Headquarters: Waite Park (near St. Cloud)
Revenues (FY 2004): $22–25 million
Founded: 2000
Employees: 62
Ticker: Private
Websites: www.freeze.com
What It Does: Provides online mar-keting services via free downloadable screensavers, wallpaper, et cetera


Identical twins Ryan and Rob Weber (left and right in the photograph, respectively) have been in business on line since age 15, when they started a Web site to sell and trade sports collectibles with friends. As students at St. Cloud State University, they turned their Web site–design hobby into a business, generating between $50,000 and $100,000 per month. “Our old roommates used to have to answer the phone with whatever the business [name] was at the time,” Rob recalls. Back then, the Webers were developing sites for their clients designed to generate high traffic—and thus advertisers.

Now the twins, who’ve been joined by older brother Aaron, have an even bolder mission: to be on every computer screen in the world. Freeze.com, based in Waite Park (a few miles from St. Cloud), provides to its clients online marketing services—including lead generation, software marketing (optionally bundling software promotions with the free downloads), and e-mail marketing—by providing free content, such as wallpapers and screensavers, to visitors of Freeze.com’s several “free stuff” sites. Visitors choose what they wish to download—a screensaver, for example—and then complete a short registration form, where they provide demographic information (age, gender, location, et cetera). The visitor gets the free download, and Freeze.com clients get valuable leads.

Those clients are both offline and online direct-to-consumer marketers, such as music clubs and financial services firms, as well as consumer software providers such as Yahoo Toolbar and the Weather Channel. Since Freeze.com’s inception in 2000, its sites have attracted 85 million registered users. In 2004, Entrepreneur magazine ranked Freeze.com as the 31st fastest-growing new business in the U.S. The company’s 2006 revenues are expected to exceed $40 million—up more than 60 percent from 2005.

The Webers, now 26 and 28, give credit to their experienced board of directors for helping them build and manage a successful business. “Trying to learn the Internet advertising business has been the easy part. But learning the management side has been hard,” Aaron says.

With the outside influence of the board, the Webers don’t run the company like a family business, although they enjoy having brothers as business partners. “Our experiences are aligned, our goals are aligned, and . . . we all have the same information base—and it’s good to have three for decision making,” Aaron says.

In late July, Freeze.com moved into a 22,000-square-foot facility near its original location. The Webers plan to diversify into free-content sites that provide ring tones and entertainment content for cell phones, among other opportunities. “We want to be the recognized Internet leader in the state,” Rob says. “When people think of the Internet in the Midwest, we want them to think of our business.”