$170 Million Richer! – 5+ 1 Points On What Everyone Can Learn From Mint.com

Tue, 22nd September, 2009 - Posted by Nash

$170 Million Richer! – 5+ 1 Points On What Everyone Can Learn From Mint.com

The owners of free budget tools website mint.com has a great reason to celebrate – Intuit has agreed to purchase the website for $170 million in cash. This is more amazing considering the fact that mint.com is just a 2-year start up company.

It’s not rocket science and it can potentially be done by everyone.

So what can we learn from all of this?

1. Be at the right place at the right time

One of the reasons how mint.com popularity sky rocketed is because this is the time when people are more conservative in spending and is venturing into more budget and frugal living.

Ever since the mortgage crisis and the recession, the cultural shift from spending spree to prudent spending has helped mint.com achieves natural traffic to its website. Gone are the days where spending spree is a the dominant culture.

When more and more people are scurrying to budget their income and expenses, mint.com gives them the tools that they need – budgeting tools for free.

Whether this is a genius marketing strategy or pure luck (I think it’s the first one), it pays off big to be at the right place at the right time.

2. Give and you shall be rewarded

Everybody likes things for free. And mint.com did just that. Free budgeting tools. Time and time again, we have seen website that gives out free services made it big. Some examples include the all-famous google.com (free search website), facebook.com (free social website), YouTube.com (free video sharing website) and hotmail.com (free email website).

Mint.com competitors which offers a subscription-based service for budgeting tools tanked because of this.

3. Develop useful items for your visitors

This is paramount for any successful websites. Mint.com provides a useful item for a hungry market – a free budgeting tool for a large group of people who wants to straighten out their finances.

4. Viral marketing still works – and it works well

Viral marketing, or marketing from the word of mouth works well. Mint.com became popular from this effect – either through actual word of mouth, or from social network such as facebook.com and MySpace.com

5. We should learn on how to develop applications

This is actually a reminder to me. It’s very easy to create websites now. A 5-minute approach and WHAM! – you got yourself a blog. To make your blog / website a notch higher than the rest, I think it’s important that we need to also learn the nuts and bolts of it so that we can develop tools that will help our visitors to achieve their needs.

6. Visitor & content is king

The final point to note – to make your website useful & popular – you need to have good contents and you need to find out what your visitors are looking for when they surf to your website.

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