September 15th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
Earlier this year I attended the Business Startup Exhibition in London. They were running an event based on the Dragons Den format.
Someone was pitching an idea for a web-based personal finance application. One of the “Dragons” tried to humiliate him and told him there was no demand for that kind of thing. The muppet was more interested in be a Simon Cowell mini-me than being of any use. The person I was with dragged me away to stop me shooting my mouth off in defence of the would-be entrepreneur.
There’s plenty of demand for something like KashFlow but for the peronal finance space. Over in the US mint.com has been making great in-roads and taking big chunks of business away from the incumbent player, Intuit.
TechCrunch broke the news yesterday that Intuit are buying Mint in a deal worth £170m (£102m). A very handsome price for a company that isn’t actually making much money. The software is provided free of charge to the user and the company makes money by other means as mint.com founder and CEO Aaron Patzer explains in this video:
In the US, Intuit is a far bigger player in the accountancy software market than Sage, the UK leader.
Intuit “got” the SaaS concept long before Sage did (I’m still not sure they have) and have been successfully offering a web-based version of Quickbooks (US only) for some time now.
So where to now for Mint and Intuit?
Intuit say they’ll continue with the mint.com application and brand and put Aaron Patzer in charge of its personal finance group.
Patzer said part of the appeal to him of the deal was the ability to tap into Intuit’s resources, particularly on the marketing side of things. I can certainly relate to that.
I hope he survives the move from calling all the shots to being an employee. I don’t think I could!
But the question remains, where is the mint.com equivalent for the UK market? I don’t see one. The online accounting software space for small businesses is getting very crowded with a new entrant every month (I was only aware of 1 or 2 others when we launched). My suspicion is that one or two of them will re-position themselves as being a personal finance app in the not too distant future.
Update: @roanlavery on Twitter just informed me of the existence on Kublax, a UK equivalent of Mint. Very slickly presented and appears to be well funded. I’m surprised I’d not heard of them before.
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Tags: bstartup, intuit, mint.com, Sage, techcrunch
Posted in Accounting, Cloud Computing / SaaS, Ramblings, Technology | 5 Comments »
February 25th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
What is this?
Go on, you can say it. It’s not a trick question. This is spam. Nothing special about it – it’s just your common garden variety “immediate monthly income”, “secrets of millionaires” spam.
What’s surprising (or perhaps not) about it is where it comes from.
Twice a year there is an exhibition put on in London called the Business Startup Exhibition (bStartup). I don’t need to put anything in my diary to remind me about it – I know when it’s coming because it’s preceeded by dozens of phone calls from their sales people trying to sell us a stand.
They don’t understand the concept of CRM software, so the poor guy that’s phoning us has no idea that we’ve already spoken to them 10 times and said “No thanks”.
Apparently they’re just told to search Google for likely targets – sorry, potential exhibitors. As we rank quite well for small business related terms, we get a lot of their calls.
So I’m used to their ear-spam. I just hadn’t realised they’d sunk as low as real spam.
Technically they may argue that I’m on their mailing list and agreed to receive it at some point. Which is probably true. But when you join a “Business Startup Community” and opt in to receive emails, you don’t expect low-quality crap like this that has absolutely sod-all to do with starting a business.
At best it’s a mild annoyance, at worst it tempts someone away fom starting a “real” business and they lose a lot of money on it.
I actually deleted it when it hit my inbox and thought nothing more about it. It was only when someone on Twitter posted an angry message about it that I was reminded about it. Apparently he hadn’t opted in for any mailing lists or joined any communities. He’d just registered his interest in the event.
bStartup: try a bit of quality control and treat your data and community with a bit more respect. Oh, and get some CRM. I’m sure Really Simple Systems will do you a good deal.
PS. This rant has nothing to do with the fact that bStartup are threatening us with a CCJ for cancelling my order for a stand (yes, I crumbled – it didn’t stop the calls though) a couple of days after ordering it because my wife had the cheek to choose the same weekend to be due to go into labour.
Tags: bstartup
Posted in Small Business | 4 Comments »
