INTERVIEW | Fallon Brothers
Home Boys Daft.ie is one of Ireland’s most popular websites and the leading property listings website in the country. Founded by the Fallon brothers, both engineering graduates, Daft.ie has grown from a part-time project to a successful business. In their spacious new offices on Golden Lane, Eamonn and Brian Fallon talk to David Molloy about how they got to where they are today.
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aft.ie had its genesis in the early days of the internet in Ireland, when access was offered to the public for £25 through the Indigo company, to which the Fallon brothers signed up. When their older sister finished college and began looking to move out from home, she complained about the ordeal - picking up the Evening Herald and sifting through the property section, making calls to arrange viewings, and walking the city every evening. The technologically-minded brothers decided to find the website for Dublin properties which they assumed existed − and found nothing. At the time, they thought it was an odd omission, but nothing more. Until Brian (B.A.I. 2005) brought up the idea again for a transition year competition while he was in school, and got Eamonn (B.A.I., M.Sc. 1999) on board. “It was the right time,” Brian explains. “There were a huge amount of people moving back to Ireland, and at Trinity, there were 14,000 students who got internet access for the first time, and there were no Irish websites to look at.” This was back in 1998, and traffic grew slowly at first. Yet by the end of the three month period Brian’s school competition ran for, they suddenly found themselves with a website which thousands of people were using every day.
“It was at that point that we decided to learn how to automate it, to learn the tech behind it, and it kind of became a part-time project thereafter,” Brian recalls. “We just kind of technically made it so it could automate itself, and set it free and let it go. And over about six years, every year, the site doubled in traffic." The thinking at the time, the brothers explain, was that if you did everything for free, and built traffic, eventually you’d make money from advertising. That never happened, and the dotcom crash was the end of that model. In 2004, it was clear that the fledgling company needed to make money or it wouldn’t last. “I think what we learned out of that business model was trial and error,” Brian recalls. “We tried loads and loads of different things and they all failed, and eventually that process enabled us to learn what works.” This led the Fallons to decide they needed a business plan that didn’t depend on outside advertising or contracts; they needed to generate revenue based on their content alone. Eamonn explains: “What our plan really was, was to convert ourselves from a free listings website to a ‘paper’ classifieds website. To compete headon with the newspapers, in a similar model to how they do it, charging per listing.”
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