Shit or Get Off the Pot
Economists and other financial watchers have valued the observed over the said for many centuries. During the Jupiter heyday, Evan Neufeld was famous for using the phrase “shit or get off the pot” frequently. Essentially: don’t talk about doing it, do it. The former isn’t valuable and the later is all that matters.
In all the surveys Jupiter did, consumers would say they would do things and said they felt positively but in the end there was a strange factor of three. That is, three times as many people said they were going to do something than actually ended up doing it.
That’s why the financial management startups like Mint and Wesabe are so exciting to me. They capture real world observed data, rather than self-reported data (surveys, reviews etc.). They literally could build the utopian yellow pages company.
Brad Burnham has a great post up on the Union Square Ventures weblog on the company’s new release:
“Wesabe anonymously aggregates spending data from thousands of “neighbors” so you can now know that, on average, a service visit to the Weatherford BMW dealership costs $700 more than a visit to a visit to Bavarian Professionals and yet users rated Weatherford 17 on a scale of 100 compared to the independent shop’s rating of 96. Aggregating data on spending patterns and satisfaction for the hundreds of merchants and service providers we depend on in our everyday lives, and making that data available to consumers will empower consumers to make better choices with their money.”
There is one small problem: user’s don’t explicitly want to create a utopian yellow pages company through Wesabe. So the challenge is giving users enough value in an online version of Quicken that they are happy to contribute their data to the service.
Also one other point may be that not a lot of personal people like to manage their money (or not enough to get representive scale). Rather, the majority of Intuit’s customers are small businesses who definitely all want to manage their money.
So maybe instead of a consumer utopian yellow pages company, Wesabe and Mint might end up creating the utopian small business B2B yellow pages company. Still each are huge opportunities to be had.
