Aaron Patzer is the founder of Mint.com a financial services company started in 2006. He had the idea after wasting hours trying to organize his own finances through traditional computer programmes such as Microsoft money and Quicken.
Patzer left his job to start working on his idea and after seven months of hard work he was ready to launch to the public.
The site is a simple and effective way to manage, save and grow your money which is also why Mint.com is free. The online application allows users to set goals and visually budget their finances.
Aaron saw a quick return on his efforts and after the first year Mint.com had close to half a million registered users.
He started Mint.com when he was 25, but this was not his first foray into business, when he was 16 he started a web development business. He has always been a bit of a computer genius, experimenting with them since he was 6. As a student he studied Computer Science from Duke University.
In 2007 Mint.com won TechCrunch 40 competing against 700 start ups. Aaron was nervous before hand, (not surprising since he had to speak in front of 500 people for the first time) but it was arguably the most important moment for Mint.com as the publicity he got when he one really accelerated the number of users of the site at this early crucial stage of the business.
When the well documented financial crisis began, users of Mint.com trebled to around 1.5million, revenue increased eight fold, year on year and Mint.com released an iPhone application which quickly moved into top spot in the financial category. At this time he also received $12million in funding from Benchmark, to take advantage of opportunities and expand the product offering of Mint.com.
This rapid growth attracted the interest of Intuit, a more established financial services company who were actually the founders of the Quicken financial programme which failed miserably.
They bought Mint.com for $170million as they saw a product which could bring financial services to millions of people for free. They also saw a great team at Mint which would be able to grow them further.
Aaron believes that the most important thing when starting a business is to make sure the product/service solves a real problem. Take a look around you; what do you hate to do? “Solve a real problem, and the world is yours.”
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