Freedom10 Review: Text Cash Network reboot with vouchers
There is no information on the Freedom10 website indicating who owns or runs the business.
The Freedom10 website domain (“freedom10.com”) was registered on the 6th of January 2013, however the domain registration is set to private.
Buried in the source-code of the Freedom10 website however is a link to the domain “textcashnetwork.com”, which is used by affiliates to sign in.
Sharing the same affiliate backend, Text Cash Network initially launched in late 2011 and at the time was headed up by Brett Hudson.
Text Cash Network saw affiliates sign up and in exchange for agreeing to receive text advertisements from company, earned commissions based on how many new affiliates they recruited.
The idea was that advertisers would fund the commissions, but with the only participants being affiliates looking to get paid, not surprisingly the opportunity never really took off.
At some point Text Cash Network rebranded themselves as “True Cash Network”, with Freedom 10 appearing to be a continuation of the “sign up and get paid for receiving text ads” business model.
There is currently no specific information regarding whether Hudson is still involved with the running of the company on the True Cash Network website.
Read on for a full review of the Freedom10 MLM business opportunity.
The Freedom10 Product Line
Freedom10 has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market affiliate membership to the company itself.
Once they’ve signed up, affiliates can then purchase a $10 voucher, which Freedom10 claim ‘will be accepted by up to 10,000 Freedom 10 Vendors in 2013’.
Whether or not that eventuated is unclear.
The Freedom10 Compensation Plan
To receive Freedom 10 Benefits and Revenue Sharing you will need to agree to receive up to 5 text messages daily and sell or purchase a single $10 Freedom 10 Coupon Annually.
The Freedom10 compensation plan is similar to that of Text Cash Network, paying affiliates $1.50 per recruited affiliate down ten levels of recruitment.
Qualification for receiving commissions on recruited affiliates sees them required to opt in to agree to receive 1 to 5 SMS text ads a day.
The coupons the company sells to affiliates are commissionable too, paying out $1 down ten levels of recruitment whenever a coupon is purchased.
Joining Freedom10
Affiliate membership with Freedom10 is free. A $10 voucher purchase is required to qualify for commissions however, with most affiliates likely to purchase the voucher themselves.
Conclusion
Freedom 10 will follow in the steps of Groupon & Living Social and plan to dominate The Coupon/Voucher & Text To Save Market Place.
Whilst the comparisons Freedom10 makes between itself and Groupon might be lofty, there’s nothing inherently wrong with selling $10 vouchers.
The problem arises when an MLM compensation plan is attached, with retail (specifically the lack thereof) being a major issue in Freedom10’s business model.
Affiliates sign up at no cost and then can either sell or purchase a $10 voucher to qualify for commissions. On top of that, they also receive commissions for recruiting other free affiliates and building a downline.
The retail viability of Freedom10’s vouchers, considering all members of Freedom10 are affiliates, is next to zero. And even if there was a retail option, selling a $10 voucher (a discount to a third-party service of product) is not a valid MLM product.
As such you wind up with what is practically guaranteed to be a 100% affiliate-funded venture, with said funds recycled and paid out to affiliates who recruit the most.
Again it would appear that advertisers are expected to foot the bill for the $1.50 a month recruitment commissions – but as with Text Cash Network there’s little to no value inherent to anyone advertising through the SMS network.
Simply put, affiliates wanting to get paid isn’t going to be a target demographic for any legitimate advertiser. I suspect this is reflected in the types of advertisements Freedom10 blast out to their affiliates.
All in all, this idea didn’t catch on with Text Cash Network, didn’t go anywhere when they rebranded as True Cash Network and probably still isn’t going to work as Freedom10.
$10 a year is the outlay here and, pyramid scheme issues aside, it really comes down to how long you can stand have daily SMS advertisements flood your phone.
Website was archived by Wayback Machine back in Feb and March 2013. Back then it was already in “pre-launch”. All the links are broken.
So they’ve been pre-launch for a whole year. Phooey.
Their example claims to solve Groupon’s problem but really doesn’t. Anybody who offers $300 worth of stuff for $100 actually only gets $80, according to their example, since $20 went to this F10 thing.
How does that “solve” Groupon’s problem? It doesn’t, except maybe a little bit about cash flow… Groupon users pay Groupon first and redeem voucher at the merchant. So Merchant have to wait to be paid by Groupon. But if money’s that tight with cash flow, they should not be doing this sort of “loss leader” any way.
Checking websites registered by Brett Hudson shows almost 60 sites, usually with names like: cashespresso, espressocash, zillaenergyshot, abundancewithbrett, exfuzecoffee, buyshapeway, shapewayshake, summacoffee, 1kemailformula, wakeupwithbrett, etc. etc.
Is there any evidence that this is a going concern? I did a verbatim search on the url with a one month time frame and the only hit was this thread.
I mean this sorta kinda tried to launch last year but didn’t seem to gain traction and late 2013 TCM launched MyNyloxin which seems to be their current focus.
As to MyNyloxin that doesn’t seem to be going great guns it’s self. The Alexa numbers have fallen through the floor and seem to be digging.
And where I once viewed the cobra venom pain reliever supply company (Nutra Pharma Corp) as something like a victim of a less than up and up MLM partner I no longer do.
Erik “Rik” Deitch, primary owner of Nutra Pharma is no stranger to MLM, he was a named defendant in the Waiora product lawsuit. He, at a minimum has no excuse not to know any better.
And as far as his company’s financials go, well they may in fact be bad enough to explain why a sham MLM outfit like TCM look like a viable option.
Perhaps this should be in the MyNyloxin topic but just one example of the dysfunctional codependance between Nutra Pharma and TCN: I don’t think TCN has or is using their own merchant processing for (at a minimum) product sales. Nutra Pharma handles the credit card transactions and remits earned commissions to TCN, only not always in cash.
Per the Q3:14 10Q, year to date Nutra Pharma has issued 180 million shares of restricted stock to TCM in lieu of $300K in owed commissions (and booking a loss on the transaction). And from the same source the total number of outstanding shares of Nutra Pharma Corp (NPHC) has increased by about 155 million between the second and third quarter of this year alone.
This is a publicly traded dumpster fire with a (disreputable) MLM division.