The Road to Entrepreneurship...

As early as six months ago, Internet juggernauts such as Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte have been calling for a mass exodus of Facebook due to the questionable security policies and unethical business practices by it’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. Well it looks like all that talk has finally grown to be something big. May 31st has been designated as ‘Quit Facebook Day’ where, more for protest rather than disruption, some in the tech community are planning a boycott of Zuckerberg’s Internet empire - ironically, a Facebook fan page has been created for this. So far almost 15,000 people have pledged to do so. It is quite a noble and necessary cause that I think could serve as an eye opener to the company. 

I have been a Facebook user since 2004 - when it was only available for .edu accounts but I no longer consider myself a heavy user.  My last login was almost a month ago and I can’t remember when I logged in last before then. For me the initial value of Facebook was to reconnect with friends from high school and college. More recently, I have used it to promote this blog as well as other self-promoting activities. I never saw it as a private extension of my real life social network. For me, everything on it was public anyway and everything I posted on it reflected that. The reason I bring this up is because I am not the typical Facebook user. Deleting my account should not impact the company in any way whatsoever.

So why am I considering deleting my account? The answer is simply that I do not actively use Facebook. Deleting my account would be one less account there that I need to worry about. However, if in doing so, I am part of a cause that will send a message to Zuckerberg and his team over at Facebook that our data should be managed fairly and with great respect, then so be it.

Last week, I logged onto Mint.com (as I do every morning) to get a snapshot of my finances. While reviewing posted transactions, I noticed a new icon on the top right corner of the transaction summary page - “+ Add a Transaction.” Mint - the free online personal finance service - now offers account reconciliation. You can now manually enter transactions as they occur and Mint will automatically reconcile these transactions after they post to your account. The lack of this feature has been a major complaint for some fellow Mint users to the point where it detracted such users from using the service. While I understand the complaints regarding this missing feature, I am well satisfied with Mint. For me, the benefits that Mint provides outweigh the lack of features such as transaction reconciliation.

Mint, the brainchild of Aaron Patzer, solves the long-standing problem of easy and free personal financial and budget management. It provides a simple solution to a seemingly simple question that most of us have - How much did I spend this month, and on what? Launched on September 2007, Mint attracted more users than any other online solution within its first year, boasting over half a million people opened accounts. Recently acquired by Intuit - the makers of Quicken - Mint continues to flourish as the fastest growing service of its kind.

The major benefit that Mint brought to consumers is that it allowed anyone with an Internet connection access to manage and understand their finances. Mint is able to offer the same services offered by the Quicken (Intuit) and Microsoft Money but for free and securely through a web browser. Personal money management has become demystified and such a benefit definitely contributed to Mint’s early success. Important things to note are the multiple features that make up this benefit. Mint implemented features such as transaction categories, email alerts, monthly spending charts, graphs and so on… to deliver such benefits to the consumer.

There is a relationship between features and benefits. That is, benefits are made up of features. The features that go into a product or service should all serve to provide a benefit because when it comes to products and services, it appears that most consumers look for benefits NOT features when making purchase decisions. Patzer and his advisors recognized this and (I think) focused their efforts on implementing features that provided the most benefits to the consumer - which in the end is all that should matter.