I initially saw Mint with Aaron Patzer and Dave McClure in November/December of 2006. Instantly, I was in love. It was a unique approach to a massive problem and Aaron already had a working prototype. Note: Aaron spent the previous 6 months building it alone in his apartment. Most people never realize there were way more competitors than just Wesabe: Geezeo, Buxfer, Yodlee (data-aggregation company used by Mint), Quicken Online, MS Money online and a few others I can’t remember.

Here is Mint’s initial version:

So what did it take for Mint to win?

1. Instant Value. This is easily the most important thing. All the other solutions required work. Facebook was our secret weapon that trained people to share their personal information online. Thanks Zuck. Within 3 minutes of using Mint you get your full financial picture and ways to increase your own money. All for free. Basically, too good to be true. No other service came close to doing this.

2. Name. Next to family and health, personal finance it is one of the top 3 most sensitive things in life. The site was originally called mymint.com. I was initially against buying Mint.com but Aaron / Anton spent months acquiring the domain. This may seem inconsequential, but would you feel more comfortable entering your bank details on Wesabe.com or Mint.com?

The idea that we could buy / use that domain showed people we had money and aren’t as likely to just steal their information. The shortness of the domain in and of itself [chase.com, mint.com] signals legitimacy. Think about companies adding ‘as seen on tv’ stickers to their boxes. Shows they had the money to buy the tv spots.

3. Trust / Design. This goes along with the name. This seems to be discounted but sometimes I talk about Mint as a design / marketing company whose product is personal finance. Think of Zappos as a Customer Support company that happens to sell shoes. Jason’s clean design style helped make users feel comfortable with giving Mint their financial information. I’ll cover this in more detail another time, but for now here’s a few key things we did to increase trust:

• SEO. People trust Google, so we knew they’d trust us more if they came to Mint from there, so we used search engine optimization to get Mint to the front page of Google searches.
• Authority. We got thought leaders in personal finance to back us.
• Security. We actually promoted security front and center.

To drive this point on design & trust home, compare these 2 sites (names removed) and tell me which one makes you warm and fuzzy about sharing your financial data.

If you want a contemporary reference, it would be something like this “Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to Mint, now back at your man, now back to Mint. Sadly, he isn’t Mint, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s Mint.”

4. Investors. Aaron is one of the most strategic people I know and was able to bring on the who’s who of investors. Those people had deep connections anywhere we needed it. For example: one of the leaders of Quicken, the guy who invented Gmail, and many more…

How did he do it? Good question. He wasn’t a Silicon Valley insider (he’s from the midwest) and he didn’t pitch these guys right away. Aaron built a functional prototype for 6 months and then hit the streets. He picked investors based on their industry experiences relevant to Mint.

5. Research. Aaron’s father has research experience and we spent countless weeks figuring out what people really wanted before we ever launched our beta. Guess who we found out Mint’s biggest competitor was? No one. Apathy. This shocked me! Most people would rather not track anything and just see how they are doing when they go to the ATM. Guess who was #2? Ms Money, Intuit, Wesabe? NOPE. Microsoft Excel. Who would have believed that!

Learning about all this provided us with the messaging / approach and branding to appeal to the right audience. This affected our messaging, internally and externally we were similar to Firefox in saying “take back your money.”

6. “Lean”-Startup. Mint was well-funded and definitely took its time to launch. 1.5 years. Think of how it was to be the marketer of that (:

I am a fan of validation through research – approaching people at cafes, user testing in person, surveys, segmentation and interviews – which Mint did way beyond any quick-to-launch first movers.

There are times when getting your product out there before it’s ready can hurt you; first mover advantage may not apply to a market where the product needs to convey trust. Would you give your credit card to someone who was caught cheating?

Could Mint have won if they hadn’t raised $15+ million dollars? I don’t think so. Where did the money go? Yodlee is not cheap. Hiring the best people. Endless supply of ping-pong balls add up.

Why did it need so much money? Dealing with Yodlee seems trivial but we had dedicated engineers, and securing data is not cheap! We also spent a lot on design, and we made sure we got the product right. How did we know the product was right? That’s for another blog post. 1.5 years to launch.

Did Aaron need to take 1.5 years to launch the product? It’s hard to say about right vs. wrong but when looking at the outcome it doesn’t seem horrible.

7. Education. Dave had a the killer idea of the content network (blog) which was a HUGE traffic generator and still is to this day. It provides infographics, ideas, interviews and a wealth of useful information to users (and Google for SEO juice). The development took way longer than anyone expected so we had the time to focus. Most startups won’t have this luxury. This got us loyal followers, connections to other relevant bloggers and learnings of what keywords people are using when talking about personal finance. More recently, Stew Langille has done an amazing job creating tons of rich content & infographics in the blog and well executed landing pages.

8. PR / word-of-mouth. I get ultra-annoyed when people refer to things as viral. Mint got its inital public buzz and discussion because it won TC40. Beyond that Mint built a useful product, that tons of people wanted and was completely free, makes it easy for people to want to tell their friends about. Then Atomic PR (and their $15k+ month retainer) helped take Mint out to the mainstream press (Walt Mossberg, Good Morning America, The NY Times, etc…). We cared less about the web 2.0 crowd and more about Aaron’s family & friends form the mid-west. Guess what? They still read newspapers in physical form.

Managing your finances effortlessly (and free) was a very appealing story compared to chatter and manual input. Also, most users don’t want to install a plugin to then connect to their personal finance sites (required on Wesabe).

9. Right place, wrong community. Wesabe provided a phone # to call their CEO (great idea), was involved in all things web 2.0 but I believe missed looking to middle Americans who are the struggling the most with finances. Personal finance is an extremely private thing. Personally, I couldn’t care less about your money. I just want to know how I can protect and grow my own. Wesabe was all about forum / chats / comments about money while MInt is a entirely private experience.

10. Community. We spent a ton of time holding online chats, went to events (like twiistup la, finnovate) and connected with the entire personal finance community. Oh yea, this was 9 months before we even launched the product.

Think about this. By the time Mint launched we had more traffic than all the other personal finance sites (buxfer, geezeo, wesabe) combined. Huh? Yea, thanks to its design, 4th-mover (or later) advantage and actively seeking promotion, Mint won.

Bonus: Look how Mint responds to Wesabe shutting down. Ha!

You should follow me on Twitter.

Thanks to Jason Baptiste and Matt Wensing, Brad and Allen for reviewing.

Please leave comments on Hacker News.

via flickr

1. The most critical thing of a successful event is making it NOT suck. I know that sounds easy but it’s about getting valuable speakers and providing a great forum for relevant people to connect. With CommunityNext we never even realized how much we made until the event was over. Our priority was for everyone to LOVE what we put on. That’s why we got Threadless, PlentyOfFish, Fark and other people to the valley that aren’t considered regulars. We also paid extra for open bars before this is now common. Lastly, we got the best food. People remember that and Kahlua cabbage is SO good!
2. Focus on a core group of people and get to break-even ASAFUCKINGp. These people who have over 500 followers on Twitter with a 2/1 follower (>500) / following( <250) ratio. Once I got there I was set. This means that people will start saying to each other “oh, you going.” “oh yea,” And ones who aren’t going will feel left out.
3. Mailing lists are GOLD. We got on http://thestartupdigest.com and some VC associate mailing lists which were giant. Try to attract people who can expense it, easier for them to make purchasing decision. Teacher conferences must be tough:)
4. Partner with women2.org. A great audience of potential attendees.
5. DON’T SHIT your pants if you have only sold 15 tickets and there are 2 weeks left. If your event sucks well maybe you should. Otherwise 80% of sales come in the last 2 weeks of an event.
6. Think of hitting up vc associates. They love this shit, have great expense accounts and can promote to the companies they have in portfolio.
7. Going back to #1. Really need your core locked. That is around 20-40 people who either got free or discounted tickets.
8. Hit up Dave McClure and other people who have events, Charles Hudson, Cassie Philips & sfbeta. They are the godfathers of events in the bay area, they can help you promote via their lists or provide suggestions.
9. Post your event in the generic bitch places, you get 1-2 sales from them, ie. Craigslist posting, yahoo upcoming, plancast & facebook event.
10. You need to enable tracking links in Eventbrite, http://noahsevent-FACEBOOKTRACKING.eventbrite.com so you can see where your sales are coming from.
11. Leverage people who already bought. Give them 1/2 off for 1 friend. Always ask people how they hear about your event and why they are going?
12. Realize 99.99999999999999999999999999% of events are networking. This totally surprised me as I wanted to learn great things. The speakers and price just help filter the types of people who will come. It’s hard to encourage it but alcohol is an amazing social lubricant and try to do fun things with nametags.
13. You should discount your early bird around enough that selling 10-15% of capacity will get you to break-even. With Community Next I preferred keeping prices low and raising over time when demand rices. Although, one strategy that worked in our later events is keep prices high so people think it’s high value but give out coupons to get to break-even in the beginning.
14. Add SnapABug to your site, at a $300 price point for tickets either hiring someone at $15 / hour or doing it yourself is a very good ROI
15. Consider a twitter RT free ticket thingy. Seed with 1-3 key people in your area or target market. Give them 1 ticket to give away for followers retweeting. Should help sell 10-20 tickets.
16. Ask questions. We found some really good sales by asking on Linkedin Answers. Try on quora.com now too..
17. Do a freebie. This one for business on software worked well. What worked well for CommunityNext was having 1 open slot during the day and letting users vote on it. Ie. User’s choice panel. We actually had someone cheat so watch out for that too.
18. Buy google & fb ads. Try reddit ones for geekier events. At our $300 price point we bought on the names of speakers / companies, surprised we sold tickets from this manner.
19. Your SUCCESS METRIC of your event is NOT profit but retention for future events. Simple things to improve this: connect people during your events, spend more to have drinks for Free all day long and don’t have sponsors that don’t add value or do cool stuff at your event. A nice thing is also to prep your speakers over the phone to make sure what they are going to say won’t suck.
20. Trade labor for promotion. You inevitably get a few freeloaders who want to help, let them.
21. Enable your people to promote for you. We gave out badges, now you can give people things to tweet and post to Facebook / LinkedIn statuses. Ps. Try encouraging people to promote to LinkedIn groups, don’t think this has been done much.

Ultimately when doing your event you need to think about why you personally want to go and attend. Get that figured out, setup a budget, lock a few speakers down, get your core group and you are good to go!

So here’s what we are going to do:
Leave a comment or tweet to @appsumo on how we can increase our appsumo.com homepage conversion rate. We are going to take our 3 favorites, test them and report back the results. All tweets / Comments must be submitted by Friday 3pm (so we have enough time to test).

If there is an increase in conversion rate we will give the difference to the top person. The other 2 people selected will get a free bundle.

Huh? Yea, we are currently hovering around ~3% conversion rate. If you do a mock up, that makes it easier to choose and do your test as well.

Here’s how the numbers work out:

$250 for a comment is not a bad deal:) Contest ends Friday at 3pm PST, go leave a comment / tweet now.

Disclaimer: There are no disclaimers.

Why are we doing this?

This is helpful to increase our conversion rates going forward. It compounds. So if we increase it to 5%, then it’s always 5% for all future bundles and we can keep increasing that to my personal goal of 10%.

So far we’ve doubled our conversion rate from 1.5 to 3%. Here are a few things we’ve done so far:

Here are some things we changed based on CrazyEgg, SnapABug and general feedback.

• Moved buy now from right to left side



• Changed the share links to social proof since no one was clicking



• Too many people were clicking on our. No Thanks, tell me when the next bundle is so we pushed it down further on the page and removed the background color



• We added a testimonial to show that people like what we are offering.



• Displayed company logos based on which got the most clicks (also on who had most the twitter followers).
• The timer wasn’t prominent so we moved it higher:



• Our conversion on the checkout page is very high (80%+), ie. so we want more clicks. Hence we made more things that made sense clickable to the checkout page, like the timer.



• Peoples mouse movements were in the middle of the page so we moved our buy now buttons there. Learned from Clicktale.com.



• People were confused whether they were getting one or all bundles so we changed the text from buy now to buy all 5 now >



• Removed the tell us what you want and app directory link from the tip. Distracting from what we want users to do, buy.



• Clarified redemption times. Got great feedback using SnapABug.com that people didn’t have a need for the bundle right now. So we realized we could clarify that almost all the services can be redeemed whenever.



• Feedback was that text sucks and images rule. Removed text and updated with images.



• People kept asking if our charge was monthly or one time. we added an faq page.
• Bonus tip! Use google analytics and setup goals. this was AMAZINGLY helpful. you can see the $ per each referral as well as how much $ you make from specific page visits. This will teach you if people to go to your faq then buy or which sites you should try to buy more traffic from.

Thanks Sudhanshu Aggarwal, Jason Baptiste, Ruben Gamez, Gabe Weinberg, Jeff Clark, Jerome Breche and everyone who talked to us for help on this article and optimizing.

Contests ends Friday at 3pm. Go leave a tweet / comment with what we should test, it can be anything.

AppSumo.com Design Bundle includes:

- Typekit.com – Amazing fonts!
- Balsamiq – Save time, create mockups
- Noteableapp – Collaborate on design projects
- Ember – Designers portfolio

All this just for $12 bucks. I know:)

Clock is ticking, only 2 days left: Get it now >

People who made this a reality: David, Lora, Sanketh, Veen, Hiten, Jeff, Dmitry, Noah, Peldi and Alex.

Deal includes top web productivity apps: Evernote, RescueTime, Shoeboxed, Remember The Milk, and more…

Yay, We got featured on lifehacker.

link

PHP Programmer
- Must be able to do the work of 3 Americans or 10 outsourcers:)

Data Manager
- Must love bitch work and have a good attitude.

Opportunity for growth, make lots of money and fun included. Email me, job [at] okdork.com. If you refer someone then you get a Chipotle burrito on me…

Question: Where are the best ways you’ve found quality hires?

Sidenote: People are not resources. Why do companies always refer to people as allocating or moving “resources.”

Shit. I saw that email about my hosting pw reset. I went to my hosting provider and tried to change my pw and start backing up my dbs and files. Okay, whew. Now back to my email problem…

What to do when your gmail is hacked

1- If they have NOT changed your pw, (they changed mine), go to your google account and change your pw to lock them out. Google Accounts login
2- Okay, didn’t work? Try to reset your password at the gmail password reset page. I heard this may take up to 24 hours to respond to. But you want your email now!!!
3- Still out? Go to the gmail recovery form. This is actually how I got my email back. It took around 30 minutes for them to send me email reset.

Unfortunately, they still had the pw to my hosting server and changed every one of my personal websites to the image above. Fuck!

Prevention:

a) At this point please make sure you have a backup email in your google accounts file, this is where they email the password recovery info to. I used a fake email intially to register my gmail, so from now on I have a real backup email in there.
b) Make backups of your dbs and files from your personal servers right now. Saves you the headache, my other sites had files deleted so now I have to go to google search and used cache links to try and save them.
c) On gmail, I created another account and then setup a filter so every single piece of email I receive is forwarded to that account.
d) Have different passwords. I know you know this but I use the same password, ‘hello’ on so many things. Now I don’t.
e) Update wordpress. These guys put in some backdoor files (pol.php,aa.php, etc…they can name them whatever they want) in really hidden folders so they could access my sites anytime they want. Make sure to check for this and delete them if you find them.

I hope this helps and saves you the frustration and anger that I faced. Any other ideas or similar stories?

Someone emailed me this

I’m at that point where I haven’t blogged for 2 months (got married, moved to the UK), and I can’t get myself to write the first post…do you have any prescription for that dr kagan?

I’m no doctor, luckily my brother is:) Anyways, what do you do when you are tired of blogging? I put ads on okdork a few months ago. And now I’m making a whopping $1 a day or so. That is about 5 burritos a month.

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Personally, it won’t change my content but it’s a nice reward outside of meeting new people that I get. Also, it encourages me to post more often and somewhat try to promote my blog more. I still don’t:) The unfortunate thing is I don’t get to control what ads appear on my blog. For example, this image on Andrew Chen’s blog supporting John McCain. I am not sure he supports him but a new visitor might get that impression. Ads are a good thing to motivate me but do have this downside.

What do you do when you are tired / unmotivated to blog? (ads, outsource, stop blogging, etc..)

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At 13 I started working at a Popcorn stand in Vallco Mall.

Yours?

Have you ever been in a car crash?