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Comment by steamboiler | Hacker News Reader

From a comment posted on the blog: "You may not realize how fragile Mint was. All the hard part was being done by Yodlee.com; Mint simply built a thin layer over Yodlee, and collected affiliate fees. Mint was not built for the long haul, it was built to flip. (Check out the free yodlee.com to see that this is true.)"

I think this point is important. Mint was adding value to an existing set of services rather than creating from scratch. This made its offering relatively easier to replicate. IMHO this point is not given adequate importance when considering why Mint chose to sell.

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giant plus one to this - mint was brilliant to make a warm and fuzzy credit card lead gen site and then parlay that into this size of sale.

I have to disagree; if it was that easy to replicate Mint's success, how come Mint can worth that much of money, and why people are using Mint's service instead of Your-Mint-Clone?

Your comment reminds me of the remark ( either here or on reddit, I can't remember) that StackOverflow is easy and can be cloned in a week, because the underlying technology is not hard to replicate. What you forget is market often pays a premium for the database, not the technology. Getting the technology to setup is easy, getting the subscribers, is not.

Unfair comparison. I never said it was easy to clone Mint or tried to trivialize Mint's achievements. On the contrary I emphasized the word "relatively". My argument was that Yodlee is the senior partner in the Mint-Yodlee collaboration. I am also guessing here that Intuit has far more access to financial data (banks as well existing quicken databases) than Mint-Yodlee.

EDIT: rephrased for clarity.

Quickbooks Online has ways of connecting to bank accounts and getting balances automatically.

My guess is that Intuit will be able to dump Yodlee now and use their own systems.

Wow, shocking. I can't believe Intuit would pay $170 million for something that has a single point of failure.

Wonder how much those access rates are going up :-)

Mint.com will be migrated over to Intuit's inhouse platform, away from the service Mint.com is using now.

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