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Content Tagged mint
Mint Adds Support For Mortgage And Loan Tracking
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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Development Release: Linux Mint 5 XFCE CE RC1
Linux Mint
Distribution Release: Linux Mint 5
What Winning TechCrunch40 Did For Mint.com
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?
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Development Release: Linux Mint 5.0 RC2
Linspire.com - CNR support for Linux Mint
Strands Absorbs Another Personal Finance Company
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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Development Release: Linux Mint 5.0 Beta 1
Mint Moves Into Investment Tracking
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 let’s 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)
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Motley Fool Co-Brands With Mint
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.
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Distribution Release: Linux Mint 4.0
Mint Gets A Mint
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.
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