Full Details On Mint’s $14 Million Series C Round
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I am sure Yodlee.com is a profitable company but I do not think their investors will ever see much return on the 110 million dollars worth of investment since 1999.
If you take away Yodlee powered backend, Mint.com does not have much going on for them other than the subscriber base. If you have a hard time monetizing from the subscribers you have, It's just going to be a long painful ride for everyone involved.
Because personal finance is intimidating, and nobody wants to do it. By having virtually nothing to do in Mint, it lowers the intimidation factor that people have when thinking about managing their money. It's a way to get people in the door, and getting that far has always been the struggle behind personal finance sites.
While true, the same holds for all information that we have online that is important to us. But it's a big mental block that both these sites need to overcome. Yodlee kinda shifted that burden by selling software to financial providers whom we already trust by opening accounts.
I'd like to see Mint leverage on it's user data but since it hasn't yet I doubt it is as simple as turn on AdSense and watch the money pile up. Which leads me to wonder when will they start leveraging it and how?
I think this sounds better (at least on paper) because you are both the friend of the consumer and the institution. In your model, the institution becomes more or less the enemy. Actually, since you (Mint 2.0) are trying to unite consumers against the bank, the bank will just shut your site down by not blocking access to the consumer's transactional data.
By grouping multiple customers together, Mint is further reducing transaction costs for the bank, so that it may become economic for Mint to give some of the rewards to the consumers, in the form of higher interest (Mint earns less because the bank will have to pay Mint less to make up for the better deal to the consumers).
If this allows Mint to generate enough leads, the smaller fee may be made up by an increase in volume.
The way I originally understood it was more from an aggregation of power into the hands of the consumer. By banding together they would be able to leverage a better rate. In that sense I would see the bank as becoming a common enemy (probably a poor choice of wording too).
This is an interesting model in that Mint becomes the preferred provider or discount broker or something along those lines.
Having experimented with it a fair bit, I can safely say that if it's not a content site with CRAP-TONS of page views, it's really hard to make PPC ads work. Stuff like Gmail is not a big win in terms of CTR because users quickly learn to ignore the ads-- and neither is Mint or RescueTime (our baby). Mint can play the leadgen game (sending people to different banks) but bank changes and new mortgages are rare decisions and I'd imagine that Mint users often ignore the lead gen links and focus on their own content.
I also imagine that they have a similar problem that we do-- giving people data visualization isn't inherently sticky and people drift away from data like this. It gets boring. And because it's self-improvement/awareness focused, it's like a gym that doesn't have a membership fee and has no cancellation cost-- few people are disciplined enough to stick with it.
On the data asset front, we have the same type of asset. But it only really has value (beyond linkbait/PR) if it's a representative population. I'd wager Mint's userbase decidedly doesn't NOT represent a cross-section of America.
I think Mint has a lot of promise, but I think they have some tough problems to solve. And by taking $14m (presumably on a $50m valuation), they've just signed up for a very very long road.