So while everybody just had 7 minutes (of demo), we had a lot more. We demoed the products, we put out little fliers.
#INTUIT MINT FOUNDED FREE#
staying productive) and in the other room we served free alcohol to everybody and had demo stations. We rented them and in one room, the team was programming (i.e. The conference had rented all but two rooms – they were too small to be used. So what we did is we made sure that the entire company was there – all wearing same t-shirts, our PR agency and couple of friends wearing same t-shirts (brand consistency, i.e.) ensuring a much bigger presence. That’s all the time you get and beside that, you don’t have much presence (hard to get mindshare). The other big fact is that we launched at TC40 – you are on stage for 7 minutes and doing a live demo. It was like a red carpet – 600 people put up the badges (also means 600 banner ads for free!). After that, we sent out email to everybody that if you put up a badge on your website (“I want Mint”), we will give you three alpha access. We collected 20,000 email addresses even before the launch and 20,000 email is what our system could handle all at once. Give us your email and we will notify you of the next revolution in personal finance”.
#INTUIT MINT FOUNDED SERIES#
We also did series on personal finance disasters and then we got other bloggers from personal finance websites who would contribute blog articles for a link from us.Īt the bottom of every article, we had ‘Hey! Mint is cool thing and is launching. We also brought in some of the prominent bloggers as well. We didn’t have any money to hire writers, so we started writing ourselves and did simple series like ‘What’s in your wallet’, ‘Why am I using this credit card’ etc. Later we realized that possibly we can’t keep up with Microsoft Money and Intuit just on categorization features – so we gave away the free product and made money out of the insights from it (i.e lead-gen model for this industry).Įarly Days > How did you manage to gain traction? Apart from SEO, what other channels did you use? Tell us more about the customer acquisition strategy of Mint.Ībout 9 months before we launched the product, we started a personal finance blog. If the user knows where their money is going, we know where their money is going – and that led to our business model. We took yellow pages data, categorized and eventually, we were able to categorize 90% of expense data. Mint took away a lot of work out of the system. Maybe there was a problem when you have to go through 50 screens of setup. I started a web development company at the age of 16 and Mint was born of a personal frustration of using personal finance tools which entailed way too much work. Here is a detailed conversation with Aaron Patzer, Founder of Mint ( the conversation occurred over the phone and will be shared later as a podcast). Secondly, the product was way too well thought out – right from domain name (rumored that Aaron paid quite a big chunk of money for the domain) to the unconventional way it was marketed. Mint is special for couple of reasons – first and foremost, they manage to shake up the personal finance space and took the much bigger competition head on (Microsoft Money and Quicken). The bill payment service was then discontinued on June 30, 2018.At the age of 25, Aaron Patzer started Mint (in 2006) and after three years, sold to Intuit for $170mn. In 2016, claimed to have over 20 million users.Mint Bills, previously known as Check and Pageonce was a financial account management and bill payment service bought by Intuit in 2014 and integrated into in March 2017. As of November 2013, claimed to have more than 10 million users. Mint's primary service allows users to track bank, credit card, investment, and loan balances and transactions through a single user interface, as well as create budgets and set financial goals.As of 2010, claimed to connect with more than 16,000 US and Canadian financial institutions, and to support more than 17 million individual financial accounts. It was later renamed from "" to just "Mint". (which also produces TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma). was originally created by Aaron Patzer and provided account aggregation through a deal with Yodlee, but switched to using Intuit's own system for connecting to accounts after it was purchased by Intuit in 2009. Mint, also known as Intuit Mint (styled in its logo as intuit mint with dotted 't' characters in "intuit" and undotted 'i' characters) and formerly known as, is a personal financial management website and mobile app for the US and Canada produced by Intuit, Inc.