How products start and fall out (not fail)
Lessons from Mint
Hey PMs
Last week I received an email from Mint.com that they will be shutting down on March 23. I had a tinge of sadness about it.
Here is the Backstory.
I came to the USA with about $ 200 and my first salary was $ 3000 per month as a programmer. Living in Sunnyvale in the Silicon Valley was not cheap even then.
So budgeting and managing expenses was critical. It was all paper and pen initially. I still have that first paper diary of my expenses. (My first dinner was a cold burrito at 7-11 in Sunnyvale, no microwave yet).
Being a stickler for managing money (which I still am), I outgrew my paper ledger soon. My needs evolved as we now had two incomes, some investments, credit cards and so on.
So I purchased MS Money. At the time, there were MS Money and Quicken for personal finance management. The only reason I bought Microsoft was because I had access to a store discount (remember, stickler for money :-)
The software eased my life. I could analyze where my money was being spend and adjust spend accordingly, since I had a big saving goal ahead of me.
(Wow, we ate out that much?)
But there was a problem.
MS Money was a standalone software not connected to the web then. So all the entries of my transactions were required to be entered manually. Every cash purchase, every credit card transaction. I had to wait for the credit card statement at the end of the month, and then enter the details manually. It was tedious. The manual entry was taking a toll on me.
In 1995-96, there were no APIs or credit card downloads from banks. Everything was manually entered. Some offered CSV download but many did not. Even then CSVs are problematic and time consuming.
As I got busy and had some travel, I lagged in my data entry. Soon enough, my money management got out of control. There would be weeks when I did not update my transactions and there would be a backlog, which was overwhelming.
There was a time where I had no usage for a couple of months, and soon enough I lost control of my spending. I was not sure if I was saving for my big goal ahead. For some people, not having control on a given aspect of your life is a cause of stress.
And then I heard about this shiny new software called Mint for personal finance management.
It was online.
It was free.
It had a refreshing and pleasant user interface.
Product led growth at its finest.
But that was not the magic.
The magic - it downloaded all my transactions from my bank and credit card, categorize them and update my reports without me doing anything. And it did it automatically in the background. They had leveraged a protocol for downloading banking transactions which is still largely in use today.
That was a WOW moment for me. I became a fan.
And guess what, they would send me an email every Friday with a weekly summary and helped me figure out how much I was spending and where.
I did not even have to log in every day. (PMs managing metrics, note this.
Not logging in was actually good).
In my coaching sessions, I ask my students for their favorite product and the reasons why they like it. (they are not allowed to say apple, meta, google, uber or airbnb as examples).
I also share my favorites and start with the story of Mint.
And the reasons I give for Mint :
Mint simplified my task of entering transactions by an order of magnitude with minimal effort
The reporting and dashboard are automated with numerous suggestions e.g. I spent 40% more on restaurants this week compared to last week
The user interface was pleasing enough to make me want to use the software
They clearly understood the jobs to be done and the biggest friction in that job - entering transactions. Easing a users job significantly is the most important value.
Not better UX
Not SSO
Not lower pricing
Not better on boarding
Not next gen buzzword
Mint was a pioneer in building a truly great product and building the PLG movement. Mint was acquired by Intuit at a significant valuation.
And after about 17 years, it is shutting down.
Intuit likely had a strategic reason for shutting down mint which I am not much aware of.
Not having demand was not it.
Mint had a significant user base. Perhaps, they could not monetize it well. My personal theory is that most of the functionality was subsumed into their flagship product Quicken. I had switched to Quicken as my needs evolved, such as cash accounting, cross account journal entry, bill payment etc.
One of the big lessons I got was to truly understand the users journey, identify areas where their is most friction and find a solution to ease that friction. As a PM, that’s what you should be relentlessly focused on - to identify the path of least friction.
In fact, your solution should become the new behavior for users without which they will not be able to function. Can you think of working on a personal money management application without any automated transaction download capability. Likely no. A product with no automated download will have no traction. The behavior is now ingrained into peoples workflow.
And once that behavior is standardized and incorporated by others, the need for the original software goes away.
Mint changed peoples behavior in a drastic way and that was their biggest contribution. The shutdown is not a fail. Rather it was a big success for the industry and for the consumers.
Thank you mint.com