-
What’s perhaps even more amazing about this opportunity is that we made it to this point just three years after the company started: one year to build, and two years in operation. I doubt this could have happened anywhere but Silicon Valley. Mint was built in the Silicon Valley way. It started in my apartment, with Matt Snider and Poornima Vijayashanker. We interviewed the first real “professional,” our VP of Engineering, David Michaels in our kitchen. Our technology was all open source, and essentially all free: MySQL at the bottom, Hibernate to avoid the need to hire a DBA, Tomcat on Apache, Yahoo’s YUI served as the base for our AJAXy goodness. We didn’t have money for a lawyer, but no fewer than three offered to help us incorporate and accrue $25k in legal fees for a little bit of the company. We shared office space in a type of incubator, renting by the cube to avoid a long-term lease. We didn’t have money for advertising, so we started a blog. We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters. To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.
~ Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer. Smart. They just sold for $170 million.-
shecallsmeartemis liked this
-
pegobry reblogged this from youmightfindyourself and added:
kevintwohy, mikehudack & youmightfindyourself) Silicon Valley indeed — they went for the quick buck when they could’ve...
-
helloxander reblogged this from mikehudack
-
alexbeaudet liked this
-
skotcarruth reblogged this from kevintwohy
-
triciawang liked this
-
emilydee liked this
-
mopostal reblogged this from auciello
-
mopostal liked this
-
johnfitzpatrick liked this
-
stevewoolf liked this
-
mariamcg reblogged this from juliaallison and added:
very true, no overnight success but still an awesome result
-
indiedreams liked this
-
juliaallison reblogged this from meghanasha and added:
a more intelligent, thoughtful, genuinely sweet guy you’ll never meet - so I couldn’t be more delighted that he’s...
-
caterpillarcowboy liked this
-
losingweightinthecity liked this
-
auciello reblogged this from youmightfindyourself
-
missmala reblogged this from mikehudack
-
saucy liked this
-
mdfsmash reblogged this from mikehudack
-
saintonge liked this
-
john liked this
-
infoneer-pulse liked this
-
suhlee liked this
-
monsieurledan liked this
-
youmightfindyourself reblogged this from mikehudack
-
marc liked this
-
whitneymcn reblogged this from david-noel and added:
(kevintwohy+ mikehudack + echolot) This is great and congratulations to the Mint crew, but…okay, I’ll bite: why couldn’t...
-
soundcloud liked this
-
arig liked this
-
tanya77 liked this
-
meghanasha reblogged this from mikehudack and added:
INSANE! I’m so proud of Mr. Patzer and his incredible achievement. GO MINT!
-
cesart liked this
-
patrickbeser liked this
-
david-noel reblogged this from mikehudack
-
mikehudack reblogged this from kevintwohy
-
mikehudack liked this
-
kevintwohy posted this
-
