It is hard to know how much of Mint's userbase is active, as they haven't published that I know of – during the Intuit debacle, they posted numbers, but they weren't about actives versus inactives.

One thing that has changed in the two months since this conversation started is the lead generation market. As I think some people predicted, companies are reevaluating how they pay out lead generation for things like accounts, so it is unclear that that is even a long-term viable channel. If it isn't, what other revenue options are out there for the PFM's of the world seems to be to the operative question.

I'm not sure that I think TwitterPulse is the best measure of the success of a site, but I suppose that depends on what demographic you are going after. I think Mint appeals highly to the tech affluent, the sort of people who read Crunchbase and comment on blogs. But that isn't actually the whole US population.

Let me give you an example. A woman called today for support at Thrive, and in between fixing her problem, she was gushing about how we are “the bomb” and how she does HR for new hires at a construction company. And every time people get hired and she does orientation, she says “we don't offer financial advice, but here are some great guys that do” and she talks about Thrive.

That woman will never Twitter about us. She'll never post on a blog. But somewhere in the US, there are a bunch of construction workers who hear about Thrive because it offers advice that matters to them. And that matters to us.

Your point about trust is an entirely valid one, and I think the important thing is what we trust sites to advise us on. I don't take personal finance advice from my mechanic because it isn't his expertise, and I don't take it from my bank manager because he is generally looking only for profit; the whole reason services like Thrive got created is because you couldn't trust the people taking your money to give you good advice about it. So the operative question about trust is this: what advice will we take from Mint and Thrive and other PFM's? Do we trust Mint to offer us account recommendations with our best interest in mind? Thrive? Wesabe/Rudder/etc.?

I can tell you my philosophy: the way to get people to trust you is to be trustworthy. This isn't about marketing or branding, creating “the illusion of trust”. This is about actual trust. Because all the marketing and hype and such sets us up for the problem we just had: people using our money not in our best interests, but in the interest of their bottom line. And so Thrive doesn't just appear to act in your best interest – we actually do.

-Matt

We actually did, and were originally incorporated in such a way that we could have gone either way (I don't understand the actual legalities of exactly how that all works, so I can't actually provide more details). As a team, however, I can say that we would have loved to go work for someone like the Pew Foundation or even the government, had we been given the opportunity. We all got in this to help consumers and we work hard at that every day.

That having been said, I should note that I actually think the LendingTree acquisition is very much on target with our mission. This is a company that was started by a guy who got frustrated when he tried to get a mortgage and couldn't get terms that made any sense between vendors. We've got a ton of opportunities that LT can help us take on, and though I can't say more until we get them nailed down, I think we'll be able to build a bunch of new features that will make it even easier for people to accomplish their goals, by facilitating partnerships for every financial action that people want to take. I think the real challenge and next step is making sure that once we have the right advice in place, we make it as easy as humanly possible to follow it, so that it what I'm noodling on these days.

-Matt

It is hard to know how much of Mint's userbase is active, as they haven't published that I know of – during the Intuit debacle, they posted numbers, but they weren't about actives versus inactives.

One thing that has changed in the two months since this conversation started is the lead generation market. As I think some people predicted, companies are reevaluating how they pay out lead generation for things like accounts, so it is unclear that that is even a long-term viable channel. If it isn't, what other revenue options are out there for the PFM's of the world seems to be to the operative question.

I'm not sure that I think TwitterPulse is the best measure of the success of a site, but I suppose that depends on what demographic you are going after. I think Mint appeals highly to the tech affluent, the sort of people who read Crunchbase and comment on blogs. But that isn't actually the whole US population.

Let me give you an example. A woman called today for support at Thrive, and in between fixing her problem, she was gushing about how we are “the bomb” and how she does HR for new hires at a construction company. And every time people get hired and she does orientation, she says “we don't offer financial advice, but here are some great guys that do” and she talks about Thrive.

That woman will never Twitter about us. She'll never post on a blog. But somewhere in the US, there are a bunch of construction workers who hear about Thrive because it offers advice that matters to them. And that matters to us.

Your point about trust is an entirely valid one, and I think the important thing is what we trust sites to advise us on. I don't take personal finance advice from my mechanic because it isn't his expertise, and I don't take it from my bank manager because he is generally looking only for profit; the whole reason services like Thrive got created is because you couldn't trust the people taking your money to give you good advice about it. So the operative question about trust is this: what advice will we take from Mint and Thrive and other PFM's? Do we trust Mint to offer us account recommendations with our best interest in mind? Thrive? Wesabe/Rudder/etc.?

I can tell you my philosophy: the way to get people to trust you is to be trustworthy. This isn't about marketing or branding, creating “the illusion of trust”. This is about actual trust. Because all the marketing and hype and such sets us up for the problem we just had: people using our money not in our best interests, but in the interest of their bottom line. And so Thrive doesn't just appear to act in your best interest – we actually do.

-Matt

We actually did, and were originally incorporated in such a way that we could have gone either way (I don't understand the actual legalities of exactly how that all works, so I can't actually provide more details). As a team, however, I can say that we would have loved to go work for someone like the Pew Foundation or even the government, had we been given the opportunity. We all got in this to help consumers and we work hard at that every day.

That having been said, I should note that I actually think the LendingTree acquisition is very much on target with our mission. This is a company that was started by a guy who got frustrated when he tried to get a mortgage and couldn't get terms that made any sense between vendors. We've got a ton of opportunities that LT can help us take on, and though I can't say more until we get them nailed down, I think we'll be able to build a bunch of new features that will make it even easier for people to accomplish their goals, by facilitating partnerships for every financial action that people want to take. I think the real challenge and next step is making sure that once we have the right advice in place, we make it as easy as humanly possible to follow it, so that it what I'm noodling on these days.

-Matt

Speaking as a registered (and active) user on both Mint and Thrive, I'll offer my opinion – it may be one data point, but I have personally invested in excess of 100 hours tracking my finances through Mint since the start of 2009, and as of approximately 3 weeks prior, I now do the same in parallel with Thrive.

I think Matt @ Thrive's explanation of Thrive's model relative to Mints comes from a biased POV, but still rang true to me 100%. The recommendations I have received from Thrive speak to my desire to develop my personal financial security, and long-term growth. The recommendations I receive from Mint feel much more calculated, and oriented toward encouraging my opening of a new credit card or savings account. Now that I understand the potential “$15″ gain, everything about the way the site operates seems to make more sense to me.

To provide some color, I have no credit card debt, and not an extensive amount of savings, as I'm in my low 20s. At this point, I'm not interested in a CC with a low APR and high rewards, because I spend less than 5% of my monthly transactions on credit. Having been bombarded by credit card suggestions by Mint for over 5 months now, I admit I have been tempted to concede and open a new card that will yield me “$235 in savings in the first year”. As I thought about doing this, I figured I would cancel my other card, because I don't need more than one.

The first helpful tip I noticed on Thrive was its estimation of my credit, and recommendations it has to keep a strong credit score. I quote: “Keep your oldest credit card account open. Even if you don't regularly use the card, this will continue to improve your score the longer you have it. Try to use it at least five times per year to keep it active on your credit report.” This jostled my memory and reminded me of some advice my Dad gave me when we opened the card my last year of high school, and it really engendered a real sense of trust in Thrive. Not to drive the point to hard, but ever since then I've only viewed Mint as a place where I can enjoy a beautiful Web 2.0 interface – not a location where I can rely on planning my financial goals, and considering my long-run security.

I think Matt said it best by highlighting that Mint has “no aspirational or goal-setting part of their site.” I noticed this within 1 week of using Mint, and I was delighted to find Thrive, because it does have that. While at this point the goal setting and tracking remains fairly basic, I am hoping they will be updating the site soon, because I know they have their goals in the right location.

Speaking as a corporate consultant though, I also feel that Numbers gave a great analysis of the competitive landscape, and I worry about the long-run viability of any PFM web app. Matt – did Thrive ever consider operating as a tax-exempt org, given it seems the mission of your organization is more important than the bottom line?

Jonathan – any thoughts?

Eric

You make a good point about “registered users” numbers being very different than “active users” numbers. Generally the majority of any site's userbase is inactive, no? That's one of those 90/10 things? So yes, it's possibly that I overshot my calculations for Mint's revenue.

Regarding your point about Mint.com not establishing trust with its users..I disagree with you. The users that have signed up for mint.com have given their bank account information to the company. Obviously they trust mint!! And if you check mint's TwitterPulse, there's no lack of happy users: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mint.com

I can see your point about Thrive attempting to communicate a brand of trust to the users. But I think you're talking about something slightly different than trust: objectivity. Thrive users know that you have their best interests at heart, not the business' best interests. That's awesome. But i don't think Mint suffers from the reverse of that problem — i don't think its users distrust it or think that it's recommendations are ill-advised.

Thanks,
Jonathan

One content I'd note with your Mint math: their “registered users” numbers most likely don't line up with their “active users” numbers, which is probably what they are basing their offer uptake rate on. So their revenue numbers are probably far, far lower than you think.

One big difference between Thrive and Mint is that Mint is essentially churn & burn; they haven't shown much effort in building product that is meant to keep people around in any long-term way, since there is no aspirational or goal-setting part of their site. So if you were trying to look at revenue models, they are most likely thinking about first-time action, rather than lifetime value (which is how Thrive's revenue is constructed).

Why does this matter? For one, Mint has done very little to establish trust with their users, because they are interested mostly in initial profit. Thrive, on the other hand, invests a lot in communicating a brand of trust to our users, and we see that in how often they take our recommendations over time. And I don't just meant monetized recommendations – we give plenty of advice that has nothing to do with generating revenue. The goal is to establish a partnership that lasts by creating real value and help for the people that use Thrive.

Academic models of trust vary, but two important factors in almost all of them are predictability and dependability.

Predictability: this is a measure of how much people have expectations that are met. This is everything from knowing what is going to happen when you press a button and have that expectation fulfilled, to a larger sense of what Thrive does and how it works in your life. I think both Mint and Thrive do this relatively well, although I do always feel like Mint over promises a tad, since their outside-the-wall content seems to imply that they will fix your entire life, not just do a little tracking.

Dependability: this is related, but a little different, and is an area in which Thrive strives to shine. The idea here is that this is how much people believe that actions are initiated in their best interest. So not only do i know what Thrive is going to do, I also know that those actions are based in their desire to interact with me in a positive way. I know that it isn't going to try to sell me something, that the recommendations will be designed to do right by me, and that all the things they do are designed with me in mind.

As for marketing, you are absolutely right that word of our mouth has been by far the best marketing technique for us, as has major press. I do a bunch of press interviews each week, commenting about the psychology of money, and that helps us both in demonstrating to the public that we're dedicated to this issue (raising our trust factor), as well as spreading the word about Thrive itself.

Probably by the size of the affiliate check!