Monday, December 20, 2010

The Lesson Any Company Can Learn from Mint.com

Mint.com has quickly become the premier financial management app for keeping track of accounts across multiple banks. And today, Mint.com announced they are partnering with educational publisher Scholastic to launch a free, online curriculum aimed at educating high school students about personal finance.

But this post isn't about fiscal responsibility (I'm by no means an expert on that subject), but rather the idea of taking on that educator role. This program is a good idea for two reasons.

  1. Mint.com is directly speaking to a large age demographic (high school kids) that doesn't typically use finance-management tools. However, many high school kids have smartphones, which makes them a potential user base and a growth opportunity for Mint.com.
  2. Mint.com is taking efforts to establish itself as a thought leader in both the finance and mobile industries.
That second point is the primary takeaway that we can all keep in mind. Mint.com is by far the most popular app of its kind, so in many ways it doesn't need to educate a mobile user base that typically doesn't even use their product. However, by doing so they are better positioning their brand in the public arena.