Brad Fallon’s FreeIQ… What Happened?
By Anna Johnson on December 17th, 2008Early in 2007 Brad Fallon launched FreeIQ.com as the ‘marketplace for ideas.’ It was supposed to be the YouTube for information marketers – where you could, among other things, upload, show and monetize your videos.
It hasn’t been quite two years since the launch of FreeIQ, but if Google Trends for Websites is any indication… the site has never really taken off.
There could be a number of reasons for FreeIQ’s less than stellar performance. Perhaps the service has never lived up to its promise… perhaps there were some technical difficulties that hindered initial uptake… perhaps its selling proposition is unclear…
Who knows? I have no clue, as I’ve never used it. Then again, perhaps that itself IS a clue…
The story painted by Google is that FreeIQ has never received much traffic. Arguably there has been no sufficient, sustained effort to bring in that traffic. Sure, various Internet marketing ‘gurus’ may have promoted FreeIQ when it first came out… but a few weeks later they were on to the next big thing. There are only so many emails you can send promoting the one thing…
In any case, FreeIQ doesn’t strike me as something that could ever rely on a short-term launch campaign for traffic. To gain sufficient market traction it really needs an ongoing system for generating traffic and, in turn, members.
But perhaps there is another, more fundamental, reason why FreeIQ hasn’t taken off. It appears to suffer from that classic ‘chicken and egg’ problem: to get content you need traffic… but to get traffic, you need content.
Moreover, given so many other places where you can upload videos – and one in particular, YouTube – what does FreeIQ really have to offer?
For all its supposed value and benefits… does FreeIQ really deliver what information marketers want? Whether in terms of exposure, links, leads, customers, profits, and so on?
Furthermore, if the failure to really address the wants of the target market is a major problem for FreeIQ… then it’s probably been compounded by moves by YouTube in the past two years. YouTube has only made its service more attractive to information marketers, whether by enabling longer videos to be uploaded, or by offering to share advertising revenue with video producers in its partner program.
If any of this theorizing is accurate, then I can’t see FreeIQ ever taking off. Not unless Brad Fallon and his team put much more effort into building traffic and, more importantly, offering a more compelling reason for information marketers to use FreeIQ.
Unfortunately, the risk of pouring even more money into something that may already have soaked up way too much cash may not justify such an effort.
Despite the apparent failure of FreeIQ, it doesn’t appear (from the outside at least) to have been much more than a slight blemish in Brad Fallon’s otherwise impeccable business record since he and his wife launched MyWeddingFavors.com
And this is where I think Brad Fallon has been very smart. Unlike so many idealistic entrepreneurs, he never staked his entire business fortune on an untried, unproven business such as FreeIQ. It wasn’t until AFTER he had successfully built businesses such as MyWeddingFavors.com and Stompernet.com – businesses based on much more certain business models – that he pursued ‘the big idea.’
I applaud entrepreneurs with the guts to pursue ‘the big idea’. To me, it’s the pursuit of big ideas that bring true innovations to the world.
Brad Fallon could easily have taken a much more conservative approach to his business by focusing on what was already working for him, or by moving only into markets where there was an obvious, easily monetizable business model.
Instead, he invested what I imagine was a considerable amount of money into an idea that, in other circumstances, could have transformed the online information marketplace. I don’t necessarily rule that out from happening either.
But, even more, I applaud his approach to starting and building businesses – an approach which I believe is the most likely path to surviving and thriving as an entrepreneur.
More on that approach – and why it beats both a more and less conservative approach – tomorrow…
December 14th, 2010 at 2:32 am
It’ll be really interesting to see how uQast goes. This is his stab #2 at the video content market. It’s looking pretty good in my opinion, you should do a google trend chart for it in about 6 months
The link he sent out to his list about it:
http://welcome.uqast.com/
Good luck with it brad fallon!
…I’m sure you’ve got a google alert out there for your name
-Matt Haslem