rudder
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Rudder was an online personal-finance tool intended to help consumers monitor and plan their finances.
02 / rudder FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
The company said the business had become unsustainable despite its work improving the product, and it chose to close. Coverage mentioned an earlier exposure of bank-account information, but the company’s notice did not establish that incident as the cause of closure.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Closure announced
In November 2010 Rudder’s user notice announced that the personal-finance service would close.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Rudder launched in 2008 as one of a promising crop of personal-finance startups alongside Mint and Wesabe, backed by a $2 million first round from Meakem Becker Venture Capital with a five-person team in Houston, Texas.
- 02
The free, ad-supported service pushed users a daily email snapshot of their finances, analyzing purchases and bills to show how much they would have left at the end of the month; it competed directly with Mint, Wasabi, MoneyStrands and Geezio.
- 03
Mint went on to a successful exit, selling to Intuit for about $170 million, while Rudder never reached comparable scale.
- 04
In November 2010 Rudder announced on its website that the business had 'become unsustainable' and shut down, joining Wesabe as a Web 2.0 flameout.