Posts Tagged ‘personal finance’

How do you start a small online business in a sector with ginormous competitors, one of whom is Microsoft, and then flip it for $170 million dollars just three years later? Just ask Aaron Patzer, founder of financial management service Mint.

Patzer founded Mint when he was 25 in 2006, charging head-first into a field dominated by Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken. He later sold the company to Intuit for a hefty sum. The name of the game for Patzer was simplicity.

“Mint was born of a personal frustration of using personal finance tools which entailed way too much work. Maybe there was a problem when you have to go through 50 screens of setup,” said Patzer in an interview with Pluggd.in, AKA the “TechCrunch of India.”

Patzer’s startup began gathering customers before the service even launched. About 9 months before launching, the Mint team began writing a simple personal finance blog. They used it to collect 20,000 email addresses, which they then used to get people to place Mind badges on their own sites. Essentially free banner ads. The company also got a publicity boost by launching at the TechCrunch40 conference.

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AllFacebook Marketing Conference returns to San Francisco on June 28-29! Join us and get a how-to guide for marketing to Facebook’s 800 million users. A full agenda will be announced soon. Keep an eye on our event site for more information. Special early pricing is available for only $249 until this Wednesday, February 15, so register today.

How financially fit are you? It’s a very important question these days, and the tools to keep you financially healthy are all the rave. Mint, the web-based personal finance tool, is releasing a new section of its site called Financial Fitness in order to give a wider range of features to its users. Financial Fitness really takes Mint’s existing personal finance tools to the next level, making the new segment a natural progression for Mint.

Financial Fitness consists of five personal finance principles and lays these out for users to note on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. These five principles include:

Know your Money
Spend Less than you Earn
Use Debt Wisely
Invest Your Savings
Prepare for the Unexpected
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