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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

Indinero should consider pivoting.

Compete.com only shows them at 800 or so uniques per month. But more importantly it will be extremely challenging for indinero to pick up enough small business accounts to make this idea work. While it's possible that this company could be an acquisition for Intuit that's not going to happen with anything like the user base they have. And getting time strapped small business owners to see value in this service in my opinion (with many years selling to small business and owning several) doesn't seem likely at all.

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I don't have access to Indinero's data, but for my own startup, Compete's data is no more accurate than a random number generator. Both the absolute numbers and the shape of the graph have essentially zero resemblance to the real data.

If the sample is small then the data will be way off. That's the point. There is low traffic so there is nominal data.

That being said comparing compete data to hundreds of parked domains that get enough traffic to have a decent data sample yes I would agree the data is off. But not anywhere near enough to make any difference in the point I was making.

Those numbers being off just by a factor of "only" 10-50X (which I think is reasonable given Compete's record) would make a big difference for a B2B site. Even more important from the perspective of a startup would be the presence of an upward trend - and with Compete, I've seen their estimate for our traffic fall by over 50% in months where we grew by around 40%.

I'm pretty sure for a "decent sample" - at least, accurate enough for the data to be useful for anything - you need to be at least a top 100 site, and even then I've heard stuff from a couple webmasters of those sites that Compete data is off by an order of magnitude or so.

Using Compete as a sole-source gauging a site's success is a problem. As a data point, their estimate of a site I run is 500x off.

Which of your sites are you referring to? For heytell.com compete is showing 8,265 uniques. Certainly you aren't saying that that site is getting 4,000,000 uniques are you?

Not at liberty to say. It does appear that Compete currently has a hole when it comes to divining mobile traffic.

What would Intuit want with them, though? Intuit already has Mint and their own service for syncing with all the banks. Indinero seems like a business branded Mint, which Intuit would be able to do themselves. It doesn't seem like there'd be much value in Indinero's brand or accounts either at this stage.

Plus, Intuit's also using Fonzie to shill reverse mortgages to seniors these days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CogQBgAFwI4

As a startup, I might want to steer clear of that particular borg unless prospects were truly dire.

The video you linked to is by Quicken Loans, which is in no way affiliated with Intuit.

Quicken Loans was very briefly owned by Intuit (from 99-02), but the only thing they share now is the Quicken trademark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Loans

Interesting - I saw the "Quicken Loans is an Intuit Trademark" scroll at the bottom of the screen during a commercial a few nights back and assumed there was an association past trademark. Wonder if other consumers jump to the same conclusion...

bingo. the small biz segment is crazy expensive from a cust. acquisition standpoint. you have to raise a fair amount of dough to get a sales beach-head established. aside from intuit and the credit card cartels there aren't a lot of folks who have succeeded in getting scale there..

square may have a good run in that space, but they really are just an optimization play on the cc processing flow..nttawwt....

Or you have to just stay lean and execute well.

I own a popular blog, and Google Analytics shows 3x-4x the unique visitors Compete does. So, while I would say that yes, their stats tend to be inaccurate, that's still an alarming trend for InDinero.

(Update: I also compared to my startup's site, and GA shows 10x the visitors that Compete does. But still, even if off by a factor of 10, that's not great traffic for such a high-profile startup.)

Citing Compete is dangerous territory indeed.

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