Site Review: Investimonials.com adds over 3,000 financial reviews
02. Jan, 2010 
6 Comments
Calling itself the “Trip Advisor” of the investment industry, Investimonials.com launched in November of 2009. Investimonials offers a platform in which users can review various sites and services offered out there. I call it more like “Yelp” of the investment industry.
In my opinion, it’s a very promising site that could add a ton of value to both the consumers and the professionals. When Yelp first launched in 2004, I knew it had a lot of potential for the consumers and the businesses. A few years later, I can’t imagine now going to the restaurants without reviewing them on Yelp first.
I see a similar value to be offered by Investimonials. However, like many review sites, it’s faced with the “chicken-and-egg” challenge. Without the users adding reviews, the site offers no value. However, without the site adding value, the users aren’t encouraged to participate. It’s definitely a daunting challenge for the founders of Investimonials.com.
It’s been a few months since the launch, and I’m looking at its progress. Unfortunately, the site hasn’t progressed as fast as I had expected. Most of the product reviews only boast 1-3 reviews, which usually doesn’t help determine the true value very accurately. However, I do think the site still has a lot more potential to grow for the following reasons:
- The founder of Investimonials.com is Timothy Sykes, the penny stocker who manages a successful business leveraging his blog. He is a businessman, and he knows how to market. At a minimal, he has a ton of advantage over someone new with minimal experience in the industry.
- The site offers great ways to encourage user participation. By adding additional reviews, users can earn IV bucks that can be turned in for real products. Although many of the physical products are products sold by the founder Tim, some of the membership prizes are attractive. (see below) The Kirk Report especially is a very valuable membership in my opinion.
- The guys at Investimonials added immediate value to the users by listing over 3,000 financial products before the launch. That’s definitely a lot of work, but this is truly what it takes to make a site like this successful. To overcome the initial “chicken-and-egg” stage, the site has to have initial value. The team knows this.
- Well built platform – I can tell Tim put a good amount of investment into building this site. This is no pre-bought web template. Although still pretty basic, the site offers good features that require a reasonable amount of development work.
Bottom line, it’s too early for us to get much value out of the site. However, I do believe this site has a ton of potential for usability down the road. Let’s come back in a year and see where it stands.
Thanks for the review, but it's only been 1 month and 7 days since we launched….new site coming in the next few days…game changer, stick around
Looking forward to it Tim.
This is a tough business model to say the least…..my experience is that people are barely willing to help themselves financially. That is a real “sometimes” as the majority of people get glossy eyed when you start talking investments. That being said, they will rarely put any effort into helping others from a financial standpoint unless they have something to gain themselves….My prognostication is that if anyone spends precious time write a review it will be because they are ticked off at some company, not because they want to provide objective criticism. Besides, we all know that most positve reviews will be fakes from the actual providers just like all other review sites.
Already 3,000 reviews in one month, people are dying for some transparency…
can u update the pic as we have a new site entirely now!