People ask me all the time what’s the additional value between cobalt and Freshbooks, the leader in the online invoicing market.

Well, there is a big difference on the base. For Cobalt a project is on it’s own. You link an invoice with a project and that’s it. At Freshbooks they have a different approach. For them you work on projects for a client. So if you have an expense (in cobalt that’s ‘invoice in’) then you have the option to assign it to a client, and additionally choose one of the projects you work on for them. That means if you have a project or a product you’re working on that’s not assigned to a specific client you’re in trouble. Freshbooks has more a time tracking approach: you work for a client and sporadically you have expenses for that client.

Mint, a personal finance web 2.0 application, is sold to their main competitor Inuit. The secret sauce for the Mint app was a patent-pending algorithm that matches transactions with a database of 14 million U.S. merchants, the better to automatically categorize and track spending, obviating the need to keep a check register.
They were everything their main competitor, Intuit, was not. While Mint was inventing, Intuit was asleep. People used Quickbooks/Quicken out of habit and legacy. People used Mint because they loved it. A little bit sad i thinK. In europe we also have our own Quickbooks and it’s with that idea or frustration that also Cobalt popped up and evolved to a first productstage.