Image Credits: Credit Karma
Now that Intuit is shutting down personal finance app Mint in January, some startups say they’re seeing an influx of new customers.
One of these is Monarch Money, a subscription-based money manager app co-founded by Val Agostino, John Sutherland, and Ozzy Osman to help customers create financial goals and create a path to achieving them. My colleague Mary Ann Azevedo reported on the company in 2021 when Monarch raised $4.8 million in seed funding.
Usman said in an email: “We’ve been getting double the number of users since the news broke and that’s where it all came from.” The app’s Google Play store page shows more than 10,000 downloads in its lifetime, but Osman declined to get more specific about the exact number.
In the year November 1 was “our biggest day in terms of new users” since we launched the app in January 2021, he responded. This includes the transition from waitlist to official and subsequent announcements.
Monarch CEO Agostino called the season “bittersweet” in a blog post following the Intuit news. That’s because there’s some history there: Agostino was the first product manager on the first team that built Mint. In the year He led the product team through the Intuit acquisition that closed in 2010.
Intuit then bought Credit Karma in 2020. Credit Karma has “approximately 130 million US users,” Agostino said on his blog. When Credit Karma was acquired, my colleague Ingrid Lunden noted that when Credit Karma launched financial planning in 2013, it drew direct comparisons to Mint.
Following the Credit Karma acquisition, Mint’s growth appears to have slowed, according to Fast Company. Agostino made a similar comment in his blog post, “If you’re Intuit, it doesn’t make sense to invest in both of these consumer platforms, so I’m not surprised they’re closing and consolidating Mint.” Credit Karma.
“When we started Monarch, my goal was to ‘fix’ a lot of things that I felt were broken at Mint,” Agostino told TechCrunch in an email. “It was a great business model. A free personal finance app is not an easy business to run because of the high cost of collecting financial information. Moreover, users sign up for these apps in hopes of improving their financial lives. When an app is supported by ads, the needs of advertisers are prioritized over the needs of users, ultimately defeating the purpose.” By winning.
Meanwhile, when Intuit told customers earlier this week that Mint would be included in Credit Karma, customers took to Reddit and social media to ponder what to do instead and ask for suggestions for other apps.
Jess Manno They responded to Intuit’s tweet I don’t want to keep track of all my progress with “OK, but can I transfer my data from Mint?”
Agostino told TechCrunch that Monarch offers the ability to import Mint data so users can try Monarch and still “protect their financial history.”
and Sean Adrian, co-founder of the Cheddar expense tracking app; He tweeted. He previously worked at Wesabe, a personal finance startup in 2008, and said, “Competing with Mint was tough. TechCrunch spoke to Wesabe founder Mark Hedlund about that in 2010.
“Intuit must be banking on cash to see our biggest competitor, Mint, as a weak side project,” Adrian said via direct message. That said, we’ve seen a huge amount of beta signups since the news, so I for one am very excited.