Wesabe vs. Mint: Lessons Learned

Marc Hedlund recently posted a great piece on why Wesabe lost to Mint in the battle of online personal finance apps. As many of you know, Mint was acquired by Intuit in 2009 for $170 million. Wesabe, on the other hand, closed its doors several months ago. Hedlund was the product designer (and later CEO) at Wasabe, so his point of view is especially relevant. He points out, for example, that Wesabe launched almost a year before Mint, contrary to what a lot of people assume. He also makes it clear that Wesabe's failure had nothing to do with design or brand identity.

Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that. Instead, I prioritized trying to build tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for the better, which I believed required people to more closely work with and understand their data. My goals may have been (okay, were) noble, but in the end we didn't help the people I wanted to since the product failed. I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all.

Case Study: A Recession-Proof Business

In case you didn't know, my family currently resides in Bulgaria. My wife is originally from here and has been doing some teaching. That's given me a unique opportunity to see how business is conducted in this part of the world. I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs to get their take on the situation in the EU's newest member state.

One of them, Vlado, is a former classmate of my wife who owns a convenience store business. He started from scratch and now has six different locations around town. I asked him how his business is holding up during the current downturn and was surprised at how upbeat his response was. Vlado's secret: The vast majority of his sales come from high-margin, recession-proof items like coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol. For most Bulgarians, these are not discretionary purchases. He's noticed customers trading down to cheaper brands during the crisis, but they still buy with the same frequency.

Of course, his success hasn't gone unnoticed. In a town of 75,000, he's seen about thirty new stores pop up in the last year alone. Several are owned by people that he once trained, but many of them are struggling and probably won't make it in the long run.