Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
I’ve been around this industry part-time since 2002. Over twenty years of watching launches, comp plan rewrites, “ground floor” windows, and the same conversation happening over and over: is this thing real?
There’s one test that answers that question faster than any due diligence PDF, any corporate video, any upline’s twelve-minute voice note. I call it the end-user customer test.
Would a person who has zero interest in the business opportunity buy this product, at this price, and buy it again?
That’s it. That’s the whole test. It’s simple enough that people skip past it, and it’s the reason most of them end up eighteen months deep in something that was never going to work.
The problem isn’t that people don’t know about the test. It’s that almost everyone runs it wrong. Below are the mistakes I see most, and how to run it properly instead.
In this guide
- Mistake 1: Asking yourself instead of asking a stranger
- Mistake 2: Counting distributors as customers
- Mistake 3: Treating autoship as proof of love
- Mistake 4: Running the test on your warm market
- Mistake 5: Accepting “but the quality is incredible” as an answer to a price question
- Mistake 6: Testing the sale and skipping the repurchase
- Mistake 7: Confusing policy language with actual behavior
- Mistake 8: Running the test after you’ve already joined
- How to actually run it
Mistake 1: Asking yourself instead of asking a stranger
The most common version of this test is a person sitting in their kitchen going, “Would I buy this?” And of course the answer is yes — because they’re already emotionally invested, they’ve watched the launch call, they like the guy who showed it to them, and somewhere in the back of their mind is a comp plan.
You are the worst possible test subject. You’re contaminated.
The test requires someone who doesn’t know there’s a business attached. Not “someone who says they don’t care about the business.” Someone who literally doesn’t know. The moment the opportunity enters the room, you’re no longer measuring product demand. You’re measuring social pressure and hope.
Mistake 2: Counting distributors as customers
This is the big one, and it’s not just a business-judgment problem — it’s the exact thing regulators look at.
The FTC’s business guidance on multi-level marketing is direct about this: an MLM’s compensation structure should be based on actual sales to real customers, and the agency has been skeptical of business models where the revenue comes primarily from participants buying product to qualify for bonuses. The FTC also warns consumers about this dynamic directly in its guidance on MLMs and pyramid schemes.
So when you’re evaluating a company, “we did $40 million last year” tells you nothing until you know who bought it. Distributor autoship is not customer demand. It’s payroll running backwards.
The question to ask is uncomfortable and you should ask it anyway: what percentage of monthly volume comes from people with no distributor ID? If nobody at the company can answer that, or the answer is a speech, you’ve learned what you came to learn. I go deeper into the warning signs in MLM red flags.
Mistake 3: Treating autoship as proof of love
Autoship is a retention mechanic, not a demand signal. Plenty of people stay on autoship because cancelling requires a phone call during business hours, or because dropping below a volume threshold means losing a rank they worked six months for.
The clean version of the test strips the coercion out. Would this person buy it if there were no rank to protect, no qualification to maintain, and cancelling took one click?
If the honest answer is “probably not every month,” you don’t have a customer. You have a subscription that’s outrunning its own value for a while.
Mistake 4: Running the test on your warm market
Your sister will buy the thing. Your friend from church will buy the thing. That’s not a market signal, that’s love with a credit card attached.
Warm market purchases are the single most misleading data in this entire industry, because they arrive early, they arrive easily, and they convince you the product sells. Then you run out of people who love you and the numbers fall off a cliff, and you conclude you have a “consistency problem” when what you actually had was a demand problem the whole time.
Test on people who owe you nothing.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Mistake 5: Accepting “but the quality is incredible” as an answer to a price question
It might be incredible. Doesn’t matter.
The end-user test isn’t a quality test, it’s a price-value test at retail, against everything else that person could buy instead. A cold customer isn’t comparing your product to nothing. They’re comparing it to the version at the pharmacy, the version on Amazon, the version their doctor mentioned.
When you ask “would you buy this at $89 a month?” and the answer is a long explanation about proprietary extraction methods, you have your answer. Real product-market fit sounds like “yeah, I’d probably grab that.” It’s boring. It’s fast. It doesn’t require a presentation.
This is the whole reason I wrote about the complexity trap and the real customer — the more explanation a product needs to justify its price, the fewer actual customers it will ever have.
Mistake 6: Testing the sale and skipping the repurchase
A first purchase measures your persuasion. The second purchase measures the product.
Almost nobody runs the test out to the repurchase window, because it takes 60 to 90 days and everyone’s in a hurry. But the reorder is where the truth lives. Did they finish it? Did they notice anything? Did they buy again without you prompting them?
That last clause is the whole test. If every reorder requires a follow-up text from you, you don’t have customers — you have a part-time job checking on people.
Mistake 7: Confusing policy language with actual behavior
Most companies now have customer-first language in their policies and procedures. Retail volume requirements, customer qualification rules, refund windows. Good — that language exists partly because regulators pushed for it.
But policy is what a company says. Behavior is what the field does. Go find three distributors who aren’t in your upline and ask how they actually got to their rank. If every path runs through recruiting and every “customer” is a person who joined at wholesale to save money, then the customer-first policy is a document, not a business model.
Also check the income claims while you’re there. The FTC’s Endorsement Guides apply squarely to what distributors post about earnings and results. A field that plays fast and loose with income claims is telling you exactly how it treats the customer question too.
Mistake 8: Running the test after you’ve already joined
Once you’ve paid, bought the starter kit, told your spouse, and posted about it — the test is over. You will find customers. You will find them because you need to.
Run it first. Before the enrollment link. It costs you a week and it will save you a year. I stepped back from the industry in a serious way partly because I got tired of watching people run this test in the wrong order — here’s the longer version of that.
How to actually run it
Take one week:
- Buy the product at full retail price. Not distributor price. Retail. If retail and wholesale are wildly different, note that — a big gap usually means the retail price was invented to make the discount look good.
- Find five people who don’t know you’re evaluating a business. Neighbors, coworkers, an online community you’re already in.
- Show them the product and the price. No comp plan, no story, no “ground floor.” Ask: “Would you buy this?” Then shut up.
- Sell it to whoever says yes. Actually take the money.
- Wait 60 days and do nothing. No follow-up, no check-in, no reminder.
- Count the unprompted reorders.
If step 6 gives you zero, you have your answer, and it cost you a week instead of a year.
If you’re trying to figure out where you actually stand before you commit to anything, start here — it’s the sequence I’d walk anyone through.
The end-user customer test isn’t cynical. It’s the most pro-industry thing you can do. Companies that pass it build people’s lives. Companies that fail it consume them. The only real mistake is not running it before the money leaves your account.
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We called mistake four ‘warm market blindness’ back when I started in the 90s, different label, same trap, your sister buying the starter kit told you nothing then and it tells you nothing now. What’s actually new here is mistake six, testing the sale but skipping the repurchase window. Nobody had the patience to wait sixty days and count in the era I came up in either, but at least now someone’s written down that the sale isn’t the finish line.
Gus’s point in plain English: your sister buying to be nice isn’t a customer, it’s a Christmas present with extra steps.
Gail’s compression is fair, but two and three are different failure modes: one’s a measurement error, wrong denominator, the other’s a causal error, mistaking retention friction for demand.
Step three of the how-to-run-it section asks you to find five strangers and show them the product cold, in person, and watch their reaction. That’s the whole method resting on a skill, approaching strangers, that plenty of capable people simply don’t have and aren’t going to build in a week. Is there a version of this test that works through writing, a survey, a landing page, rather than requiring five live conversations?
Anneke raises a fair point, and at sixty-one I share some of her hesitation about approaching strangers, though for different reasons than temperament, simply less energy for it than I once had. I wonder whether a version of step three could be run through a genuinely blind online survey instead, with the price shown and no context about who is asking or why, which might solve both her objection and mine without weakening what the test is actually measuring.
Arthur and Anneke are both pointing at something worth naming plainly: the discomfort of walking up to a stranger is real, and so is the discomfort of finding out your product doesn’t sell once you’re not standing there attached to it emotionally, which is really the entire subject of this article. I think the piece is honest that the second discomfort is the actual point, and no amount of redesigning step three changes that. I’d only add that a survey removes one kind of friction from the test and it’s fair to ask whether it quietly removes some of the honesty a face-to-face reaction gives you too, the kind where you can watch someone’s hesitation instead of just reading their answer.