[pge]

This b-school case study strangely appears to ignore the customers. User and customers are different things for these companies. Mint found a way early on to sell the data it had to financial services companies that wanted to target users. While Mint had to figure out how to take care of users (since they were the product offered to the customers), their ability to find customers (i.e. companies that paid them) set them apart from other solutions and enabled them to make money.