MinTuit: What’s Next After the Intuit / Mint Deal
Business, SaaS September 14th, 2009
TechCrunch50 could not have asked for a better start: they get to announce that personal finance startup Mint winner of the $50K grand prize @ TC50 two years ago just got acquired for $170M.
Great exit for a startup – not so sure about concerned users. But the big question today is why it made sense for Intuit and what the future holds for Mint and its users. The consensus is that first of all this has been a defensive move. Mint started to bite into the Intuit / Quicken pie, and Intuit just had to stop it.
There is some irony in this deal: the playbook had been written by Microsoft, against Intuit.
Continue reading …
Tags: acquisitions, aggregation, benchmarking, data mining, intuit, intumint, mergers, microsoft, Microsoft Money, mint, mintuit, money management., MS Money, Online Banking, personal finance, PFM, quickbooks, quicken, SaaS, Wesabe, xref
Intuit Did Not Kill MS Money. Microsoft Did. Slowly, Over Long Years. Here’s the Full Story.
Software June 11th, 2009
An era comes to an end on June 30th, when Microsoft discontinues their PFM (Personal Financial Management) product, Money.
The story started outside Microsoft, with a startup named Intuit releasing their first DOS-based PFM software, Quicken. The concept was simple and powerful: balance your checkbook, keep track of your financial transactions electronically. It worked; in fact surveys showed that Quicken became the driver for many consumers to buy their first personal computers in the late 80’s. But it really became popular when Windows, especially the first “good” version, 3.0 arrived.
Intuit remained a one-product company until after their IPO in 1993, when they acquired Chipsoft and entered the tax-software market.
Continue reading …
Tags: intuit, microsoft, Microsoft Money, mint, money management., MS Money, Online Banking, personal finance, PFM, quicken, SaaS, software as a service, Software plus Service, Wesabe, xref
The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Not-So-Hidden Business Model in SaaS
Business, SaaS June 1st, 2009
Forget software: it’s all about (your) data.
Hyper-growing Financial Management system provider and Quicken / MS Money challenger Mint recently raised eyebrows announcing their plan to sell anonymized aggregate customer data. Some reviewers were screaming, we saw bombastic titles like Personal Finance Startup Mint Wants To Sell Your Money Trail – but in reality the news wasn’t earth shattering. You don’t really believe your spending patterns are not dissected – aggregated – analyzed in every possible way and sold by your bank and credit card company, do you?
So nothing new – but a good opportunity to discuss the role of user data in SaaS business models – and there is more than outright sale of data.
Read more …
Tags: aggregate data, benchmarking, business model, data ownership, data privacy, freshbooks, mint, saan, SaaS, xref
Zoli Erdos
