Wesabe

» see wesabe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

wesabe was a US-only personal finance product. it sat in a category that did not have a turkish version at the time, because the bank-aggregation problem in turkey was a different shape entirely. our online banking was per-bank, with no third-party aggregator in the legal space, and the cultural habit of letting an outside service read your account statements was not there.

so wesabe lived in my peripheral vision as a startup-press item, never as a tool. i read about it the way i read about mint, on techcrunch and on hacker news, without an account on either. marc hedlund and jason knight founded the company in december 2005 and the site went live in november 2006. the pitch was that managing money was as much a social problem as a calculation problem, and that a community of users sharing budgeting tactics could move people more than a dashboard could.

that thesis was probably correct in some abstract sense and wrong in the product-experience sense. mint launched in september 2007 with a different bet. let yodlee read the user's bank accounts automatically, classify the transactions with machine learning, and show the user a clean dashboard with zero typing. the typing-free flow was the killer feature. wesabe's equivalent did not ship for another six months and never matched the polish of mint's first version.

on 31 july 2010 wesabe shut down. the closure was clean, with data export and an open-source release of the codebase. intuit had already bought mint for $170 million in september 2009. hedlund posted 'why wesabe lost to mint' on 1 october 2010 and the essay became a fixture of startup reading lists for the rest of the decade.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the wesabe model was: upload your bank statements (later, optionally aggregate them via wesabe's own backend), tag transactions, set goals, then participate in goals-groups with other users trying to save for the same kind of thing. there were 'tips' attached to specific tags, contributed by other users, that suggested ways to cut spending in that category. the social layer was the differentiator.

the privacy stance was the other one. wesabe encouraged users to keep bank passwords on the user's machine rather than uploading them to a central server. that was the right answer from a security perspective and the wrong answer from a setup-friction perspective. mint just took your password, ran it through yodlee, and showed you the dashboard. wesabe asked you to install a browser extension or upload a file.

~ the slide ~

hedlund's post-mortem is unusually candid for the genre. the headline points he raised: mint did not launch first, and mint was not actually cheaper or more secure. what mint had was a faster path from sign-up to seeing your data on screen. the rational case for wesabe (better privacy, deeper community) lost to the experiential case for mint (less typing). the tech-press buzz cycle locked in around mint after it won the first techcrunch 40 in september 2007, and wesabe could not catch back up to that narrative.

the revenue side actually worked. wesabe started making money in late 2008 and lived off its own income from mid-november 2009 until the shutdown. it was not a runaway-burn story. it was a story about a slower-growth product losing the buzz war and not being able to raise the next round at a competitive valuation. by mid-2010 the board concluded the path forward was a clean wind-down rather than another raise.

~ what came after ~

the wesabe codebase went open source on github at shutdown and is still discoverable there. the lesson hedlund wrote down has been quoted in startup essays for fifteen years now. it sits next to the patio11 'do not call yourself a programmer' essay and the joel-on-software back catalog as one of the long-form reference texts of the 2005-2010 startup blog era.

the personal finance category eventually consolidated around mint, then around the bank-aggregator successors like plaid, and then around the bank apps themselves once big banks built native budgeting screens. mint itself got shut down by intuit in march 2024, sixteen years after its launch. wesabe outlived its competitor only in the sense that the essay still gets shared every time a startup loses to a simpler product.

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