£102m – Minted!
5
on September 15, 2009
Earlier this year I attended the Business Startup Exhibition in London. They were running an event based on the Dragons Den format.
Someone was pitching an idea for a web-based personal finance application. One of the “Dragons” tried to humiliate him and told him there was no demand for that kind of thing. The muppet was more interested in be a Simon Cowell mini-me than being of any use. The person I was with dragged me away to stop me shooting my mouth off in defence of the would-be entrepreneur.
There’s plenty of demand for something like KashFlow but for the peronal finance space. Over in the US mint.com has been making great in-roads and taking big chunks of business away from the incumbent player, Intuit.
TechCrunch broke the news yesterday that Intuit are buying Mint in a deal worth £170m (£102m). A very handsome price for a company that isn’t actually making much money. The software is provided free of charge to the user and the company makes money by other means as mint.com founder and CEO Aaron Patzer explains in this video:
In the US, Intuit is a far bigger player in the accountancy software market than Sage, the UK leader.
Intuit “got” the SaaS concept long before Sage did (I’m still not sure they have) and have been successfully offering a web-based version of Quickbooks (US only) for some time now.
So where to now for Mint and Intuit?
Intuit say they’ll continue with the mint.com application and brand and put Aaron Patzer in charge of its personal finance group.
Patzer said part of the appeal to him of the deal was the ability to tap into Intuit’s resources, particularly on the marketing side of things. I can certainly relate to that.
I hope he survives the move from calling all the shots to being an employee. I don’t think I could!
But the question remains, where is the mint.com equivalent for the UK market? I don’t see one. The online accounting software space for small businesses is getting very crowded with a new entrant every month (I was only aware of 1 or 2 others when we launched). My suspicion is that one or two of them will re-position themselves as being a personal finance app in the not too distant future.
Update: @roanlavery on Twitter just informed me of the existence on Kublax, a UK equivalent of Mint. Very slickly presented and appears to be well funded. I’m surprised I’d not heard of them before.
5 Responses to £102m – Minted!
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It’s easy to be critical of a startup but hard thing to do.
Entrepreneurs see a clear pathway into an uncertain future and are prepared to pursue an opportunity with vigor and determination.
Doubters will only believe in the entrepreneur when they see the startup growing rapidly.
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David Harding
@Richard – Me too, my wife used to live in the states (and used mint of course) but introduced me to Kublax since she moved here…Its pretty good! Alot of room for potential it seems.
Congratualtions to mint.com though! Good job on building such a great product..
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All our research suggests that online personal finance software will start to explode in the UK in the same way that it did in the USA when mint.com came to the market 2 years ago.
Money Dashboard (www.moneydashboard.com) is currently in alpha test and will be released in Beta before the end of the year. It was previewed at the Microsoft launch of Silverlight 3 back in July.
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There’s also Egg Money Manager. The only requirement is to sign up to one of their savings accounts (you don’t have to use it). It integrates nicely with the other high street banks in the UK. I’ve used it to manage my various accounts for the past two years or so.