Manilla
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Manilla was a free personal account management service incubated within and backed by Hearst Corporation, launched in beta in February 2011. It gave consumers one secure access point to all household accounts - bills, finances, travel rewards programs and magazine subscriptions - under a single password, with bill-pay reminders and lifetime document storage. By July 2013 it had 500,000 activated users. The company shut down on July 1, 2014.
02 / Manilla FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Manilla's official shutdown explanation was blunt: the company was unable to achieve the scale necessary to make the economics of the business viable. The free service never found a revenue model or mass adoption sufficient to sustain it - it had announced 500,000 users a year earlier against ambitions of over a million, while rival Check was being acquired by Intuit. It ceased operations on July 1, 2014, within days of releasing a major app update.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Manilla ended operations.
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
Launched in beta February 2011 by Hearst Corporation as a free personal account management service; launch partners included Comcast and Citibank.
- 02
Named one of Time Inc.'s '10 NYC Startups to Watch in 2011'; won a 2012 Webby Award.
- 03
Topped 500,000 activated users in July 2013 (doubling in six months); users linked 3 million accounts from 3,500 businesses.
- 04
Announced shutdown in May 2014; ceased operations July 1, 2014, citing inability to reach the scale needed for viable economics.
- 05
No reliable loss figure disclosed.