Why Wesabe Failed
Marc Hedlund, Wesabe’s CEO, has an essay up about why Wesabe lost to Mint, which is quite bumming me out.
Yes, both products helped some people — ours mostly through a supportive community and theirs mostly through giving people a rough picture of where their money has gone. But when we analyzed the benefits we saw for our users, and when Mint boasted about the benefits they saw for their users, the debt reduction and savings increase numbers directly matched the national averages. Because our products existed during a deep financial crisis, consumers everywhere cut back, saved more, and tried to reduce their debt. Neither product had any significant impact beyond what the overall economy led people to do anyways.
I loved Wesabe, and still miss it. Maybe my getting smarter about money was merely a coincidence, but I stopped carrying any credit card debt less than a year after I started using the service, because of decisions I made after Wesabe showed me the whole picture.
Mint is like Wesabe’s dim, amoral cousin, with a Zoolander haircut.
