Why Quicken Online Didn't Win
Quicken Online was a product that seemed like it could and should work. We were solving an important problem - helping people live beyond paycheck to paycheck, not go into debt, and have a better financial life. In many ways, it’s one of the most purely user-benefit focused products I built in my career.
When I look back at some of the screens, I still think showing people when they are and are not living within their means is an important problem that is still not solved well. Many people still struggle with the basics and I think there’s a huge untapped need to help solve this problem.
However, an early learning for me is that sometimes working at a big company with an established brand is actually a large detriment, especially when competing with fast moving and very intelligent competition.
A portion of our lack of success is related to what Mint.com accomplished. They were a great product, they were fantastic at PR, and they out executed us a number of times. Despite that, we were still compared favorably in reviews: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/10/hands-on-mint-com-vs-quicken-online/
However, we also made a number of tactical errors that significantly limited our ability to win a market with a valuable product.
We started out as a paid product. A lot of this was based on the internal dynamics at Intuit - freemium was new in the market and I don’t think the value was fully realized by internal leadership. At the time, we couldn’t convince leadership to launch a free product with mass appeal and then monetize by adding value at later stages. Instead, we started with a very low price of $2.99 under the assumption the user would pay for value. Unfortunately, we weren't differentiated enough nor better than others in the market, especially Mint.com, to justify the incremental expense. Integrating a billing platform and identity platform was also a multi-month chunk of work that prevented us from spending more time on the core user experience.
We underestimated the constraints we had as a larger company. I think we made an assumption that as the established player in the space, we had both the technical and marketing resources that would make us more successful. However, when actually looking at it, Mint was likely better funded, had a scrappier team, and hustled harder than we did. That does not mean we didn't work hard - most of the engineers transitioned from being desktop or client engineers to full web developers and did an amazing job in the process. What we lacked though was the single-minded focus of a startup. Mint was able to focus intensely on just building a great product experience for users. We had to handle the usual product development concerns around billing, security, scaling, and quality control as well as the usual needs of a large enterprise.
We also weren't always able to play the game as scrappy as they did. Their PR strategy was top notch, they moved incredibly fast on it, and they used it to build a strong competitive position. It took us a lot longer to respond in the media and by the time we had the right people in place, we were playing catch-up instead of controlling the public narrative.
We overestimated the brand value of Quicken. Quicken, for many, was a personal finance brand focused on helping older and well-off people see their net worth and investments. It was not a brand associated with helping people clean up their debt or pay their bills on time. We failed to differentiate ourselves enough in the market and create a brand that defined us, as opposed to a brand that defined how users perceived us.
Mint made certain parts of the experience feel magical, even elements where we had near parity in terms of features. Their account aggregation was using Yodlee and we had an internal team that also enabled aggregation with a very similar technology stack. Despite this (in contrast a bit to Wesabe), they still made the experience feel magical and instantaneous through intelligent design and by enabling users to line up all their accounts to be added. On the other hand, we made users wait through the process of adding each account, which made the experience less magical and interesting.
Despite all of this, Quicken Online was more successful than many realize. At the time of the Mint.com acquisition by Intuit, Quicken Online had almost a million users and we later learned that we weren’t as far off of Mint in terms of active users as it seemed. But they were scrappy and fast moving, they won the public narrative, and they made strategic moves to make it seem like they were going to put additional pressure on Intuit (both through fundraising and then talking about their longer term aspirations to move into small business). This was enough to justify the high acquisition.
However, for a young PM, this was a scrappy and incredible experience. We built some amazing features, we engaged in a challenging struggle with a competitor, and I learned a lot in the process about product, speed of delivery, and the value of brand.
And I still think that screens like this, where we helped people live within their means, need to be built into more modern finance products to actually help people.