7 ms·

The real reason "Wesabe lost" (to Mint)

47 points by QuantumGood 16y ago

Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand. The longer your business survives, the more chances there are to find new ways to thrive. The article http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint made it sound like they gave up. Businesses can survive even when their original goals do not—running a business isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Yes, Wesabe was behind in the race with Mint. But you don't "lose" until you go out of business.

QuantumGood 16y ago
Reading http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint 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."
JeremyChase 16y ago
I highly doubt they just gave up. I am more inclined to believe that they were facing declining revenue with no money in the bank.
- jerf 16y ago
  Yes, I am very uncomfortable with the logic that since Wesabi didn't lay out their every effort to save the company, they must therefore not have put any thought into it. That's an unjustified leap; perhaps they didn't think it made for a very interesting read, if nothing else.
akv 16y ago
This is just opinion, not based on any facts or circumstances that the companies might have faced.
DannoHung 16y ago
As someone who tried using Wesabe seriously for several months, I will tell you why they went out of business: their product was not very useful. I spent quite a while entering receipts and tagging things and all I ever got was a few charts that showed me how much money I had spent. There was no tool for budget estimation, there was nothing to help do mortgage calculations, cripes, there was hardly a point to using the website at all with the sole exception that they had some pretty good discussion forums. The only reason I preferred Wesabe to Mint was because Mint wanted to reach into the guts of all your accounts and that felt kinda creepy.
- po 16y ago
  I also used wesabe for several months. When mint.com launched I was tempted but I was initially turned off by the online-ness of it. I liked that wesabe was a desktop based product and I had ownership of my data. Now that idea seems a bit quaint. I think people (including myself) have gotten a lot more comfortable with their financial data being online. I am not using mint (for my US-based accounts) and I like it a lot. The reason I stopped using wesabe was because 1.) I was MAc OS X and the desktop client they had was buggy. and b) I kept hitting bugs with the banks I used. I don't think they were able to keep up the pace. It was frustrating. I'm sure it was not lack of effort on their part. Perhaps they should have been willing to compromise more. It's really hard to say. I really appreciated Marc dumping his thoughts on the matter.
- revorad 16y ago
  I wonder if becoming a Q&A site for personal finance would have been a good pivot for Wesabe.
- rodh257 16y ago
  yeah it wasn't overly useful, but it was the best that I could get, being an Australian (thus, my bank was unsupported on Mint). The firefox plugin uploader of wesabe meant that any bank could be supported, I'm interested as to why Mint couldn't offer a similar thing?
- cdr 16y ago
  I found the receipt-entering and thing-tagging useful in and of itself. The auto-labeling was awesome for watching my accounts - you generally only had to label/tag a business once. I vastly, vastly prefer Wesabe's auto-labeling system to Mint's POS labeling. On Mint, any transaction from Chili Ave (a major road) gets autolabeled as Chili's, the restaurant - and so on. It makes Mint worse than useless for me. I get better info logging onto my bank's 90s era site.
zaidf 16y ago
Who's the author? His about page brings up nothing.
Aegean 16y ago
This is the single question I had in mind reading the other article. why did mint's success have to mean death for wesabe? he even identifies a yet unsolved problem that the service is not accurate or helpful enough. Were the costs too prohibitive? I think you can cut the costs, downscale, and continue until finding the right spot and rise again. Also I expect the market to be very big and particularly accommodating for several startups in this area.
n8agrin 16y ago
The author claims that businesses often reinvent themselves in order to survive. As I understand it Wesabe _did_ reinvent themselves. I believe they were working closely with banks to have them implement some Wesabe related tools directly for the banks' customers. I didn't work at Wesabe so I may be wrong about this. Personally, I stopped using Wesabe for the same reasons that DannoHung mentions in his comment. I wasn't getting a good 10,000ft view of what was happening to my money and there were no tools available to help me budget. Shame though because I'm not exactly thrilled about giving Mint/Intuit/Yodell my personal info.
Swizec 16y ago
After following this debate of wesabe vs. mint (and thinking it was about delicious things like wasabi and mint when I first heard about it) I wanted to try out Mint. It wanted my online banking username/password ... who the hell gives the username and password of their bank to a website? In light of unimportant social networks like twitter and facebook making damn sure you aren't sharing the username/password combination around ... people give their ... I'm confused. How do these sites stay in business? Do people really care that little about security?
- brown9-2 16y ago
  I'm not sure if you don't realize it but the entire purpose and key feature of Mint (and perhaps Wesabe as well, I've never tried it) is to aggregate all of your banking information in one place. Of course to do so they need the credentials to your various accounts, as the banks don't offer any sort of open APIs or OpenID or anything like that. If you're not comfortable with this then of course the product is not for you. You can read more about Mint's claims of security and privacy at http://www.mint.com/privacy/ http://www.mint.com/privacy/
  - Swizec 16y ago
    Yeah I honestly don't feel safe sharing that kind of info. I would much rather use my bank's "export data" feature once a week or so and uploading it there. Also, maybe my bank is weird, but how can Mint have access with just the user/pass combination? I can't do anything online without a RSA certificate ...
    - brown9-2 16y ago
      I don't think it is public info how they accomplish it but it seems that they are simply scraping the site, for a good number of my personal accounts at least. Mint has me answer a number of the individual bank's "security questions" to be able to fully set up the bank account in Mint. If the bank changes the login procedure in anyway, then I have to re-edit the info about the bank that Mint has.
maukdaddy 16y ago
"Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand." Thank you, thank you, thank you for not using the "pivot" buzzword.
alsomike 16y ago
Personally, I don't think Marc gets it at all. He says the goal was to get people to change their financial behavior, and this is a noble goal. Maybe, but so is building a weight loss application for people who don't want to lose weight.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
precipice 16y ago
(This is Marc from Wesabe.) I definitely, and intentionally, left out a lot of the detail about why we decided to turn the site off. My post was already huge and that final decision wasn't what I was writing about; I was writing about the competition between the companies and how people perceived it. Also, some parts of that decision are personal and I didn't want to write about them. Of course, though, we didn't just try one thing and then give up. We tried everything we could think of to keep it going. That said, I addressed some of the reasons for the decision to shut down in the post announcing our closure: http://blog.wesabe.com/2010/06/30/wesabe-is-discontinuing-its-accounts-tab-as-of-july-31st/ http://blog.wesabe.com/2010/06/30/wesabe-is-discontinuing-it...
stretchwithme 16y ago
The author was making some sense until he held Tesla up as an example of not giving up. Using the government to raise further capital from others against their will is hardly a good example.

47 points by QuantumGood 16y ago

QuantumGood 16y ago

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

JeremyChase 16y ago

I highly doubt they just gave up. I am more inclined to believe that they were facing declining revenue with no money in the bank.

jerf 16y ago
Yes, I am very uncomfortable with the logic that since Wesabi didn't lay out their every effort to save the company, they must therefore not have put any thought into it. That's an unjustified leap; perhaps they didn't think it made for a very interesting read, if nothing else.

akv 16y ago

This is just opinion, not based on any facts or circumstances that the companies might have faced.

DannoHung 16y ago

As someone who tried using Wesabe seriously for several months, I will tell you why they went out of business: their product was not very useful. I spent quite a while entering receipts and tagging things and all I ever got was a few charts that showed me how much money I had spent. There was no tool for budget estimation, there was nothing to help do mortgage calculations, cripes, there was hardly a point to using the website at all with the sole exception that they had some pretty good discussion forums. The only reason I preferred Wesabe to Mint was because Mint wanted to reach into the guts of all your accounts and that felt kinda creepy.

po 16y ago
I also used wesabe for several months. When mint.com launched I was tempted but I was initially turned off by the online-ness of it. I liked that wesabe was a desktop based product and I had ownership of my data. Now that idea seems a bit quaint. I think people (including myself) have gotten a lot more comfortable with their financial data being online. I am not using mint (for my US-based accounts) and I like it a lot. The reason I stopped using wesabe was because 1.) I was MAc OS X and the desktop client they had was buggy. and b) I kept hitting bugs with the banks I used. I don't think they were able to keep up the pace. It was frustrating. I'm sure it was not lack of effort on their part. Perhaps they should have been willing to compromise more. It's really hard to say. I really appreciated Marc dumping his thoughts on the matter.
revorad 16y ago
I wonder if becoming a Q&A site for personal finance would have been a good pivot for Wesabe.
rodh257 16y ago
yeah it wasn't overly useful, but it was the best that I could get, being an Australian (thus, my bank was unsupported on Mint). The firefox plugin uploader of wesabe meant that any bank could be supported, I'm interested as to why Mint couldn't offer a similar thing?
cdr 16y ago
I found the receipt-entering and thing-tagging useful in and of itself. The auto-labeling was awesome for watching my accounts - you generally only had to label/tag a business once. I vastly, vastly prefer Wesabe's auto-labeling system to Mint's POS labeling. On Mint, any transaction from Chili Ave (a major road) gets autolabeled as Chili's, the restaurant - and so on. It makes Mint worse than useless for me. I get better info logging onto my bank's 90s era site.

zaidf 16y ago

Who's the author? His about page brings up nothing.

Aegean 16y ago

This is the single question I had in mind reading the other article. why did mint's success have to mean death for wesabe? he even identifies a yet unsolved problem that the service is not accurate or helpful enough. Were the costs too prohibitive? I think you can cut the costs, downscale, and continue until finding the right spot and rise again. Also I expect the market to be very big and particularly accommodating for several startups in this area.

n8agrin 16y ago

The author claims that businesses often reinvent themselves in order to survive. As I understand it Wesabe _did_ reinvent themselves. I believe they were working closely with banks to have them implement some Wesabe related tools directly for the banks' customers. I didn't work at Wesabe so I may be wrong about this. Personally, I stopped using Wesabe for the same reasons that DannoHung mentions in his comment. I wasn't getting a good 10,000ft view of what was happening to my money and there were no tools available to help me budget. Shame though because I'm not exactly thrilled about giving Mint/Intuit/Yodell my personal info.

Swizec 16y ago

After following this debate of wesabe vs. mint (and thinking it was about delicious things like wasabi and mint when I first heard about it) I wanted to try out Mint. It wanted my online banking username/password ... who the hell gives the username and password of their bank to a website? In light of unimportant social networks like twitter and facebook making damn sure you aren't sharing the username/password combination around ... people give their ... I'm confused. How do these sites stay in business? Do people really care that little about security?

brown9-2 16y ago
I'm not sure if you don't realize it but the entire purpose and key feature of Mint (and perhaps Wesabe as well, I've never tried it) is to aggregate all of your banking information in one place. Of course to do so they need the credentials to your various accounts, as the banks don't offer any sort of open APIs or OpenID or anything like that. If you're not comfortable with this then of course the product is not for you. You can read more about Mint's claims of security and privacy at http://www.mint.com/privacy/ http://www.mint.com/privacy/
- Swizec 16y ago
  Yeah I honestly don't feel safe sharing that kind of info. I would much rather use my bank's "export data" feature once a week or so and uploading it there. Also, maybe my bank is weird, but how can Mint have access with just the user/pass combination? I can't do anything online without a RSA certificate ...
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    I don't think it is public info how they accomplish it but it seems that they are simply scraping the site, for a good number of my personal accounts at least. Mint has me answer a number of the individual bank's "security questions" to be able to fully set up the bank account in Mint. If the bank changes the login procedure in anyway, then I have to re-edit the info about the bank that Mint has.

maukdaddy 16y ago

"Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand." Thank you, thank you, thank you for not using the "pivot" buzzword.

alsomike 16y ago

Personally, I don't think Marc gets it at all. He says the goal was to get people to change their financial behavior, and this is a noble goal. Maybe, but so is building a weight loss application for people who don't want to lose weight.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

precipice 16y ago

(This is Marc from Wesabe.) I definitely, and intentionally, left out a lot of the detail about why we decided to turn the site off. My post was already huge and that final decision wasn't what I was writing about; I was writing about the competition between the companies and how people perceived it. Also, some parts of that decision are personal and I didn't want to write about them. Of course, though, we didn't just try one thing and then give up. We tried everything we could think of to keep it going. That said, I addressed some of the reasons for the decision to shut down in the post announcing our closure: http://blog.wesabe.com/2010/06/30/wesabe-is-discontinuing-its-accounts-tab-as-of-july-31st/ http://blog.wesabe.com/2010/06/30/wesabe-is-discontinuing-it...

stretchwithme 16y ago

The author was making some sense until he held Tesla up as an example of not giving up. Using the government to raise further capital from others against their will is hardly a good example.