The best thing I read this week was Wesabe’s co-founder’s post explaining why he felt Wesabe lost out to Mint. Most of you probably know about Mint because they have entered the Indian market as well, and Wesabe was a similar website which was launched ahead of Mint but couldn’t compete with them and shut shop earlier this year.
This post is really great because it is so brutally honest, and I can only imagine how painful it must be for an entrepreneur to not only close down their business, but then dissect it with the honesty that is showed here. It touches upon some important aspects of managing personal finances, and is a must read.
Bad Money Advice does these great posts at the end of every month where he highlights some trends from the PF blogosphere, and as usual it is witty and makes for a great read.
The Psy – Fi blog is becoming one of my favorite blogs because of the wit and the clarity of thought displayed there, and I present to you another great post titled dying to invest.
Among other interesting reads this week:
How to overcome communication fears @ HBR
Don’t trade a boss for something worse @ Financial Samurai
Best home based business ideas @ The Digerati Life
Commission oriented advice @ Capital Mind
Amazon debuts Kindle for web @ TechCrunch
How to make your Windows startup faster @ Digital Inspiration
Enjoy your weekend!
I have read the article about Wesabe twice now, once at work and again tonight and I must say that if I were an angel investor I would definitely want a guy like this running another company.
I wonder if he was this honest with his staff when he was the CEO? Did they really know they were falling and headed towards failure or is it something that didn’t come clear to him until after the dust had settled.
I tried Mint for awhile and I have to agree with the comments made that Mint is not worth the hassle and doesn’t do a very good job of showing where your money is going and how to improve your financial situation. It seemed to me that they were only interested in getting you to sign up with new credit cards. I haven’t checked my Mint account in well over a year, I don’t even remember my username and password.
Your comment reminds me of something I heard Fred Wilson say at an interview, where he was asked how do you know the difference between something like Twitter and Chatroulette, and I think he said something to the effect of a large part of that being about who the founder is. I was a little surprised then because I thought it’d be more to do with the product.
The article is really good about Wesabe. To be technically correct Mint is not in India yet. Intuit has a product called Intuit Money Manager which is different then Mint in the US. At some point they will probably rollout Mint.com to include India.
Thanks for explaining that Manish. Did you get to use the Intuit product? Any impressions on that?