Intuit mint alternatives
These aren't people who "gave up", often, they made the smarter decisions. Given a 40% chance of making several million and a 3% chance of making billions, it's pretty reasonable for folks to take the higher probability, even if the statistical expected value is better with the VCs. Roughly, they took a chance with self-financing, and maybe a ~40% chance bet on making a good living, versus taking the VC money and having 3% on becoming unbelievably wealthy. It's demeaning and inaccurate to call them "lifestyle businesses", they made a calculated decision. I know several founders that started from nothing, built their company to turn a sizable profit and resisted big VC money. The better definition is simply a business that fits the founder's intent and lifestyle. I think this is too far narrow a definition of "lifestyle business". > A lifestyle business is one where the owners have set a target business size and profit level, and do not try to grow past this some owners even actively inhibit growth to keep the business from getting too large. I think you could run a reasonable lifestyle business here if you don’t take VC, but I’m skeptical this can ever be truly mass-market. That’s why you’ve seen a rise of more focused products like Robinhood, Wealthfront (going after the high end), savings apps like Acorn and digits, banking apps like Chime, etc (being a bank is profitable) that have incredibly strong revenue models attached. The fact is you need radically different products for different parts of your consumer audience.
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When I was there, we put a lot of thought into how to crack personal finance, and ultimately felt that “spending” was too complex and too niche. Lead-gen isn’t sufficient here Credit Karma has 10x the userbase and much stronger signals of intent, which is why they dominate digitize acquisition. So without a strong monetization engine that will work incredibly well at only ~10mm user range, you’re in trouble. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product.
For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. and maybe in the early days, the original team can stay true to that, but eventually time and money take their toll.Ĭompanies that really want to build lovable, user-aligned products, set up a revenue model that encourages them to stick to that long term. Every company will say they are different, and that they actually care about their users and about building a good product. I'd definitely encourage anyone joining (or starting) a company to think about what the revenue model they are choosing means for the product and company long-term. This also explains a lot of the problems with the internet at large today-misaligned business models. It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products. Many personal finance products are free, but make money by selling data or trying to upsell you on something else that you don't need (like, say, a credit card you don't need or a tax product that is overpriced ). Both those things happened with Mint.Īnother important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model.
One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here.