site’s budget management tool (which automatically categories purchases depending on where they occur) were restricted to a set of options defined by Mint. Now users will be able to enter their own categories and set up custom rulesets.

So where does Mint go from here? Patzer says that Mint will soon be enhancing its mobile options, with a new SMS feature in the next few weeks and an iPhone application around the end of the year. Unfortunately, making transactions on Mint (be it to pay bills or execute trades) still isn’t possible and won’t be for some time, which means you’ll have to go elsewhere to move your money around.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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)

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