[jayliew]

As a startup entrepreneur I think it's tremendously helpful. By the way, when you mentioned about the $1 user acquisition by Mint, I couldn't but help think of Andreessen Horowitz's (as championed by Ben)'s view of "fat" startups - "sometimes you got to eat" (his counterpoint against being "lean").

I know this is all speculation since it's already played out, but suppose you decided to outspend Mint and when they spent $1, you spent $2 per user. How do you think that would have changed things in the equation for you?

[alain94040]

Very simple: if they had spent $2 per user, they would have run out of money faster. Their problem seemed to be that they didn't convert as well as Mint, for the reasons explained in the blog post. Spending more to get more traffic would have just emptied the savings faster. However, if you could make $2 of profit from each of those visitors, then yes, it would have been a game-changer. The problem wasn't spending more, it was converting enough people to make reasonable profits.