How I Growth Hacked Mint.com From 0 to 1,000,000 Users in 6 Month
Summary
TLDRThis video narrates the remarkable journey of Mint.com's growth from a startup to a successful personal finance tracker, sold for nearly 200 million dollars. The speaker, who joined as the fourth employee, shares the strategic marketing plan that led to acquiring a million users in six months. The plan involved identifying the target audience, creating engaging content, building hype through newsletters, and leveraging undervalued marketing channels. The speaker also provides practical advice on creating a marketing plan for any business, emphasizing the importance of setting specific goals, understanding customers, and tracking the effectiveness of marketing channels.
Takeaways
- 🚀 Mint.com was acquired for nearly 200 million dollars in 2009, starting from a concept with no product and zero customers.
- 📈 The initial marketing goal was to attract 100,000 users within six months of launch, but they achieved a million users by targeting a specific demographic.
- 🔍 The importance of identifying and understanding the target customer base was crucial, which was achieved through extensive interviews and understanding their financial strategies and needs.
- 🎯 Mint targeted young, ambitious professionals and individuals deeply interested in personal finance, focusing marketing efforts on these specific groups.
- 📝 The marketing plan included building hype and collecting emails, leveraging a monthly newsletter to engage with the audience and build a community.
- 📝 Content marketing was a key strategy, with a blog serving as the primary channel to provide valuable financial advice and attract the target demographic.
- 🔗 Consistency in content production was vital, with two blog posts published every week leading up to the product launch.
- 🤝 Collaborations with influencers and guest posts were used to expand the audience and build credibility within the personal finance community.
- 💰 Sponsoring niche sites in the personal finance space was an effective, cost-efficient marketing strategy that provided a high return on investment.
- 🏷️ The 'Powered by Mint' badge was a creative way to generate buzz and SEO benefits, encouraging users to sign up for updates and place the badge on their sites.
- 📊 The success of Mint's marketing plan can be attributed to setting a clear goal, understanding the customer, choosing the right marketing channels, and tracking the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Q & A
What was the primary goal of the marketing plan for Mint.com when it was launched?
-The primary goal of the marketing plan was to acquire a hundred thousand users within six months of the product launch.
Who was the founder of Mint.com and what was his initial role?
-Aaron Patzer was the founder of Mint.com. He initially built a prototype of the product by himself.
What was the speaker's role when he joined Mint.com and what was his marketing strategy?
-The speaker joined Mint.com as employee number four and put together a marketing plan aimed at building hype, collecting emails, and establishing relationships with the target demographic.
How did Mint.com identify its target customers before having a product?
-Mint.com identified its target customers through interviews with various people, asking questions about their financial strategies and needs, which helped in tailoring the product and marketing message.
What was the impact of the marketing strategy on Mint.com's early growth?
-The marketing strategy significantly contributed to Mint.com's early growth by creating buzz and attracting a large user base quickly.
Outlines
🚀 Mint.com's Marketing Success Story
This paragraph tells the story of Mint.com's journey from a startup with no product and zero customers to a successful personal finance tracker, which was sold for nearly 200 million dollars in 2009. The narrator, who joined as the fourth employee, shares the marketing plan that helped achieve a million users within six months of launch. The plan involved identifying the target audience through extensive interviews, creating a product and marketing message tailored to young professionals and personal finance enthusiasts, and building hype before the product even existed. The narrator emphasizes the importance of targeting a specific audience and the strategy of collecting emails and building relationships with potential customers and influencers.
📈 Building Pre-Launch Momentum with Content and Sponsorships
The second paragraph delves into the strategies employed by Mint.com to build an audience and credibility before launching their product. This included starting a monthly newsletter to engage with the community, consistent blogging to attract personal finance enthusiasts, and collaborating with influencers for guest posts. The narrator also discusses the effectiveness of sponsoring niche personal finance blogs, which helped in driving email sign-ups and building relationships with bloggers. The 'Powered by Mint' badge is highlighted as a creative way to generate interest and SEO benefits. The paragraph concludes with the narrator's advice on focusing on consistency in marketing efforts and leveraging underutilized marketing channels for higher ROI.
🛠 Crafting a Marketing Plan for Your Business
In the final paragraph, the narrator transitions from recounting Mint.com's marketing strategies to providing guidance on how to create a marketing plan for one's own business. The advice includes setting a specific goal with a clear time frame, understanding the target customer's needs and preferences, choosing the right marketing channels, and tracking the effectiveness of marketing efforts to optimize them. The narrator suggests that marketers should focus on what works and eliminate ineffective strategies. A template for a marketing plan is offered for those interested in applying these strategies to their business, and the paragraph ends with an invitation to subscribe for more content and a mention of another video detailing the launch of a new product.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Mint.com
💡Marketing Plan
💡Customer Demographics
💡Content Marketing
💡Newsletter
💡SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
💡Collaborations
💡Sponsorship
💡Product Launch
💡Marketing Channels
💡Powered by Mint Badge
Highlights
Mint.com sold for nearly 200 million dollars in 2009 and had a marketing plan to acquire a hundred thousand users within six months of launch, ultimately acquiring a million users.
The speaker joined Mint as employee number four with no product and zero customers, and was tasked with creating a marketing plan from scratch.
The importance of identifying the right customer base for a product is emphasized, as it was a challenge for Mint in its early stages.
Interviewing potential customers to understand their financial strategies and needs was a key strategy used by Mint to tailor their product and marketing.
Mint targeted young, ambitious individuals and those already interested in personal finance, as they were more likely to adopt a new financial tool.
Building a product and marketing message for a specific demographic is crucial for effective marketing.
The strategy of creating a newsletter to build hype and collect emails before having a product was a successful approach by Mint.
Content marketing through blogging was a pioneering strategy by Mint to attract their target audience before launching the product.
Consistency in content creation, such as posting two blog posts per week, was a key factor in Mint's marketing success.
Collaborations with influencers and guest posts were used to expand Mint's audience and credibility in the personal finance space.
Sponsoring niche sites in the personal finance sector allowed Mint to gain high ROI and build relationships with bloggers.
The 'Powered by Mint' badge was a creative way to generate interest and SEO benefits before the product launch.
Mint's pre-launch marketing strategies were focused on building relationships and audience before having a product to sell.
Setting a specific goal and time frame for a marketing plan is essential for creating a sense of urgency and clear objectives.
Understanding customer needs and using their language in marketing is more effective than using jargon.
Selecting the right marketing channels based on where the target audience spends their time is crucial for reaching them effectively.
Tracking and mapping out a marketing plan helps in identifying which strategies work and which need to be abandoned or scaled.
The video offers a marketing plan template used by Mint, which can be adapted for other businesses.
Transcripts
you have probably heard of mint.com it
is the number one personal finance
tracker out there that sold into it for
almost 200 million dollars in 2009. when
i joined the company as employee number
four
we had no product and zero customers i
put together a marketing plan with the
goal of getting a hundred thousand users
within
six months of launch we ended up getting
a million in this video i'm going to
tell you the story of how we did that as
well as share the exact marketing plan
that we used
so that you can copy it for your
business by the way stick to the end
where i show you exactly how to create
your own marketing plan
let's dive in after getting fired from
facebook which is a story for another
time i did a bunch of random
gigs i worked in korea i did consulting
for scanner.com but dave mcclure the
founder of 500 startups invited me to
come check out this product of an
unknown company called
my mint aaron patzer wanted to build a
tool to help people manage their
finances
and he actually built a prototype by
himself for the past six months i saw
the product and i was
blown away at the time i was blogging on
okay dork about personal finance and i
immediately saw
that this could be huge think about it
do you want more money yeah guess who
else wants more money
everybody and so i was excited also use
it myself because it's something i
was actively doing i said i want to be
your director of marketing aaron
he said you don't even know how to do
marketing
fair but i still wanted the job so
instead of giving up i actually put
together this marketing plan that we're
going to be going through today you can
see the original version hopefully on
screen
somewhere up here and i pitched it to
aaron he was impressed i was hired on
the spot and the rest
is what you're seeing in this video so
when aaron patzer hired me we were still
a super early stage startup number one
we didn't know exactly who our customer
was number two
we needed a product only a buggy
prototype that aaron built by himself
so challenge number one is figuring out
who your or our customer was
so having a marketing plan is great i
can tell you exactly what to do but if
you're marketing it to the wrong person
no one's gonna be interested so people
interested in personal finance might
sound pretty specific but it's extremely
broad
males treat money differently than
females families differently than
someone that's had student debt
so actually who the product could be for
was really broad so to figure it out we
interviewed a lot of different people so
we met people at coffee shops we
interviewed friends we interviewed
people that we thought would be good
fits here are some of the questions that
we
asked to figure out who our customer
would be what's your current financial
strategy what do you need the most help
with
when it comes to personal finance how
would your ideal personal finance tool
work very exciting very stimulating and
some really fascinating things came out
of this that helped direct how our
marketing and product was targeted at
first off most people don't do anything
with their personal finances i don't
know what you do but this actually
shocked me second thing was that the
people who did care about their finances
were really young ambitious people
who are already reading personal finance
blogs they were already at the gym
saying hey i want to be doing the stuff
in personal finance
teach me more i think what a lot of
people do in marketing is doing
correctly is that they're trying to
change behavior
hey come to the gym come to the gym now
it's much easier to help people when
they're already at the places you want
doing all these customer interviews
allowed us to build our product and
create a marketing message targeting
specifically these people
so who are you targeting in your current
business and the more narrow
you're targeting the better think about
any of the most gigantic companies
harvard students microsoft super
targeted developers a lot of these
companies we're super niche but for
somehow every other person who's
starting a business out there's like i'm
going to go extremely broad
good luck don't forget to like this
video and subscribe to the channel if
you want more videos from uncle noah
so the specific takeaway from this
marketing was two key things one we were
going to target us yopos or young
professionals we were calling them at
the time
as well as people hyper interested in
personal finance what we realize from
that is that the messaging
is going to be targeting to these two
groups of people as well as the
marketing all marketing is at the end of
the day is who
and where and so now we're like all
right we know it's going to be personal
finance and young tech geeks let's go
after those people challenge number dose
we didn't even have a product one of the
huge challenges for me as a marketer
uh is for about a year there was nothing
to even tell people to go use
so what do you do when you don't have a
product that exists and this is a common
thing i've seen a lot of companies
my engineers are taking too long i have
to sell a prototype elon musk sold a
model 3 a billion dollars worth without
a car anyone actually even touched so
what did i do to actually fix that
problem
my plan was to build a lot of hype and
collect a lot of emails and
relationships
around people specifically targeted in
the demographics i was talking about
so here are some examples of what we did
number one a newsletter and i'm still
doing this today with appsumo.com we
didn't have a product people could sign
up for so we needed a way to start
building the community and interactions
so monthly newsletter was amazing
there's a lot of services like
sendfox.com maybe mailchimp.com and the
ways that we're actually able to get
that is we had a blog we did ads we did
a website i'm gonna talk about that a
little bit more
we also sent a monthly financial tips
newsletter to add value and stay in
touch with people by the time we
launched the tickers i believe we had
over a hundred thousand people on our
newsletter excited for when we finally
came out
i think a lot of times when you guys are
building your business and trying new
marketing it's like let me code code
code make make me make
is there any customers out here anybody
anybody do it reverse get customers
first
and if you don't have a product start
building relationships with either
influencers or people you want to help
promote
or people you eventually want to be
buying your product or service second
way that we built up an audience without
having a product is content marketing so
mint was one of the pioneers of content
marketing aka
blogging before this was even a thing so
we knew who our target customers were
and we knew that they were on personal
finance blogs so we figured why not
build the
number one place online for them to
learn about personal financial advice
and that's what we set out to do so i
put together a content schedule with a
bunch of articles i knew our target
demographic would love
so you can actually see our content
calendar probably up here somewhere on
the screen
yeah so this is awesome so we knew
exactly if you look at the categories on
this thing you could see
we were targeting money hacks and young
professionals and we got through most of
the articles that we thought would do
really well of this
to target that demographic there wasn't
as much seo this was like a little bit
over 10 years ago
but the idea here is that once you know
who your target customer is now you can
start writing content specifically
tailored for them
one thing that i've used definitely over
the years is look at the questions that
these people email you or when you're
talking to them they'll ask you a
question
write that down and that becomes content
you can use on social media blogging
or on youtube two pieces i want to
highlight with the content marketing is
number one is consistency and this is
the part
i always have to say it out loud for
myself is that we posted two blog posts
every single week until we launched one
thing i was thinking about today with
my friend andy beal was that success is
hard work compounded by a long time and
it's yes
do something for a very long period of
time and ideally keep improving and you
will have success so focus on
consistency in your marketing
another thing that was really great aka
i did last work is collaborations
so i would go out to people and say hey
we have a little bit of an audience we
have a blog
can i interview you or do you want to do
a guest post for our blog they would
give me all the information
we would promote it they get some
attention and then we would be able to
build our audience from that so some of
the results from this is that our blog
became a huge driver if not the key
driver
of free traffic that was able to grow
into the size that we were able to sell
for almost 200 million dollars
third thing we did before we even had a
product is we sponsored super niche
sites and this is something you could
still do today
in different mediums so one of the best
powerful things to do as a marketer is
to find
underutilized or undervalued marketing
channels facebook ads you ever heard of
them yeah
so is everyone else youtube ads oh wow
guess what everyone knows about that at
the time with mint i noticed that a lot
of these blogs didn't have a lot of ads
they didn't have a lot of sponsors
so i would email them and my subject
line was can i pay you a thousand
dollars i ended up being able to meet
and sponsor almost every single blog in
personal finance now
mostly people wouldn't even respond to
me for a thousand dollars the results
for this is we got a ton of micro
sponsorships that paid a huge roi
because they drove a lot of email
signups and the other thing that's
really interesting is that they built
relationships so when you send someone
money or you want to sponsor someone
they'll probably take your calls and be
your friend or be able to work with you
in the future
it also had a nice side effect this
build up our credibility because we're
associated with the personal finance
blogger
which is our targeted demographic guess
what they're like oh that guy's legit or
woman's legit
mint.com is also legit too the thing
about this is that it doesn't scale as
well as facebook ads like facebook ads
you just put in the money and then it
goes up if you keep spending
with this it's harder to do that but the
roi meaning the amount you spend
is way higher so one key thing that
still applies today about this is
sponsoring super targeted people that
are not mainstream yet you get the best
deals on this goes for tick-tockers
youtubers
instagramers twitterers even bloggers
this day which is not as popular
but the point i'm trying to make is that
going out and sponsoring super giant
ones yeah get a lot of attention it
might be good but if you go to actually
some of the up and comers you're gonna
get amazing deals
and you'll get the best roi that i've
ever seen so as you can imagine we tried
a lot of other marketing strategies but
these are some of the top three that
were the most effective so copy them
start a newsletter and engage with your
audience on a regular basis do content
marketing it doesn't have to be on blogs
it could be on different types of
mediums youtube podcast
ish instagram whatever that is and three
go and actually find people to sponsor
that are not as gonna be expensive as
some of these main streamers
one other kind of tiny quick tidbit that
we did that i thought was really cool
was we did this powered by mint badge
so people could go sign up for me and
say hey i want to find out about this
product when it launches
and if you wanted priority access you
got a badge called powered by men or i
want mint that you'd put on your site
the cool thing is that people would
start seeing it then they would want the
mint badge as well
as it gave us a lot of seo juice so
these are the things that worked for us
let me talk to you a little bit more and
we'll break down a little bit more of
the marketing in act 3 which is when we
did the launch so in terms of the launch
of the success we finally took all this
audience we built all this traffic we
built we launched a techcrunch 40 and we
had over a million users within six
months which is pretty much
bonkers uh in terms of performance
especially we did a lot of marketing
before we ever had a product so one key
thing to think about is
whatever business you're in right now
how can you start planting seeds for
relationships and marketing
even before you have the product it's
way way better than trying to do it
after the fact so act four how do you
actually create your own marketing plan
most importantly if you are watching
this you probably have a business or you
want to start a business
leave a comment with what that is below
i'm going to break down briefly how you
can use the same strategies that i did
to grow mint in your own business
number one pick a specific goal and a
time frame i learned this from mark
zuckerberg i use it at mint i've used it
at appsumo
it works the reason mid marketing plan
was successful is that when i was hired
aaron said i need a hundred thousand
signups within six months of launching
very very specific time frame very
specific objective so for you
if you don't have a time frame there's
no sense of urgency and there's no clear
thing you're trying to accomplish so
let's say you have a business and you're
making a hundred dollars a month
all you have to do is say hey by
december 31st i want to make a thousand
dollars a month now you can work
backwards and say all right well each
month
i need to make this much money and break
down how do i plan on getting it i would
say that's probably the key thing to
take away from the mint marketing plan
number two
go talk to your customers call me i miss
you who is your customer
what actual problem are you really
solving for them what messaging should
you use
in your marketing use their language not
yours and where are they hanging out
online number three
pick your marketing channel so now you
have a goal you know who you're trying
to target what are the different
marketing channels you could think you
could reach these people
is it partnerships is it pr is it
youtube is it podcast figuring out where
your customers hang out and you can just
ask them
this is exactly then you have to go
market in their parties so at min we
were really successful because we
identified
two key customers and then we went to
their marketing channels to their
personal finance blogs
to the ads that specifically targeted
them number four map out and track your
marketing plan so i know that sounds
super generic but a lot of this time
it's
we over complicate these things or a lot
of you what i've noticed is that you
don't actually do any of the tracking
you just kind of are like
yeah i'm just going to wing it see how
it goes i know mexico's south i'll just
drive down
so map out hey if i want to get to this
target here are my expectations from
these marketing channels
and when you start implementing it one
of the key things that again marketers
as well as ourselves at appsumo don't do
always perfectly is
what channels are working that i can 10x
and what channels are not working i have
to kill
if you're not killing some of your
marketing activities you're probably
doing too many things if you want to
download the template of this marketing
sheet i use for min i'll put that below
in the description
if you like this video check out the
video where i walk you through exactly
how we built and launched our own latest
product tidycal.com
within 20 days and don't forget to
subscribe to the channel i'll see you
out there and i love you
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