“When I started Mint I took a very different approach…and this is sort of the methodology that I formed (Validate your idea > Create a prototype > Build the right team > Raise funding). Mint founder, Aaron Patzer, took a different approach: Many companies like to launch their product and iterate based on feedback.

Here’s what I found: Different from the Start I set out to dig a little deeper and get a more thorough understanding of how Mint grew. Putorti provides a synopsis of each component. This blog post is, in part, inspired by Jason Putorti’s (designer extraordinaire at Mint) answer on Quora about the different components that led to growth. As we’ll see, being a consumer financial startup was a big turn off for investors, too. People had to hand over their financial data to a young company, so Mint had an uphill climb in gaining trust with users. When you add in the fact that this is a finance product with no real viral component (Mint is personal, not social), it makes it even more impressive. Growing to millions of users in two years would be a success story for any consumer web company. Four years later, Mint has over 10 million users. At the time, Mint had over 1 million users and was adding a few thousand new users every day. In November 2009, Intuit bought Mint for $170 million. Mint officially launched in September 2007. What propelled Mint to millions of users was a strong product and a strong marketing strategy. Winning TechCrunch 40 helped Mint get off to a great start and establish its credibility, but, in the end, that likely was a small contributor to its overall success. If you were to create a list of startups that had so-called “ overnight success,” personal finance software service Mint would have to be near the top of the list.

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