Why Wesabe Lost to Mint - <AUTHOR> http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint <comment><USER5> He doesn't give the name element enough credit. It's _huge_. Mint is one of the two examples I give of best brand names ever.

Not kidding. _Ever_. Silk Soymilk is the other example I use.

Mint's a killer brand name, I think it'd be literally impossible to beat Mint on natural branding in personal finance, it's the most perfect name I could imagine. It has double, good meanings - "Mint" as in a place where coins/money are minted, and of course the plant/candy. Then the plant/candy is associated with being fresh, clean, safe, and it's colored green, again like money.

It's just genius. It's also only four letters, easy to remember, relevant, and they got the domain name for it. It's really, really good. The only other name so good is "silk soymilk", for basically all the same reasons. (soymilk -SoymILK - easy to remember, silk is clean/smooth/elegant/upscale, four letters, hard to forget, etc).

Seriously, Mint might be the best named/naturally branded online company ever. I'm not joking. If I ever had to do a lecture on naming and branding, I'd 100% for sure use Mint as an example.

<comment><USER6> (This is Marc, author of the linked post.)

I think people attribute success to a name because that fits the mental model people have for success: You just choose the right name! And then you win!

That's nonsense. Winning is a long series of decisions that have to go right far more often than not. I pulled out the decisions I thought really were critical and irreparable turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot of work to fulfill, _both_ for us and for Mint.

You'd like to believe the name is all that matters because then the path to success is so short and so clear. It just isn't so. (And there are counterexamples galore that you're emphatically ignoring -- companies with fantastic names that never got anywhere.)

To be clear: they did have a better name. I say so in the article. But that's not enough to win.

<comment><USER5> > I pulled out the decisions I thought were really, critical and irreperable > turning points -- hard decisions that required a lot of analysis and a lot > of work to fulfill, both for us and for Mint.

Buying mint.com was a hard and critical decision for Mint - they paid $2 million for it in equity during their series A. I think you massively underestimate it as a reason they won. I think if the names are flipped - <USER2> your company was named mint.com, theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win. I did enjoy the article a lot though and thought it was very honest and good reading and insightful. But maybe you underestimate the power of their name and branding? Mint might be the best naturally-branded website of all time (edit: maybe ask.com is better, which also proves that branding and name isn't everything). But that was a big advantage.

I thought the rest of your post was very good and insightful and I agree with a lot of it, but I do think you underestimated the name effect. It's big, it has a multiplier on everything - more press, more PR, more virality, more trust, more conversion, more desirability, more user retention, etc, etc, etc, etc.

<comment><USER7> > I think if the names are flipped - if your company was named mint.com, > theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win.

Whoa there, you're jumping to extreme, unsupported conclusions. No one disagrees that Mint's branding is great. But to count that as the main reason why they won? Even top 3-5 reasons? That flies in the face of the wisdom given by _every_ successful startup veteran: _it's all about execution._ If Mint.com hadn't provided the instant gratification that got people talking, if they hadn't won TC50, if they hadn't spent heaps of money on marketing, they would have been dead in the water.

Don't get me wrong: branding is important. But if your product+marketing is inferior, you'll probably lose, and if it's superior, you'll overcome all but the most disastrous names. (Nobody knew what a googol was, most people still don't, and look who's running the show.) You're focusing on the name to such an extent that you're ignoring most of the factors that lead a business to success or death... it's like MBA guys who've never built a product in their lives, yet say things like, "Oh I'll just outsource it, it's not important." Yeah right.

<comment><USER8> Supporting evidence:

Two years back I tried Mint, Wesabe and the new Quicken online.

From those three sites, only Mint could retrieve data for my WellsFargo visa. So I stayed.

Quicken was the worse - they actually made changes to my account (for which WF notified me by email) and their support was basically useless when I asked them about it.

So, the name had almost nothing to do with my decision - if Wesabe had the same scrapper as Mint, things would have been different.

(I misspelled Wesabe twice while writing this post - so maybe the name does matter... but I still maintain that a working product matters more)

<comment><USER9> Until this post, I thought we were talking about the Mint linux distro.

Today I learned that people use a program called Mint for handling their finances. I would have expected, at least, a program called "Money".

<comment><USER10> That name would just get them sued by Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi, I was one of the early Mint.com product guys.

I just want to say thanks to Marc for sharing this. I know how difficult it is to be objective in a post-mortem analysis, and I think your post is a very balanced (and dignified) assessment.

There's one more important differentiator, however, that hasn't been discussed yet and which pre-empts a lot of this commentary, that I thought I'd share: Mint intentionally targeted a different market.

Most consumer spending in the US is managed by middle aged men and women that are not especially financially nor technically savvy. It was our view that previous personal finance solutions (Quicken, MS Money, and the following web- based solutions) catered more towards the technically/financially proficient, and had therefore missed the larger market opportunity.

So we tried our best to ignore the Silicon Valley drivel around "viral distribution" and "cloud security" and focus instead on issues like "How can we make it easier for a soccer Mom in Kansas to set and meet her monthly grocery budget?".

The Mint brand (including the name, visuals, and user experience) were all designed with this in Mind. They were definitely supportive, as Marc correctly points out, but in no way were they determinate.

I think Mint and Wesabe were both strong products that served their users' needs well. We just happened to target different users, and ultimately there were more of ours.

</comment><comment><USER12> The essential point seems to be that Mint was easier for users. This is something we constantly emphasize at YC. You care a lot about your startup. You have no idea how little a potential user cares. So you can't let the activation energy be high.

Plus users are mostly not programmers. They're terrified by software. Most software they've tried in their lives has caused them pain, either by not working right or by being incomprehensible (which are indistinguishable to the victim).

So imagine you're designing your app for someone who's both apathetic and cringing with fear at the same time. You cannot make it too easy. If there's something you can do that will take a week and make your app 1% easier to start using, it's worth doing.

<comment><USER13> Your reasoning can be applied on a micro level also, comparing the name mint to wesabe. The former is unquestionably easier to remember, type, and tell friends. Is it worth spending a lot of money to get a premium domain? The question sounds very similar to asking 'how much effort should I spend making 1% improvements in usability?'.

One of my friends spent (from what I heard) over 200K for a very good domain. It seems wasteful on one hand, but on the other hand they must get a lot of credibility because of it.

<comment><USER12> Depends on the situation and the name. I can't imagine many situations where it would be worth paying 200k. You can get good enough names for free usually, or at most 10k. It just takes some ingenuity.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps, but most high-priced domains will retain a significant chunk of their value if not appreciate over time. In the worst case, you resell it.

<comment><USER12> Interesting point. For most startups though the opportunity cost of having that cash tied up is a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a really good article and it does cover a few things that were probably factors, but I remember looking at both Wesabe and Mint back when they were both new and I chose Mint for two reasons:

1\. The design was better, which made me feel more comfortable about handing over my data (Mint's designer Jason Purtorti talks about this here: <http://vimeo.com/15066599>)

2\. Mint seemed more focused on being a really simple-to-use webapp to analyze my finances, whereas Wesabe's messaging indicated that they were trying to leverage the wisdom of crowds to help people make better financial decisions. I don't want the crowd analyzing or managing my finances, and it wasn't clear at a glance how their goal could be accomplished while protecting my privacy.

Also, as he mentions regarding the Yodlee thing, Wesabe had a "download this application and it'll retrieve your bank data" thing, but Mint just worked with thousands of financial institutions, and that seemed much easier and more reliable.

Regardless, this was a great blog post and I wish we could see more introspective posts like this when ventures don't work out the way the founders hoped.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all...Their approach completely kicked our approach's ass...Changing people's behavior is really hard_

Hmmm, reminds me of an old saying, "When in doubt, leave it out." Now I'm going back to all my forms and mockups, wondering if there's anything else that can be removed. Short attention spans, human nature, and plain old laziness make "Keep It Simple Stupid" more relevant than ever.

 _A domain name doesn't win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn't lose you a market. You can't blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you'll win._

Bulletin board material. Front and center. (I really should be spending more time writing code and less worrying about the market or reading Hacker News.)

[EDIT: We complain a lot here about "survivor bias". This is an excellent post and a great counterexample with much to be learned. Wesabe may have lost, but AFAIC, Marc is most definitely a winner.]

<comment><USER15> _I really should be spending more time writing code and less worrying about the market or reading Hacker News._

I couldn't disagree more. Worrying about your market is how you know _what_ to code. I think the number of startups who fail because they don't get sales, marketing, and product-market fit outnumber those who fail because they didn't write enough code or good enough code 100:1.

<comment><USER16> _Worrying about your market is how you know what to code._

You're absolutely right, Ryan, in theory all the time and in practice most of the time. But there are exceptions...

OP is an exception. When it came to understanding his market and satisfying their needs he did so many things right and still got his ass kicked. By someone who "dumbed it down".

I can't tell you how many times I've beaten enterprisey competitors with teams of marketing and domain experts because the customer understood my simple offering over their complex one.

I really hate that old Henry Ford quote, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses,'" but there's a grain of truth in it. At some point, you just gotta stop asking everyone what they think, say "fuck it", build what you think is right, get it out there, and find out for real. I believe I'm at that point, that's all. Whether others think they're also at that point is for them to decide for themselves.

<comment><USER15> Fair enough; I understand that there are a variety of cases, and I was responding to what I perceived when I read it as a general statement, rather than a self-assessment of your particular situation.

 _because the customer understood my simple offering over their complex one_

This is a good example of a better product-market fit. My problem is that I have a tendency to do what a lot of hacker-entrepreneurs do: hack. But that's often not what's most needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I looked at both Wesabe and Mint when trying to decide on a aggregation service. I ended up choosing Mint.

\- Mint was easy to remember, and easy to spell. Wesabe was neither. I often typoed the name as "wasabi"

\- Mint didn't make me do any real work. Wesabe made me do all the work.

\- Mint felt private. Wesabe wanted me to work with "the crowd" of other users

\- Mint was simple and beautiful. Wesabe looked rough around the edges

So I went with Mint.

<comment><USER18> This is the most important comment in this thread. Wesabe should have listened to potential customers like you without being defensive of their offering and adjusted UX/positioning/messaging accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This "Myth": _Mint's design, while definitely very appealing and definitely a factor in getting people to trust the company, doesn't seem to me to be enough to explain the different outcomes,_

Is contradicted by this: _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_

UX design isn't just pretty pictures - which is why its now called "user experience" as opposed to "user interface" now.

I think a lot of people dismiss ux considerations because they think its just the part of the site thats "pretty" and its not.

<comment><USER6> (This is Marc, the author of the linked post.)

You're right, I both credited and dismissed a very large category with the word "design." In my view some people believe that it was just the visual appeal of Mint's site that did us in. In my view that helped them but not enough to kill us. I do think that we spent our usability effort (as I say in the post) in the wrong place, making editing, for instance, easy, instead of making editing totally optional.

<comment><USER20> Too bad you did not have the funds to continue, I thought it was pretty a useful service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To me, the larger story is about risk. A lot of people here, if directed to build a personal finance startup, would go about it in much the same way that Wesabe did. Launch early, attempt to build a community of enthusiasts, and grow the site organically (through word of mouth) as opposed to advertising. This is the time-honored way, and a lot of startups have succeeded by it.

What did Patser do? He went and dropped $2 million on the domain name before he even had a single user, and then inked a sweetheart deal with Yodlee to gain an overnight technical advantage on the competition. He spent money on advertising, artwork, and design. (Interestingly, the claim that Mint spent $1/user conflicts with something I read earlier: <http://www.slate.com/id/2228846/>. Not sure where the truth lay.)

He did everything that the 37 Signals / MVP crowd says you shouldn't. I'm not criticizing, but in their pursuit of instant profitability / dislike of VC money, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the value of gambling big. Patser took risks, and the market rewarded him for it.

<comment><USER22> Is that about risk then? Or is it about the advantage of being the guy with $2million in his pocket to drop on the business before he even starts, and the connections to get the sweetheart deal with Yodlee?

<comment><USER21> I don't know anything about the guy other than what I have read, but nothing I have read suggests to me that a) he started out rich or b) he had any sort of insider connection to Yodlee. (TFA plainly states that they could have gone the Yodlee route first, but chose not to.)

He just strikes me as someone who is a smart businessman, better at it than your average hacker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I LOVED the wesabe downloadable data import client. The fact that I didn't have to fork over the login credentials to my financial accounts was a huge win & what kept me away from Mint until wesabe closed. But clearly this was not an issue for most people and hence why the simplicity of the yodlee backed solution ultimately won.

Wesabe did one very interesting thing when they launched which was that the CEO had open office hours when you could call and talk to him. They were one of the first "Web 2.0" companies to do this. I think they stopped this at some point, but I always loved the concept.

<comment><USER24> Handing over bank usernames and passwords in order to use Mint was the one thing I thought would be a barrier for Mint compared to Wesabe, esp. since for my banks I can't provide one (limited) credential for Mint while keeping one for myself. It's interesting that a tool like Mint, which is designed to empower people with control over their finances, asks people to give up control over their financial information and most people seem to be OK with that.

<comment><USER25> Same. As an aside, does anyone know any banks that _do_ offer this? It seems like a no-brainer to me to allow users a set of read-only credentials for online account access.

<comment><USER26> A lot of banks offer OFX access, it's what stuff like Money and Quicken talk to. It's mostly read only, although I think there are a couple of banks that can do bill pay over OFX. This is pretty common knowledge if you're writing this kind of software.

Some vendors, like Ameritrade use different credentials for OFX.

Mint/Yodlee asked for front door passwords and security answers that give them the ability to trade securities and empty my account, rather than the OFX id/pin that would give them access to a standard API to retrieve transactions and balances. This made me seriously doubt their competence, and I never became a customer.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange> for details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thank you Marc for your insightful article. It must stung like the beejesus to work so hard and still get your head handed to you. It seems like your decisions were guided by your high-mindedness, believe in the best in the people, for the people, for example: people should work and understand closely their financial data. Betcha learned people are f@!#$%ing sloth, eh? Perhaps this is a case of self-project yourself onto your target market, then finds out that people are not like you at all, because if they were, they'd get off their asses and start a company, change the world or something like that :)

I tried wesabe and mint. Mint was easier to use. However, now that you explained a little bit about your Yodlee decision, I can sympathize w/ your conclusion. It turns out to be strategically deadly wrong but given your high- mindedness, don't beat yourself up too much. You can always take comfort in the fact that you were not "Webvan" :).

To get websabe to where it was, you must have made a number of "right" decisions also so you should reviews those too. You'll be back, I'm sure, and we look forward to your next venture. good luck.

ps. do consider the whole user-experience next time. pps. I ditched mint and went back to quicken for better control of my data and mint haven't got the cash account feature to fully work yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> The key lesson seems to be that ease-of-use is of absolutely paramount importance. Maybe this can even be expressed in mathematical terms: you can't just look at the "raw value" provided by a service, you have to look at the _ratio_ of value received to time and effort invested.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I'm just ignorant but I never even heard of Wesabe until this HN post. I've been an unhappy Mint user for years though (I still argue Mint is nowhere near as good as Microsoft Money was).

So if I'm representative of "average people", then lack of marketing may have been a folly too.

<comment><USER30> I'm in the same boat as you. I'm a happy Mint user and had never, ever heard of Wesabe.

<comment><USER14> Yes, this is equivalent to the statement "Mint succeeded and Wesabe failed", and not the reason it did.

Mint reached probably an order-magnitude more people ultimately, so it isn't surprising that most of us haven't heard of wesabe.

<comment><USER30> I disagree. I see mint reaching that "more people" as the reason why it succeeded, not a side effect

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> From the article: When we talked to Yodlee in 2006, the company was crumbling, having failed to get acquired and losing executives. They were also very aggressive in negotiation, telling us they would give us six months' service nearly free and then tell us the final price we'd be charged going forward. \--

This is pretty disturbing to me. It seems what Marc and Wesabe did was the right thing to do to not trust Yodlee HOWEVER, it also appears that the user doesn't care a damn.

How do you handle such situations?

<comment><USER32> You weigh the cost/risk of dealing with Yodlee against making it yourself. Marc seems to have used a usually sound heuristic - I don't trust these people, I don't want to bother working with them. Personally, I would have agreed - a partner that's an aggressive negotiator with high executive turnover can end up being an enormous liability in more ways than one. Better avoid them.

But heuristics are by definition imperfect. If Yodlee really gave Mint as much momentum as Marc thinks they did, this might have been an exception to the rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The one thing to resonate with me the most is "No one, in my view, solved the financial problems of consumers."

Marc is right. Financial literacy is a huge problem for a country that's supposed to be the richest in the world. How do we teach people the importance of personal finance management or change their spending habits? We teach all sorts of things in school except this.

Personally, I have been on a campaign for the last 9 months to teach people about the importance of planning, budgeting and saving. It's been difficult convincing people that they should think about their future. Even when I'm sitting down at the kitchen table face to face, it is difficult to establish the reasoning why they should care in the first place.

There are 4 types of people I encounter with the most:

1\. I don't know how to take care of my finances and I don't care about my future.

2\. I do know that it is important, but everything is going to be okay even I remain ignorant.

3\. I don't know, but I would like to learn more, but don't know how.

4\. I know some, I think I have a good idea, but still want to learn more, but don't have somebody to turn to.

The common problem between all of them:

1\. Most people don't know WHY they should care about their personal finance.

2\. Most people don't know where to get trust worthy information to help them or have access to professionals.

I have been trying to solve these problems with one family at a time. If you can do the same with power of reach through the internet, it would be golden.

</comment><comment><USER34> Excellent, clear thinking; thank you for this analysis. I wanted to ask more about:

 _we both totally failed at... actually helping people._

 _Changing people's behavior is really hard._

Yes, but it seemed to me -- and this post confirms -- that Wesabe was genuinely thinking about this problem of how to get people to change behavior, to improve their lives. Mint seemed (and still seems) to have a much lower ambition in this respect.

Question #1: Was Wesabe actively engaging in experiments in how to help people/change behavior? I know the support community did help some people, but it sounds from your post that in its existing form it didn't do something palpably different from what people would do on their own. So it seems that Wesabe ought to have been building as many experiments as possible, hoping for something that seemed (at least anecdotally, at first) to help some subset of users above-and-beyond what they were able to do elsewhere.

I suspect Wesabe was running some experiments but too few. If that's true, what prevented those experiments from happening? Infrastructure work/scaling challenges/security concerns? Was the employee or user count too high to efficiently run experiments?

Question #2: If Wesabe was running a good number of experiments, why was Wesabe unable to secure investment for a longer runway of more experiments? After fixing the Yodlee problem (which I agree was a major problem), Wesabe seemed well positioned to lead in experiments to change behavior. The space still seems enormously ripe for innovation. So why did new funding not happen? Was Mint's success demotivating? Was the timing bad, given the economic downturn?

</comment><comment><USER35> I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website.

I had some exchanges with Marc and he was great and helpful. I was taking a big risk on signing up with Wesabe so I conviced my superiors to give me one month to set it up, and a second month to run an internal pilot and then decide if we would launch the PFM integration to all customers.

Unfortunately we ran into some issues, that were minor in my mind, but my employer being in the financial services industry they have a very low tolerance for risk when working with customer's financial data, so they called off the Wesabe integration within two weeks into the first month.

This was for the enterprise Wesabe product, mind you, and was around six months ago so I guess Wesabe was already in its last run anyway, but I guess not having a stable enough MVP for their enterprise customers might not have helped much.

I wish you great success in your next endeavor, precipice!

<comment><USER36> Oh, shoot I just made a comment about this. I was suggesting if they had focused squarely on enterprise earlier, they might have been fine.

Do you think a future finance aggregation tool, that was focused entirely on enterprise (with subsequent accountability), would have had a better chance of success?

So many smaller banks have online banking that is lacking, I'm always frustrated that there aren't more companies trying to make that experience better.

<comment><USER35> That's actually what BankSimple is trying to solve, right?

The problem with enterprise is, like I said, they have so many regulations and tight tolerances, they are not very startup friendly.

However, if Wesabe was bought by Intuit and in turn Intuit offered exactly the same product that Wesabe already had, the banks would easily pay $10,000 a month for it just based on the name.

For reference, Wesabe was around $2,500 for their most expensive enterprise plan, which was very inexpensive when compared to having Intuit add your bank to Quicken for $10,000 a month.

<comment><USER36> I thought BankSimple was its own online bank.

Yea, I imagine you could get away with a very hefty license fee. I know of one company that charges affiliate TV stations $5m a year license for essentially a glorified hosted CMS. If they can get that for something that doesn't even remotely require the kind of privacy a bank system needs, the price tag for an online banking tool should be pretty high. Even $500k-$1m+ a year seems reasonable by comparison. Its really all a matter of support and sales prowess

<comment><USER35> An actual BankSimple employee might be able to explain it better, so I welcome any corrections, and I might be very wrong since I believe that only during the last two weeks or so is that the whole team has been built and started wholly working on the product, but this is what I knew about BankSimple from a few months back.

They are working on a great online front end, focusing on awesome user experience, while partnering with another financial institution (just one, or more, I'm not really sure) to handle the back end: all of the transfers, payments, ACH handling, and so on.

So basically you have this awesome online "bank" with a great web PFM but the business processes are actually being handled by an established brick and mortar bank.

There are many banks and they do one thing great - handle money - but many of them have awful web/internet teams. So in comes BankSimple, they solve the web part of the equation and partner up with one or more banks.

If you think about it, it kinda sounds like what Mint could be if they were more than an aggregator and closer to an online bank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> On the name thing I see a lot of misunderstanding about this. A name can be a little silly, sure. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Mint. People use this to justify terrible domain names all the time.

There are a few things the above have in common that Wesabe doesn't:

1\. They're real words. (Technically Google isn't, but it's a misspelling of a real word that probably more people than not would make.Very few people, if told about it, would type in googol.com). Look at the Alexa top 100 in the US, it's almost entirely real words.

2\. They're easily pronounced. If I tell my friend about Yahoo.com, he's going to be able to type it in or easily Google for it. I assume Wesabe is similar to wasabi, but I'm still not even sure about that.

<comment><USER38> Nothing silly about the name "Mint"

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Its fun to look back and enumerate the reasons for success or failure, but dumb luck is just such a huge part of this game as well.

Marc had a vision, stuck to his guns, and the competitor "won". If Wesabe had won Techcrunch 40, we'd be reading an article about Mint's failure due to shoddy data accuracy and how Wesabe succeeded by _"build[ing] 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."_

A startup can't implement every feature perfectly, and will ultimately have to make choices without knowing which was the "right" one.

<comment><USER40> I'm surprised the winning of TC40 isn't cited more strongly - That's where I first heard about Mint. You can argue that they wouldn't have won had they not done many of the other things right, but what's the adoption curve of Mint like before and after that event?

<comment><USER6> It was huge for them. My point, though, was that we made our own mistakes. If we had had a better user experience before TC40, they either wouldn't have made such an impression at the event or wouldn't have overtaken us so quickly.

<comment><USER41> Very nice article - many lessons learned and I think you're on the mark there, TC40 gave Mint social proof - if they can win within their own community then it must be ok.

I wonder if personal financial software is a tougher market for adoption than business financial software is.

It seems to me that many of Wesabe's features are also relevant to small businesses who are already used to making more input decisions and "wrestling" with their financial software and who might be more willing to adopt if benefits exceed costs.

I am working on a financial system that is directed more toward business than individuals (however still relevant to individuals) and I am looking for a co- founder. If you're interested Marc, I'm @blusie on twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> seems like their mistake was ignoring yodlee and trying to make their own stuff...which lost them a lot of traction.

had they launched with yodlee, Mint would have been nothing more but a "better designed wesabe"

seems to me like they should have spent the cash to subscribe to yodlee, and then spent their effort building their own version like they ended up doing.

<comment><USER43> yes, but even before Mint, there was Yodlee MoneyCenter... so you could say that Mint was really nothing more than a "better designed MoneyCenter"

<comment><USER44> Yodlee MoneyCenter was a surprising discovery for me. Sure, I had head of them because of Mint, but I didn't know that they supported most Indian banks. I've been using them for some time and quite satisfied with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I thought that wesabe's integrating at the bank level might have been a smarter approach. For instance Bank of America has a mint-like finance aggregation tool built into their online banking. I already entrust them with my finances why not use their tool?

As far as I recall, Wesabe was providing a similar service to smaller banks, as their solution for this, right? Personally I would guess that market opportunity would be at the bank level, you sell $500k-$1m/yr licenses to integrate the tool directly with a banking website, you don't even need consumers, just a really friggin good sales team...

<comment><USER45> It might work, but you'd need a hell of a runway. Think year plus sales cycles, if you're lucky. Not a real good fit for an agile, non-vc backed startup. Banks are slow, conservative, and no two are alike under the covers, even the ones running the same outsourced core software.

<comment><USER36> Very true, and you'd really need a team with a serious track record in banking. I imagine half of selling the product would be based on the perception of trust and experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So, recently, as I started pulling loans out for school and creating budgets, I went on the look for a money management service and tried out Wesabe among a few others. Mint ultimately won, and I'll tell you why, from my personal opinion as a user. Maybe it might help somebody somewhere.

A) Design

Perhaps the biggest selling point for me was how polished Mint was in comparison to Wesabe. It felt professional. I felt I could trust Mint with my personal financial data. Wesabe seemed unfinished, rough around the edges. Sure, it played more to my irrational mind, but I just felt more comfortable using Mint. Just hook in my various accounts, let me create a budget, and do the rest for me, which is what Mint did. I was guided through the profile filling process, and there was a strangely human quality about Mint -- as if it were my own personal accountant.

So the first thing I learned was that a good design and user experience can be very effective in developing trust within a potential user for your service. Second was that lots of time should go into capturing a user's attention upon first laying eyes on your app, placing guides along the way, etc, ensuring initial and continual engagement.

B) iPhone App

At the time, Wesabe didn't have a native iPhone app (I don't think they ever did come out with one). They had a webapp, but it wasn't good enough for me, especially when Mint had a native app. This played a bigger role than I thought it would. Having a native app just feels better. Just the feeling of launching the app is rewarding. I don't know about you, but I really try to avoid using webapps in mobile Safari as much as possible; they tend not to be as polished and snappy.

So, if your app and users create the need for a mobile interface, don't settle for webapp.

C) Focus (Personal/Community in this case)

Wesabe seemed to have a communal element, which I really didn't care for. Mint came across as a more walled-off made-only-for-me personal assistant, and I liked that feeling. I didn't want to share my tips on saving cash with others; I just wanted a service to manage my money, nothing else. In that respect, Mint felt more refined and catered to my needs -- it was more focused.

Give your app laser-focus.

</comment><comment><USER47> Found this blog post to very revealing, although not entirely the way others do. Expressing openly and owning these two decisions (to focus on build vs. buy & simplicity vs. user customization) is admirable, but the slippery rhetoric undermines these mightily. There are many shrewdly baked-in messages and denials that are far afield from above: \- No has solved the problem that we set out to solve in personal finance. In other words, yeah, I know I said Mint won, but we didn't really lose to Mint – no one has won! \- Circumstances conspired to make me CEO. Er, perhaps another decision was to not have the humility to bring in a more qualified CEO. Since we're all being so honest. \- Our product was just as good as there's other than these 2 facts. In other words, I created and know how to execute at the level that Mint did. Of course you do – you're in the job market! I've heard this 'falling on the sword' rhetoric from CEOs of a failed company as a public way of engendering praise. It's politically disingenuous because -of course you're responsible- – everyone knows that claiming otherwise is horrible PR for yourself. The purpose of the post to bake in all the rationalization of how the decisions were right given in the information, you're of high character, and get that personal brand out there in a controlled way. And that's the way to 'keep the focus on making the user happy'

</comment><comment><USER48> "Mint aggressively acquired users by paying for search engine marketing (reportedly spending over $1 for each user), while Wesabe spent almost nothing on marketing".

Startups need to realize that customer acquisition is an important part of the equation too. Sure technology,UX, and a memorable name is important too but too many people are still thinking if they build a good product, start a blog, twitter everyday is all that is needed to succeed.

<comment><USER25> I'd rework that statement slightly. If you're building an actual company, then customer acquisition is not merely "part of the equation," it's the whole ball game.

All other factors you list (tech, UX, naming, etc.) should primarily be evaluated as means to that end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> First interesting read. However, overly simplified. Name, product and UX are all good reasons but they can all be fixed. Companies succeed or fail for two reasons - CEO and cash flow. The importance of a CEO is usually understated but the CEO is critical. Being a visionary, cracking the whip when necessary and instilling values (excellence is the first) cant be replaced. He is driving the company forward. He can be a coder but he should not write single line of code. His role is to manage not to develop. As per Cash flow. Given enough cash flow, anything can be fixed. Company can relaunched, product improved and marketing invested. As per Wesabe vs. Mint. In this day and age people who give control of their accounts to ANY third party are plain crazy. However, the buzz instilled confidence in people and they think Mint is safe. Wesabe could have had a place in the market with people who don't trust Mint's approach. The issue was, it was not "sexy" and the people who might have been interested didn't hear about it. Good Marketing could have addressed that (positioning, PR etc). Which goes back to the CEO being a CEO and not focus on coding.

</comment><comment><USER50> There is still plenty of innovation happening in this space for those outside of the US. I know of three New Zealand based startups <http://www.pocketsmith.com> , <http://www.xero.com> and <http://www.heaps.co.nz>

</comment><comment><USER51> Winning the DEMO contest put Mint on the radar for me. First time I heard of such a business. Knew of Quicken but the idea of taking it to web was 'a ha!'. Never heard of wesabe - and I consider myself web savy - flickr, delicious etc.

I loved the idea but did not trust putting such info online. Then I saw yodlee relationship. I knew banks trusted Yodlee so I gave them (mint) extra trust because of that. I read through their TOC and it gave me more confidence.

On a related thread...I wanted to do online bill pay some time earlier and knew that there was some independent company-yodlee (not wanting to tie myself to my bank) that did it but darned if I could remember the name). So yodlee lost business because of that odd name (in my - survey of 1- case). Love the post and cmts. Good luck with your next venture. Bring same passion - <USER3> invest in good URL<g>

</comment><comment><USER52> Web 2.0 personal financing tools:

Mint - Aquired by Intuit

Buxfer - not actively maintained, founders working @ facebook

Wesabe - shut down

Anyone want to speculate on what went worked/didn't work and might work in the future in this space? As mentioned in the article, it seems like users don't really care about digging into their data, but seeing pretty graphs is good enough.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm impressed with Marc's lack of rancor towards Mint -- very classy. It lends credibility to the whole article.

</comment><comment><USER54> Very insightful read. But I don't understand why he didn't continue the startup. He even identifies a yet unsolved problem. I would have cut the costs and continue in my own direction and try gaining traction. There is probably room for this. I dont see how mint success has to mean a failure for wesabe.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is an amazing post.

Thanks for laying out your version of the story which I feel is definitely more accurate. Why did you not decide to not pursue Wesabe for the long term ?

As I understand, Mind did well in some places like immidiate gratification but was bad in accurately aggregating financial statistics. You could have reworked your UI to provide the immidiate gratification and over time also made a more robust aggregator.

Also, the fact as you state is that Mint/Wesabe both did not really make a dent in the market. Additionally, the fact that Mint has got acquired, most likely they never will. It is extremely unlikely that Mint after being acquired will be able to keep pace with Wesabe. More so the fact that you guys had substantial revenue , you could have cut the fat and dumbed down for a long haul easily.

</comment><comment><USER56> Marc I remember hearing you speak at a conference in '07 and being very impressed at how exaustively you interviewed potential users before building.

Do you feel in retrospect that there was anything obvious you could have done and monitored post-launch that would have let you out-manoeuvre Mint?

</comment><comment><USER57> _Wesabe built our own data acquisition system, first using downloadable client programs (partially because that was easier and partially to preserve users' privacy) and later using a Yodlee-like web interface_

That is the real product, the real company, launch it.

</comment><comment><USER58> It is clear that Wesabe lost. What is not clear to me is that Mint won. Yes, Patzer got $170M out of Intuit for the investors, got his share, and a nice new job at Intuit. But now what? Mint's revenues were not that great, and as for profits....who knows. Now it is being absorbed into the Intuit Borg. Intuit is still trying to figure out what the heck it did when it bought Digital Insight. Will Intuit ever see an ROI on its $170M? Oh I forgot, this is Silicon Valley. ROI doesn't matter. But Mint is a neat name. That and $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

</comment><comment><USER59> Great analysis, very valuable -- thanks to Marc for taking the time to do it. The points about the Yodlee tradeoff and focusing on the use case that required a lot of work from people are very insightful.

I agree with the others here that Mint's name and design played a huge role in its success. Years ago somebody mentioned Wesabe to me and from the way the name sounded I couldn't find it on a quick web search, I gave up. When I eventually saw the site my reaction was "looks complicated". By contrast Mint was easy to find and looked very easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER60> While Mint is a great name, I totally agree that the difference was execution. Several years ago I tried Wesabe, Mint, Quicken, MS Money (which, IIRC, used yodlee), as well as Yodlee's site itself. I went with Mint because it just worked. It had access to all of the Yodlee banks, with a far more intuitive interface than yodlee. Frankly, at the time, there were no alternatives. I've not bothered to look since.

</comment><comment><USER61> My 2 cents:

1\. Mint was viral to a degree. The service itself wasn't, but their blog was. They put a lot of effort into building a community around their blog - <USER4> tips and guides on managing your finances, and so on.

2\. I wonder if Wesabe ever tried shifting to be a more power-user service. If what he says is true, it sounds like they could made it into a service that caters to people that really do want to actively manage their finances.

</comment><comment><USER62> I had never heard of Wesabe until reading this article, though I'm not sure how I missed it. My biggest complaint against Mint is specifically why most people flock to it: it's automated and there isn't much you need to do to get existing transactions and analyze them. Maybe it's changed since Intuit bought them, but I signed up for their service two different times and toyed with it for a few hours before canceling on both occasions. To me, true finance management is not only analyzing existing spending, but preparing for future spending.

I want to be able to setup a budget.

I want to be able to setup recurring transactions and future bill payments so when I look at my finances at any given moment, I can see what I have coming due today, tomorrow, in two weeks.

I don't want to rely on my bank to tell me how much cash I have available, because it doesn't know the $1 pending gas charge from yesterday is actually a $45 fill up that hasn't cleared, but I do.

I want to keep track of all aspects of my paycheck so I can estimate my taxes all year long and adjust my withholdings accordingly or save if I'm going to have to pay in.

I'm sure I could go on and on. I realize we're moving towards (or are already in) the era of webapps and people are moving away from desktop apps, but I've yet to find a decent online finance manager that does what MS Money can do. It's a shame they discontinued it, because in my opinion it kicks the crap out of Mint.

I'm not really sure how this relates to the article, I just think it's a shame that Wasabe lost out to Mint because Mint was dumbed down enough that users don't have to do much of anything. Properly manging your finances should most certainly require user interaction to do it properly and it sounds like Wasabe was trying to do just that. Maybe that's why so many people struggle with finances, because they don't take an active enough roll in managing them and I fear something like Mint just aids in that passiveness.

As the Marc says in the article, "Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance." It's been a while since I've given it a look, but last I check Mint wasn't even close. If Wasabe was, it's truly a shame they were beat out by Mint catering to and lazy users and enabling them to stay lazy when IMHO, the problem they're allegedly trying to solve requires exactly the opposite.

<comment><USER63> I want banksimple.com, or some other kind of 21st century bank that will let me do all this stuff natively from my primary banking....

<comment><USER64> If you qualify for membership, USAA has added a lot of Mint-like features to their online banking service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> "Changing people's behavior is really hard. No one in this market succeeded at doing so -- there is no Google nor Amazon of personal finance. Can you succeed where we failed? Please do -- the problems are absolutely huge and the help consumers have is absolutely abysmal. Learn from the above and go help people (after making them immediately happy, first)."

</comment><comment><USER66> I humbly disagree with you guys. I personally don't think the name played that much of a role. In my opinion Mint won because of 3 reasons.. 1) They won techcrunch disrupt and had people buzzing 2) They gave customer what they wanted. They had the right "easy" approach to the problem. 3) They got higher value users by doing SEM.

</comment><comment><USER67> "A domain name doesn't win you a market" - he clearly didn't understand the domain name field. That's why he got that crappy Wesabe name. Mint gave hares to the owner of Mint.com so he let Mint use it.

A domain doesn't win you a market but CAN help you quite much! Otherwise, you put more money in the marketing...

</comment><comment><USER68> I only used Wesabe because I'm from Australia and Mint doesn't support my bank, the Firefox uploader was great (a bit more control over access to your bank account, sort of) but the actual website wasn't useful enough for me to keep using it. Would love to see what Mint is like.

</comment><comment><USER69> For those who haven't seen, it appears this blog post was prompted by this Quora discussion: [http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Wesabe-shut-down-while-Mint- did...](http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Wesabe-shut-down-while-Mint-did-so-well)

</comment><comment><USER70> I found the most interesting part to be when the author admitted to overlooking the idea that users might want instant gratification from a useable site. seems like in this day and age that would be the #1 priority of any company/website/startup.

</comment><comment><USER71> "No one, in my view, solved the financial problems of consumers. No one even got close. "

Completely disagree. Mint's easy budgeting tools helped me cut expenses and start an aggressive savings plan. That, plus INGDirect's multiple sub- accounts.

</comment><comment><USER53> To summarize:

\- Give instant gratification; require as little work as possible from your users

\- Be visible; Mint advertised heavily; neither site was viral

Other smaller factors too, but those seem to be the biggies, based on Marc's article and comments here.

</comment><comment><USER72> Reading the article, it sounds like Marc set out to change people's behavior. I don't think Mint did that. There's a lot more money in giving people what they want rather than what you think they need.

</comment><comment><USER73> Marc,

Thanks for putting your thoughts out there like this. We are currently tackling the small business finance space (Profitably.com) and it's interesting to see your comparison to Mint.

What are you up to now?

</comment><comment><USER74> I really loved reading this post. Thanks Marc, for sharing! I'm sure that brought back some painful memories. Totally worth it to us ;)

</comment><comment><USER36> Isn't the attitude of "If Company A Wins, Company B Loses" kind of a dangerous mindset to have when you're running a startup?

</comment><comment><USER75> Acquiring customers for $1 a pop is cheap. If customer lifetime value is < $1 then something is terribly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER53> Question: Is there a way a financial management site can be viral? Marc claims that neither Mint nor Wesabe was.

</comment><comment><USER76> The name Wesabe had a huge part to do with losing. Patzer is right, with a name like Wesabe you have ZERO chances of capitalizing on word of mouth. Before you buy a domain for your business, find 10 random people and ask them to type out the domain. If they fail or have to stop to even think about how to type out the domain, it's a failure.

<comment><USER76> Also, Mint didn't ignore the power of SEO... Even before the product had launched they had a blog that was providing inbound traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> my response to Marc's post based on being an investor in Mint and a colleague of Marc's

[http://blog.pasker.net/2010/10/02/why-wesabe-lost-to- mint-%e...](http://blog.pasker.net/2010/10/02/why-wesabe-lost-to- mint-%e2%80%93-a-second-opinion/)

</comment><comment><USER78> I had a phone interview with Marc sometime in 2007, I think just after TC40. During the interview they made me aware of Mint.com, so I spent the afternoon playing with Mint & Wesabe.

By the end of the afternoon I had begun using Mint to track all of my finances and had only managed to get Wesabe to recognize 1/3 of my accounts. Wesabe had a fantastic team, but Mint was the clear winner, so I decided not to go forward.

</comment><comment><USER79> The name is an albatross.</comment>


Non-Disclosure Agreements are for young losers, not old winners - <AUTHOR> http://behindtheclock.timmyontime.com/post/81720223/non-disclosure-agreements-are-for-young-loosers-not

<comment><USER2> I agree with that. I used to be extremely paranoid. Now, less so. But I did have an experience once that reinforced my paranoia: A local prominent business woman visited first startup under the pretense of being a potential investor (which gives her an automatic out -- investors don't sign NDAs). She watched my demo, took lots of notes, asked lots of questions, left, and then called me three weeks later to invite me to breakfast at some fancy private club. I show up (she's wearing some sort of see-through shirt which freaked me out a bit -- I was suddenly worried she was going to try to seduce me) and then, with a straight face, told me: "I have complete notes about what your product is, the direction you're taking, and your business model. I also have a team of great engineers who recently left Sun who ready to start coding tomorrow if I give them the go-ahead. Unless you hire me as your CEO immediately, I will steal your idea, launch a public campaign to discredit you, and make sure you never work in this industry again."

I laughed because I was sure she was kidding. Turns out she wasn't. I politely declined her offer and walked out the door. She told me I'm making the biggest mistake of my life. I probably spent the next two months being in such a paranoid state that I was pretty much useless as a contributor. It turns out she never did follow through on her threats. But I learned then that even someone with the worst of intentions can't necessarily take someone else's idea and turn it into a reality. That's when I started to relax a bit when it comes to NDAs. But, that said, I still ask contractor programmers to sign them but what I ask them to sign is so amazingly simple that it's more an agreement to respect each other's ideas.

<comment><USER3> NDA's and work for hire agreements are a requirement for contractors. Otherwise they can end up owning the code they worked on. Happened to a friend of mine and it cost him $20,000 to get rid of the guy.

<comment><USER4> An NDA and a legal contract about ownership are completely different things.

<comment><USER5> That's true, but for contractors the two are often combined in the same IP agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think some of the things you learn as you get more business experience include:

* That you have almost no ability to enforce contracts as an early-stage business, because lawsuits are too expensive.

* That actual lawsuits take years to resolve, usually longer than the expected lifetime of your company.

* That it is very easy to strangle business opportunities by letting them get tied up in legal negotiations.

* That in the end, there is usually a lot less value in the information you're trying to protect than you think there is.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a false sense of security with contracts in general. A lot of people tend to think that because it is written, they are safe. Forget about it, you still have to sue! Entrepreneurs are supposed risk-takers and not signing a NDA is a risk they should take.

<comment><USER6> _Entrepreneurs are supposed risk-takers and not signing a NDA is a risk they should take._

This statement is too broad to be useful. While entrepreneurs should be comfortable assessing and managing risk, it's invalid to say that entrepreneur = risk-taker, therefore they should take risk X. There are situations in which NDAs are useful to entrepreneurs and the risk of ignoring them doesn't prove your entrepreneurship, just your ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think you can conclude that because "young entrepreneurs are asking for NDAs more than older ones" that the older guys are successful due to their openness, or by talking about it it creates a buzz that makes it successful.

When you're young, inexperienced, and (most importantly) have a limited business network it is much harder to execute on an idea. A successful older person has a trusted network that they can approach with their ideas, and therefore worry less about NDAs. Younger people -- and those with less experience -- are often cold contacting angels, or setting up meetings with potential investors they have had very short business relationships with. The potential investor probably won't steal their amazing idea, but the process of starting up is much more difficult and the time cycle of idea to launch could be significantly longer for this group of people than those with experience, which could explain the paranoia.

I'd expect those with a smaller, less "powerful" network to more often ask for NDAs on new ventures, regardless of age.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like that point of view. I didn't think about that when I wrote the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Execution is most of what goes in to bringing a product to market successfully. It takes a lot more than a good idea to succeed; secretive dreamers abound, but the vast majority of them never ship.

This is old news:

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. [Howard H. Aiken, as quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater] [from wikiquote]

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. [Thomas Edison, spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper's Monthly (September 1932)] [from wikiquote]

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless. [Paul Graham, <http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html>]

NDAs may have uses in established companies with very specific trade secrets that established competitors would be able to use right away (see, e.g., <http://www.mbay.net/~heuer/Spystory/Industry.htm> \-- though that points out that some people are willing to risk criminal indictments, not just civil suits...). They're not worth the trouble for your cool idea to, say, monitor eBay auctions via Twitter and bid by tweet. Uh-oh, I guess we're not in stealth mode any more, Toto. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> In general this is true. The only real protections are secrecy and relationships (e.g. if you were introduced to x by y, then y is on the hook if x screws you).

However, there is one case when NDAs aren't stupid: when you're applying for a patent. If it ever comes to litigation, you have to be able to show you made an effort to keep your invention secret.

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree. And even worse, once a guy refused to tell me what his idea is, even after I signed the NDA. He said, 'why don't you believe me and just join us? I quit my job to start the idea, isn't it convincing enough?'

WTF.

</comment><comment><USER11> When I was a tech journalist, it was common for large firms, Apple IBM etc to ask you to sign NDAs when showing you research stuff. They tended to fly you to the factory first, then whip out the paperwork.

I would quite happily sign - once I had struck through or amended the clauses I didn't like. That used to confuse them occasionally, but they never argued.

<comment><USER12> That must have been fun. Was there anything really groundbreaking going on that hasn't ever seen the light of day, without breaking your NDA of course :)

<comment><USER11> I signed quite a few NDAs when Taligent, OpenDoc and Copland were being brewed.

God I feel old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am frequently asked to sign NDAs. I used to sign them, but not anymore. I just tell people that if I signed an NDA each time someone came to me with an idea, then I'd probably be too encumbered to work on the ideas that I'm genuinely interested in (such as, potentially, theirs). Worthwhile people usually accept that response.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not too long ago I was what you are so nicely calling a "young loser". I never asked anyone to sign a NDA contract but I had this paranoid attitude that hurt me more than it helped me.

Oh and btw you are really asking for trouble with that kind of title ;)

<comment><USER6> No, he's asking for clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You mean 'losers', not loosers :)

<comment><USER16> Maybe they're loosers too, in that they fear 'loose lips sink ships'.</comment></comment>


Freemium Hardware Is Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackthings.com/freemium-hardware-is-coming-and-you-cant-stop-it/

<comment><USER2> Potential good side of freemium hardware: Acquiring low-end hardware and somehow hacking it into a higher-end version. Manufacturers will try to make cheaper hardware by cramming more functionality onto one SoC, thus slowly driving down costs for technology in general.

Potential bad side of freemium hardware: More locked down systems, more undocumented hardware, possible backdoors and more spying (how else are we going to recover the cost of the hardware?) Devices could emerge that are "dumber," i.e. they are merely proprietary touchscreen frontends for services offered in "the cloud." People might like getting "a free tablet" even if it just does one thing.</comment>


Datomisca: Embrace Datomic the Scala way - <AUTHOR> http://pellucidanalytics.github.com/datomisca/index.html

<comment><USER2> As "endorsed" by Rich Hickey himself, no less! <https://twitter.com/richhickey/status/299563187936837633>

<comment><AUTHOR> And even before I had twitted it myself :D Rich Hickey pre-redeems Future[ApiForDatomic] to tell it in Scala ;)</comment></comment>


Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting? - <AUTHOR> I'm the CEO of a fairly new web based startup (who isn't?) and I've been having trouble getting much traction going at my teams weekly meetings.  I've read up on how to properly conduct a meeting however for some reason it just feels like I'm missing something.
Can anyone recommend a good read on how to conduct a meeting, or (if I could be so lucky) give me some advice on the subject?
As an aside, we are a small group, only 4 people. <comment><USER2> Take note from the Paypal model when they first started out - have as few meetings as possible, hit only the key points, and again, don't have unnecessary meetings.

Just cover what needs to be covered and allow people to get to their work. Fast paced.

And have people stand if possible, not sit. And no laptops or cell phones in the room. They'll pay attention in both instances.

<comment><USER3> Where I work, we have a stand-up meeting every day. It only takes 10 minutes and everyone is on the same page.

Fortnightly, we have longer, sit-down meetings, generally for planning.

I think it works well, although the sit-down meetings sometimes draw out too much discussion, I think this should be avoided to keep the meeting on point and not to bore/waste people's time

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before you have a meeting, consider what would happen if the meeting ended up cancelled -- then decide if you even need to have it. I've sat through countless meetings that could have easily been solved with a few quick emails or a phone call.

Also, make it clear what the meeting covers and stick to it, this lets people who aren't stakeholders in the current topic leave and get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Since people are already advising you to ditch the meetings, I'll just answer with a direct tip.

Try sending out an email detailing the meeting's goals, agenda, and any preparation you expect from the participants. This is sometimes called GAP and I had a coworker who was a bit of a task master who'd come from a company with the policy that you didn't have to go to any meeting that didn't provide this. I like the sentiment, at least, that meetings require preparation.

So for a weekly meeting you might send: Goal: To assign work responsibilities for the week Agenda: * Keeping our promise to deliver X to customer Y * Assigning bug #123 * etc. Preparation: Could everyone come prepared with the state of their work?

In my experience, the preparation part is the part most likely to fail. Either the meeting planner isn't the type of personality to enforce it or the meetings aren't important enough for the participants to actually do the prep. In either case, you can drop it as just having a clear goal and agenda will make any meeting better.

Also, forcing yourself to be clear about the goals and the agenda will help you see ways that you could eliminate parts of your meetings.

<comment><USER3> I think using e-mail for preparation already puts your meeting on a route for destination FAIL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Short answer: don't have meetings.

Long answer: work in the same room together for a few hours a week (10-20). This way as questions come up they will get resolved in context. Announcements, presentations and other broadcast-type things can be made at coffee break. Start having meetings after this model stops scaling.

<comment><USER7> I disagree with your short answer. Our 3 person company has a weekly meeting every Friday from 1 minute to anywhere to 30 minutes depending on if anything needs to be discussed in more detail. It's a very good idea to get together once a week outside of just working together to go over the week's happenings even if it's only for a few minutes. It serves to seal the deal of the week and get everyone completely caught up.

I also disagree with your long answer. It's not necessarily productive to work in the same room. That's why God invented cubicles! In all seriousness, though, a lot of people -- myself included -- work best in isolation. The bottom line is that you should get the people together in your group and figure out what will work best. Some people prefer working in the same room, some people get distracted because of that, etc. Find our what works best for you and stick to that.

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying this lightly, I was dead set agains it before I became 100% for it. It boils down to one thing:

It's a lot easier to stay focused when the other guy is focused.

<comment><USER7> Who's saying anything about focus? That's not the topic here. You're saying meetings (no matter how short or how on topic) are useless. That's really far from the truth. Any organization, no matter how small, needs to get together and re-hash what's going on within the company. You can't just expect to work telepathically.

<comment><USER6> If you work in the same room you will stay up to date with your mates. When I checkin stuff, everyone in the room knows about it. And when I start cursing they know what's going, too.

I agree my "focus" comment was a bit offtopic. Got carried away there. :)

EDIT: and I did not say meetings are useless, please don't put words in my mouth. I said don't have them because there are better ways to stay in sync. Meetings can be useful, just not as efficient.

<comment><USER7> 2 of us work out of the same office; the other works in a different state. (We do all get together every few months, though.) However, at least for us, we've found that it's better to separate ourselves inside the office for complete concentration. If someone needs to communicate with the other person, instead of yelling over to them, we send a message on Campfire and wait for the person to respond.

Anyway, this is all getting a bit off topic as far as meetings are concerned. I really think you need to do what is best for you and sometimes that's having weekly meetings, sometimes that's having monthly meetings, and sometimes that's having no meetings. However, I really advocate the weekly meetings, because it's very important to make sure everyone is on the same page. And not to sound corporate or anything, but you need to make sure your goals are aligned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Keep it short and to the point.

Have an agenda. Allow people to edit the agenda before-hand (a wiki is a good place for this).

Make sure actions come out of the meeting, so the time isn't wasted.

<comment><USER8> These are great suggestions! We use a private wiki that anyone on the team can edit: it saves a lot of time versus E-mail. We use the same page for both the agenda, the minutes, and a decision record (you can always re-factor or start pages to address ongoing issues/concerns, but there should be a single page for the meeting that links to related content). Since you are geographically separated I would use an IM session (e.g skype chat, google chat, AOL, Yahoo) that lets everyone take contemporaneous notes and pass links/URLs and raise their hand to speak. Take a few minutes after the meeting is over to clean up the transcript and paste it into the meeting wiki page, it doesn't have to be pretty, but comprehensible a few months from now (and everyone else can continue to refine/edit etc..). Key thing is to get decisions documented, the context that led to them, and for major decisions a brief prediction on expected outcomes and when and how to re-evaluate.

<comment><USER3> The other good thing about wiki vs email is that you have a permanent record of everything that has ever happened. E-mails get lost, and new employees cannot browse the old content

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meetings should have an agenda. By mail. 5 days in advance. That will kill "impulse meetings". First point on the agenda: "Is this meeting necessary?". Every time. With luck, it can be adjourned in less than 5 minutes. If not, you have something to discuss.

Meetings have a secretary who writes down decisions. The referendum is available as quickly as possible. The same day or the next. Meetings have a speaker who conducts the order in which people are speaking. For each agenda- point, you have 2 rounds of discussion. After that, you must cast a vote on the point or make a decision.

Ok, that was the extreme version. But it is either that or "till the coffee cup is empty" meetings. The advantage of having some rules is that you will actually get something done in the meetings. If you can't get something decided, voted in or otherwise actionated, don't hold the meeting.

Remember: If there is 8 people in a meeting, each minute in the meeting takes 8 minutes of work. Also, there are 8*7/2 relations between these people. This leads to the conclusion that you must keep the number of people down in a meeting.

Finally: Get consistency in when meetings are held. In my former code-job I hated getting in to work in order to do some great coding, just to be shown off into a meeting. All productivity that day was totally gone afterwards. Do that 3 days a week and you have cut your productivity of your developer to 2/5. Do it for all of the 6 person staff and you lost about 2.5 persons in productivity a week.

Do I sound bitter? I probably am :)

<comment><USER3> Mail is horrible. As I just commented, I much prefer the pattern of using a wiki to organise a meeting agenda.

That way, everyone can contribute to the meeting's purpose (beforehand, obviously)

<comment><USER8> Not only beforehand: you can use the same page for the minutes as well and the "secretary" doesn't become the neck of the bottle. The page should be updated during the meeting and links added to other relevant material as needed.

<comment><USER3> No, not during the meeting. I think it's rude for people to be using devices in a meeting unless it's necessary - demo'ing, presenting, etc. Not only that, but it will make everyone else in the room uncomfortable, and the person on the device won't be paying attention or contributing much of anything.

<comment><USER8> I guess my experience has been different: we've found it very effective to have the decisions documented and reviewed before the meeting ends. This is for 3-6 folks on a small team, either face to face or on the phone/skype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When you have a team size of only 4 people, I really feel you should target continuous communication. A weekly meeting just encourages each individual to "go dark". I'd suggest a daily 'stand-up' meeting.

I've used this format when forming new teams and the 10 minutes the meeting typically takes is more than paid for by the increased communication. Plus it helps motivation - everyone can share daily progress and trouble spots.

The key to this working correctly is you've gotta drive it. There is a general agenda (share progress and discuss issues) but no minutes or note taking. This means you've got to keep track of everything in your head (the big picture). Then you get to decide - "Hey this is taking too long" or "We need in-depth discussion of this" or "X isn't communicating/contributing enough" etc etc...

</comment><comment><USER11> One interesting tactic that we had at Yahoo and have adopted at a start-up (which includes several ex-Yahoos) is the "stand-up meeting", where the idea is that we all stand (as not to be comfortable and not have the meeting drag on for hours) and merely say what we are doing that may be a blocker to others (or where we are being blocked by somebody else).

Another idea (for engineers) is setup an IRC server and have everybody run a screened (as in the screen utility) client on a stable UNIX machine in a common channel. Screen on a stable UNIX machine provides persistence, IRC provides real time ability. 37signals campfire provides the same functionality (real time, but also persistent chat) for less technical people.

</comment><comment><USER12> 4 people should be in a state of continuous meeting.

<comment><USER13> The problem with this is that too much cross-communication will result in a productivity drain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you're having the meetings for the sake of having a weekly meeting (or, what amounts to the same thing, for a managerial reason like "status updates") then I'm not surprised it's dull. People's spirits are weighed down by the artificiality of that. It's a drag to drop what you're doing, which presumably is interesting, and go sit around doing something boring. Surely that's the last thing you ought to be doing in a startup.

To get out of the trap, apply the converse. The same people who groan at the thought of enduring an arbitrary meeting will come to life when working together on something real. Therefore, figure out how to make your meetings real work on something that matters. Failing that, ask the team to figure out a way to provide the value of the meeting without needing to have a meeting.

Here's my criterion. I ask myself whether what's going on is making me (and others) feel more or less alive. If it's the latter, I try to understand why. If necessary, I'll speak up and say frankly that what we're doing feels like a drag and change the subject to what we can do about it.

Basically, if it doesn't feel fun, something's wrong. Fun is the canary in the coal mine: if it goes, everything else is going too, just more slowly. So it really pays to give attention to this. I'm surprised more people don't figure that out. (Incidentally, by "fun" I don't mean anything _set up_ to be fun, like those asinine team-building outings... those things aren't fun, they're a crate of suckage with a label that says "fun" stuck on it. What I'm talking about is spontaneous enjoyment of creative work and meaningful interaction with others.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Question: Is your team meeting necessary every week? If there isn't a set of issues that need to be brought up, then you should seriously consider skipping meetings.

At a minimum, the following things should be kept in mind for running meetings: 1) Send out an agenda for the meeting beforehand a minimum 4 hours (half a day) ahead of time to allow everyone enough time to read it. Have printed copies for everyone attending can be helpful as well. 2) Use the meetings as a forum only to disseminate information to your team or to make decisions. This one is crucial. If you aren't making decisions, the meeting is a waste of everyone's time. 3) Have a fixed time each week that team meetings are held so that everyone can plan ahead to be available to attend. 4) Keep the meetings as short as possible. Hopefully with a rather focused agenda and restraining your meetings from turning into a discussion forum, you can keep the team meeting to an hour or less.

No one likes meetings that feel like they're a waste of time. Also, by making the focus of the meeting on decision making, you stop it from degenerating into endless discussions. By keeping them short and focused, everyone will be more likely to think that the meeting was useful for them to attend.

</comment><comment><USER15> Minimize meetings.

Limit most meetings to "actionable" items. (Person A does task X. Person B does task Y after task X is completed.)

Keep meetings short. (If the information can be given 1 on 1, great, if you can cover it over email or a phone call, even better.)

Maybe once weekly have recap/planning meetings, and make sure they are scheduled and sacred. Use them to look at what got done that week and what needs to get done next week.

Limit "vision & direction" meetings to conversations over lunch. You're the CEO, and your job is to get version 1 out the door. If you think that there is a fatal flaw in the fundamentals, don't pull everyone out of what they're doing.

Most of these tips only work because of the small number of people (who I assume you are very familiar with) involved.

Subscribe to the "Manager Tools" podcast (<http://www.manager-tools.com/>). There's lots of good information there, though it is designed for larger corporations. Just keep the ideas in mind as you grow.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmm. You're getting some... strange advice in this thread.

First: A scheduled weekly meeting with you and three other people is most likely overkill. The only reason to have scheduled meetings with that frequency is if you are dealing with a large team with conflicting schedules. What do you do in these meetings? I hope it's not a status report meeting. I would certainly hope in that small a team you already know the status before even starting the meeting.

Always ask yourself "can this be solved with an email or a phone call" before calling a meeting. People resent having their time spent by their boss catching up.

Don't be afraid to grab two people and say "hey guys, we need to hash this out". If you feel that it's going to take more than 20 minutes or so, THEN schedule a meeting.

Try not to schedule meetings too far out in advance. Having a meeting scheduled 5 days out kills productivity. Nobody will want to make a decision because it will be talked about "in the meeting".

Something that I see a ton of in startups is the perceived need for formality. In a team of 4, I would assume you have other responsibilities than managing the rest of your team. If not, then I assume you're the money guy. Either way, be very careful of destroying your team's productivity because you're looking for a way to validate your position. You don't have to do that, I assume they already understand you're the CEO.

I can tell people have done a lot of reading about how other companies do their meetings; unfortunately none of it is good advice. You know your team and we don't. You know your product and we don't. If meetings seem boring, then you probably shouldn't have had one. If people can't keep in the loop with what's going on in the company, then you need more meetings.

Anyways, let's get to a TLDR version:

\- Don't have a meeting without a clear reason for having one.

\- That reason has to pass the "can this be solved by an email or phone call" litmus test.

\- Don't waste people's time.

<comment><USER17> for future reference, the tldr usually goes first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> First step is to figure out why you want weekly team meetings. Once you've figured out the goal make sure everyone attending knows it, keep the time spent to a minimum (max 30 mins) and don't let anyone take you on an irrelevant tangent.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's no one 'proper' way to conduct meetings, it depends on your team and situation. You'd probably be good to ask your (conveniently small) team about the issue, they'll be able to give you a better answer than any HN user.

That being said, 37signals "Getting Real" has a chapter on meetings (<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php>) that is probably worth reading (though most of the points have already been made in comments here), as is the rest of the book.

</comment><comment><USER20> _"... I've been having trouble getting much traction going at my teams weekly meetings ..."_

Probably because they realise that you get paid just as much in meetings as coding except meetings are a whole lot easier. How many people do you have? (4) Are they all in the same room. If they are all in the same room and your team is small you don't need _"formal"_ meetings. It's just another distraction in flow.

</comment><comment><USER21> What kind of meeting?

In some cases I'll recommend Lego Serious Play, <http://www.seriousplay.com/>. Basically uses Lego to project the issues discusses in the meeting so it's easier to (1) de-personalize them and (2) to visualize.

</comment><comment><USER22> Daily stand-ups for 5 minutes each.

Weekly 15-minute "what's killing us right now" meetings

Work in the same room all the time.

Make it a point to spend a lunch with the team at least once a week somewhere besides lunch.

Repeat and rinse.

My guess is that you're not co-locating and collaborating effectively. If you were, meetings would not be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> Manager Tools has some pretty good podcasts on conducting meetings. They're not startup or tech specific, but they'll definitely give you some food for thought:

<http://www.manager-tools.com></comment>


'Our pastures have been taken': Indians rue China's Himalayan land grab - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/03/our-pastures-have-been-taken-india-china-himalayan-land-grab <comment><USER2> This is scary. The Chinese have literally come at the doorstep and now inside.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone tried Holocracy in their organization? - <AUTHOR> I would like to get some real-world experiences around Holocracy. Do you like it, or not, what are the reasons and what is your role in that organisation? <comment><USER2> I'm assuming you mean Hol _a_ cracy (eg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy))? Not trying to be pedantic, just making sure.</comment>