Mint · B2C · free budgeting app
Offer a free finance app paid for by credit card offers
Lost money on every user due to data costs; offers hurt the product
Failedpricing
What they did
Mint was free and earned money from ads and financial offers (credit cards), pushing as many offers per session as possible while paying data aggregators heavy fees per user.
What happened
Lost a decent amount of money per user; constant product-vs-revenue tension; sold to Intuit just before a planned pivot.
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Learning and Profiting from Black Swan Events — Val Agostino, Monarch Money“So to have a free product that's paying these massive fees to the data aggregators, we were basically losing a decent amount of money on every user.”
“And this was a constant tension at Mint, you know, is like, how many offers can we get in front of a user per session?”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Monarch Money: Charge users a subscription instead of running ads, so users are the customerFounder says it keeps the product improving; no numbers
- Monarch Money: Let users vote on your roadmap from a Feature Requests link in settingsOver 15,000 votes and long comments that guide what gets built
- Monarch Money: Show clickable prototypes to the users who voted for a feature before buildingSlower up front but fewer release cycles; founder's claim
- Monarch Money: Ask 'why' 3-5 times about requests to find the real emotional needFound users want a sense of control; marketing changes still to come
- Monarch Money: Define user types, from students to retirees, and choose which to targetFounder says it helped decide focus and messaging; no numbers
- Monarch Money: Run a year-long private beta with a few hundred power usersPublic beta followed in early 2021; growth took off from there
- Monarch Money: Publish a founder blog post the night a rival's shutdown leaks, with an importer readyDaily signups jumped 20-30x and stayed there (shutdown itself drove most demand)
- Monarch Money: Talk candidly on Reddit to a closing rival's users about your plans and gapsFounder says users found it authentic and trusted them; no separate numbers
- Monarch Money: Pause promised features and re-rank everything when a sudden opportunity hitsNew import extension shipped in ~48 hours vs 6+ weeks for rivals; ~70 minutes downtime
- Monarch Money: Grow the support team from 3 to 20+ people during a signup surgeBacklog of days to weeks at first; now back to 24-hour replies
- Monarch Money: Open Canada in beta after Canadians fake their location to sign upMixed: weaker bank connections frustrated some users, who were offered refunds
- Monarch Money: Build a content team teaching the personal finance basics schools skip
- Monarch Money: Keep the team small and aim for break-even even after raising VCTeam of 13 was ready when demand spiked; no financial numbers
- Monarch Money: Keep an 'open role' on your jobs page for people who don't fit a listingNearly half the team was hired this way