Wesabe Gets Some Link Love
Our portfolio company Wesabe was the first company to market in the web-based personal finance sector, which has gotten quite hot lately with the launch of competitors Mint and Geezeo.
Wesabe’s taken a bit of a backseat on the visibility front in light of its competitor’s launches, so it was nice to see that Lifehacker really likes Wesabe.
This is a very big market opportunity and we think there is room for more than one large company in this category. As Dave McClure points out in a comment to Tim O’Reilly’s post pointing to the Lifehacker review:
Wesabe targets more advanced users who want more control over their
financial details & security; Mint probably works better for folks
who want a simple solution that doesn’t require a lot of effort. Both have significant merits over previous generations of online financial services.
I am not sure that Wesabe is only a "power user’s" service. But as Lifehacker points out, Wesabe has a strong mission, sense of community, and is hyper-focused on security:
I stayed with Wesabe because I love their mission, community, and their
desire to continually improve the site. I am confident in their privacy
policy, believe they will protect my data, and like that I can take my
data with me if I want.
Regardless of the competitive dynamics of this market, we are very pleased to be an investor in this category because the things that make the web great; transparency, community, utility, and usability are going to transform the way people manage their money. And Wesabe is at the forefront of that movement.
Comments (Archived):
Although this service Is not something I use yet, I do believe you are right and the young people love one of these three services. This is a big market at least in terms of potential acquirers
Be nice to be able to tell if my bank is available before i sign up. I signed up with Mint only to find out I couldnt use it for checking. 🙁
Hi, digiSal,I’m one of the founders of Wesabe. We support any bank or credit card that provides a data export in one of the formats we support (currently OFX, QFX, QIF, and OFC). If your bank isn’t listed we’ll add it immediately. You can always drop me a line at [email protected] if you need a bank or credit card added right away.Hope this helps.
ah, i thought wesabe would pull the data from my bank automatically like Mint is supposed to. Dont like this aspect since i have to download and upload all the time, but my bank was listed.
Using Wesabe heavily. Love Wesabe. Want to see it evolve even more, particularly the data visualization.
It would be great if Wesabe would allow users to segregate information and create reports by tax year so that we can easily access relevant tax information for ourselves or accountants. This is one of the reasons why I used Quicken for the last 16 years. I’ve switched to Wesabe, but I have (I’m afraid to say) hundreds of entries amongst checking accounts and credit cards. if the only date on which I can segregate 2007 information is January 1, 2008 (i.e. before any 2008 information is downloaded), Wesabe is less useful than it could be. I need to be able to segregate 2007 information in March and April when I’m working on tax returns.Thanks
Hey, dan,We do already allow you to do this, although it’s not obvious how to do so. Our API allows you to get data in any date range you want. You can, for instance, get an Excel spreadsheet containing all of your transactions for the year by putting this at the end of the URL for one of your accounts:.xls?start_date=20070101&end_date=20071231As an example, if your American Express card is account number 1 on your Wesabe list, this is the full URL to use:https://www.wesabe.com/acco…We’ll make this a lot easier to find.
Hi Marc,Thanks for the reply. I may have known about the Excel option but was hoping you would add the date range capability to the website itself. Any chance of that prior to April 15?Thanks,Dan
Hey, Dan,Absolutely. We’ll add it now.
Thanks!
Hi, Dan,We’ve added this. You can now export any date range from the accounts index page, into any of our supported export formats, including Excel. Hope this helps.Marc
>>This is a very big market opportunity and we think there is room for more than one large company in this category. >>we are very pleased to be an investor… because the things that make the web great; transparency, community, utility, and usability are going to transform the way people manage their moneyi absolutely agree fred :)- dave mcclure
It’s time to break Intuit’s back and assign it to the scrap heap. Best wishes to Wesabe, Mint, and everyone building financial management software that doesn’t suck.Anyone heard about the latest Intuit nightmare? An bug in the update to the Mac version of Quickbooks irrevocably nukes all files and folders on the Desktop. http://www.tuaw.com/2007/12…
Wesabe sucks. Big-time.It’s counter-intuitive, documentation is is sparse, and the uploading/mouse-tracking garbage feels like Quicken ’99 on mushrooms. Why can’t I just give you my info? Ridiculous!Mint is better, but the upsell opportunities (“lower your interest rate!”) are worthless to just about everybody and feel like some mediocre direct marketer went apeshit.I still cannot fathom in this day and age why people aren’t all using Yodlee – it’s simple, powerful, links to EVERYTHING (and when a bank changes their website login procedure the Yodlee team updates their functionality usually within a day).The social aspect is interesting, but the big question for me is is there really any wisdom of the crowds when it comes to personal finance or it is a function of deeper things like personal discipline? Choosing which DVD to buy is a hell of a lot different than getting debt-free.
Tried wesabe earlier this year and found it wanting because if you’re bank isn’t in the in-crowd your stuck having to use plugins and hacks for importing your data. In the age of mashups and api’s I much prefer Mint’s solution. Yes Mint is using login’s and scraping data ala Yahoo Money circa 2000, but as a user the point of these apps is that they automate and reduce my workload – not increase it.On a personal note – interesting to see how bets are being placed amongst friends – David Cancel’s on Geezeo’s board and McClure’s an investor/advisor to Mint. I just need an insider at Wesabe to complete the circle.
That’s me!
Okay I’ll jump in…congrats to Wesabe on the LH post and some of the cool new features recently rolled out. Although I hardly think they’ve been in the “backseat” from a visibility point of view 🙂 Probably just mean they’re heads down building something cool. hmmmm…what could it be?It’s a great market and I think we should all be pretty fired up about how we’re shaking things up. Lets face it, the days of expensive, feature bloated financial software in a box are fading fast and we’re all part of the reason why. That’s pretty damn cool.Alright, enough with the mushy shit. See you at the top guys!