Precipice

I think actually the basic problem with Mint isn't those mentioned in the article (UI is meh, miscategorized transactions, data import customization). It's actually as mentioned in Wesabe's postmortem (http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/); for most people Mint doesn't actually get you to change your behavior. It just provides twentysomethings with some feeling that they're managing their finances, in return for getting pitched credit cards. Harder and more worthwhile than UI or functionality fixes are changing twentysomethings' behavior, or doing something interesting for older people with more complicated financial situations. [Mint's useless for my parents, with multiple bank accounts, investments, retirement, education and health savings accounts, etc.] One problem (and barrier to good competitors) are that aggregating finance data sucks. Mint started with Yodlee, which is nothing but a scraper for bank sites, and now runs on something Intuit built internally. It's hard to imagine many startups meaningfully tackling the problem.

Reading http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint made it seem like they "lost" because they gave up. Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand. Most successful businesses in fact face more than one “going out of business” crisis in their lifetime. The longer your business survives, the more chances there are to find new ways to thrive. Marc mentions they were near to running "indefinitely on revenue," but doesn't address why they didn't go that route. Sure, they were NEARLY failing, but running a business isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. You only "lose" when you go out of business. And yes, Mint was "winning." But still, the fact that Marc chooses not to focus on what they could have done just to survive makes it seem like he doesn't understand that staying in business is crucial, even when you're "losing."

I believe Wesabe had an implementation that did this. From http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/ Wesabe built our own data acquisition system, first using downloadable client programs (partially because that was easier and partially to preserve users’ privacy)

Yodlee is the leader. There's an old OSS code base that may (?) be useful. http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/ http://readwrite.com/2011/02/25/crawl-your-bank-account-with-w https://github.com/wesabe

Yeah Mint has so many flaws and warts but without the backend integrations it would be very tough to create a competitor. There was a good article a couple of years back about why Wesabe lost to Mint[1], written by one of the Wesabe co-founders. The biggest issue according to him was that they chose to write their own integrations instead of partnering with Yodlee. Since that time, Mint has left the Yodlee platform, but it gave them a first-mover advantage that no one has been able to overcome. [1] http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/

Like this write-up by Wesabi's cofounder as to why they lost to mint much beter: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

Mint uses Yodlee [1] for website scraping. Wesabe built their own and apparently inferior scraper, and this could be one of the reasons of why they lost to Mint.[2] [1] http://www.yodlee.com/ [2] http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

Wesabe? http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

Relevant: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

See this: http://blog.precipice.org/youre-the-ones