George S. May Business Blog

Intuit buys personal finance site Mint.com — And the winner is?

Intuit will be buying Mint.com (the personal finance site) for $170 million. Now, before I rip this deal, I do want it to be known that I think Mint.com is a wonderful website. It offers a great service, in a huge, lucrative market (personal finance), run by a great CEO, Aaron Patzer.

Now, with that information being put on the table, it isn’t hard to believe that they got the better end of the deal in this buy out.  

If I may -

Mint.com currently has somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million users. Between January and May, Mint.com signed up 300,000 new users. So, do the math and we should see, total, almost 3 million users on Mint.com by the end of the year.

Mint.com gets between $30 and $40 for referring users to credit cards and banks that it partners with. (Basically, Mint.com will analyze your income, debts, credit cards, etc., and make recommendations for how you may be able to save). About 15% of all Mint.com users end up signing up for one of those tools.

So, 15% of 3 million is 450,000. 450,000 times $35 equals $15,750,000.

Still with me?

Basically, at best, Mint.com looks to pull in around $15,750,000 in revenue this year. Therefore, Intuit, in buying the website for $170 million, has set them self up to not break even for 11 years.

Does that seem like a smart paying price to you? If there is something I am missing, I urge readers to make a post, pointing out what it exactly is, and I will happily, and humbly, retract my comments. Until then I will have to issue a tisk, tisk to Intuit for following in the footsteps of AOL and its Bebo purchase, Microsoft and its acquisition of aQuantive, and all other large companies that have paid far too much for a website in the past year or so.

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