Intuit, Inc agrees to purchase personal finance website and domain name Mint.com for $170 million. Intuit, Inc. products include QuickBooks, TurboTax and Quicken.
Mint.com is a free service that allows consumers to track their expenses and investments. The site was launched approximately two years ago. The start-up’s founder and CEO, Aaron Patzer, will become general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group, which includes its Quicken financial management software.
According to compete.com, Mint.com receives 1,203,379 unique and 4,338,838 total visits per month. Google ranks Mint.com #8 for the term “personal finance” and #1 for “money management software”.
For complete details of the sale visit WSJ.com.
Wow. great sale!
Just shows that development is key,
but rolling out a site
that gets traction is difficult.
Aron
I agree, development is key. Providing potential buyers with traffic is very important. This is a prime example because Mint.com was not purchased based on revenue. They generate don’t generate any.
Also,
I noticed on ALexa that the rank was hovering in the
30,000 – 40,000 range for a year or so,
and then quickly shot up to
the 3000-5000 range in early
2009.
It would be great to know what they did to get the traffic to shoot up.
Advertising?
Blogs?
Link exchanges?
Marketing?
Press Releases etc?
Did the site change?
It would be good for us all to see what it takes to
go from an Alexa 40,000 site to a top 5000 site
in a matter of a week or 2.
Aron
That’s an amazing sale. Thanks for reporting it. I use mint.com myself and think its a great service. Hopefully, Intuit won’t muddle with it too much.
Patrick they do some revenue I think about $10 million.
Interesting interview with the CEO
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-interview-mint.com-ceo/
Thanks for mentioning this. I am a huge personal fan of Mint. It will be interested to see what kind of tinkering Intuit will do with the Mint algorithm that recommends various financial products to users based on their spending habits. I would hope that every single user isn’t inundated with recommendations to purchase Quickbooks or form an LLC at MyCorporation (both Intuit products)
– Joel
I just wrote a post about some things that we can all learn about the aquisition: http://www.domainsuperstar.com/what-we-can-learn-about-intuits-purchase-of-mintcom-for-170-million
Thanks again for posting about this and it reaffirms my desire to keep checking back on ChefPatrick.com for domain/web development news!
I am a little slow on the uptake but can someone explain how Mint.com is an example of domain development?
Isn’t every dot com an example then?
I’m not looking for a fight here I am just curious as to how domainers perceive buildout / development etc.
Thx!
Hey Ron,
Basically what you are asking is what makes this deal special over any other sale. If I’m wrong sorry, but that is what I perceive.
Three things make this development/deal special to me…
-Strictly an online only business
-Developed with no physical products to sell
-Just two years old
What are your thoughts?