Mint.com - Aaron Patzer

I have been using http://www.mint.com for months and have posted about the genius of this website numerous times. Mint is a financial tracking website that has simplified the process of tracking your money, expenses, budget and actually makes recommendations on ways to save money or earn more money - by offering products that may better suit your needs. Mint is free to users.

I had the pleasure to meet Aaron last night at the Greater Cincinnati Venture Association meeting and he is as impressive in person as he is in his work. He was the Keynote speaker and talked about the commitment to being an entrepreneur. He discussed his failures prior to Mint and the steps taken to get Mint to the point of being a product that he could present to potential backers.

If looking to start your own business - here were a few of Aaron's thoughts.

1. You don't have a social life, he locked himself in a room for 14 hours a day for over a year to create a product he could bring to the table. He used his own money and quit his job to focus on Mint.com

2. The most important part of any business, product, or invention is that it must solve a real need and a real problem. Observe the world around you – everything you do, and especially everything you hate to do – solve a real problem and the world is yours.

3. Sit alone for an hour or two each week, no distractions and think about your business and product. Hard thinking is easy to avoid.

4. Prior to launch-to build buzz was start a very active blog with over 200 articles on personal finance. To get into the Mint.com private beta first, you needed to put up a little badge on your blog or social network page that said “I want Mint!”. That gave us lots of free advertising, and a ton of inbound links which improved our ranking in Google – not only was it free, it made those customers feel special when we let them in early.

Mint is approaching 2 million users and continuing to improve the site that was already excellent.

Stay tuned......