Wesabe
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Wesabe was a personal finance management web app founded in 2005/2006 by Marc Hedlund. It helped people track spending and change their financial behavior, and launched about 10 months before its rival Mint. The company raised $4.7 million in venture funding.
02 / Wesabe FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
In his famous postmortem, co-founder and CEO Marc Hedlund took full blame for losing to Mint. Wesabe demanded far more work from users and had a harder data-aggregation experience than Mint (which used Yodlee to pull financial data automatically). Mint made users happy immediately; Wesabe asked them to change behavior - a value judgment many users disagreed with. Mint won the TechCrunch40 spotlight, attracted five times the visitors, and was acquired by Intuit for $170 million in 2009. Wesabe did generate revenue from late 2008, but never enough to sustain the business.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded and launched
Marc Hedlund founds Wesabe, launching the personal finance web app about 10 months before Mint.
- Mint wins
Rival Mint is acquired by Intuit for $170 million; Wesabe fades from view.
- Shutdown
On June 30, 2010, Wesabe shuts its PFM functions and open-sources its code. In October 2010, Hedlund publishes his postmortem, 'Why Wesabe Lost to Mint.'
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
On June 30, 2010, CEO Marc Hedlund announced Wesabe would shutter its personal finance functions, pessimistic about the company's revenue outlook; the code base was open-sourced.
- 02
Rival Mint - which launched later - had been acquired by Intuit for $170 million in 2009, while Wesabe hit the deadpool.
- 03
In October 2010, Hedlund published a postmortem blaming himself: Wesabe's product was harder to use than Mint's, demanding more work from users while delivering happiness more slowly.