Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
I have been around this industry part-time since 2002. In over twenty years, I have watched hundreds of “ground floor” opportunities come through my inbox — nutrition, skincare, travel, forex, AI tools, and lately tokens and prediction markets. Most of them collapsed. A few are still standing.
The ones still standing all passed the same test. And it is a test you can run yourself, in about two weeks, without spending a dollar on advertising.
I call it the end user customer test. It answers one question: if the compensation plan disappeared tomorrow, would anyone still buy this?
In this guide
Why this is the only question that matters
Start with the regulator, not the opportunity meeting.
The FTC’s own Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing frames it plainly: a legitimate MLM’s compensation must be driven by real product sales, not by payments tied to recruiting. The guidance discusses whether a plan’s revenue comes from purchases by people who actually want the product, versus purchases participants make to qualify for bonuses or advance in the plan. The FTC’s consumer-facing page on multi-level marketing businesses and pyramid schemes says the same thing in plainer language, and tells people to be wary when a company’s promotion focuses on recruiting rather than selling.
Note what the regulator is not asking. It is not asking whether the founders are nice, whether the science is impressive, whether the app is slick, or whether the top earner cried on stage. It is asking whether real customers, outside the distributor network, buy this thing on purpose and buy it again.
That is a factual question. You can answer it. Most people never try, because the answer is often inconvenient and the opportunity call is more fun than the test.
The test, in five steps
Step 1: Find ten people who would never join.
Not your team. Not your upline. Not anyone with “entrepreneur” in their bio. Find ten people in the product’s actual market who have zero interest in a business. Your aunt with joint pain. Your neighbor who buys skincare. The coworker who already spends money on this category every month.
If you cannot name ten such people without leaving your phone, that itself is data. It usually means the product’s market is other distributors.
Step 2: Present the product with the business removed.
Say nothing about the plan, the founders, the timing, the launch, or the income. Show the product and the price. Ask one question: “Would you buy this at this price?”
Then shut up. The silence is the instrument. This is where most people fail, because we are trained to rescue the pitch when it dies. Do not rescue it. You are not selling here — you are measuring.
Step 3: Take the money.
An expression of interest is not a data point. A card is. Anyone can say “sounds great” to be kind to you. Very few people will hand over money to be kind to you.
Set a real target: ten conversations, and see how many convert to paid purchases at full retail — not at your discount, not at a wholesale price you eat the difference on, not as a “sample” you bought and gifted. Full price, their money.
Step 4: Wait for the reorder.
This is the step almost nobody runs, and it is the one that decides everything. First purchases can be bought with enthusiasm. Second purchases cannot. Set a calendar reminder for one full consumption cycle — usually 30 to 60 days — and see how many buy again without you asking.
A product where customers reorder unprompted is a business. A product where every reorder requires a nudge from you is a job you invented for yourself, and you will feel the weight of it. That weight is one of the most common on-ramps to entrepreneur burnout — you are not tired because you are lazy, you are tired because you are manually pushing a product that does not move on its own.
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.
Step 5: Check what you would have earned.
Now open the compensation plan and calculate what those retail customers actually paid you. Just them. No team volume, no fast start on a recruit, no rank bonus.
If ten real customers produce a number so small it embarrasses the plan, you have learned something important: the plan is not built to reward selling. It is built to reward recruiting. That is the mechanism the FTC is pointing at, and it is a mechanism you can read off the page before you commit a year of your life.
What counts as a “real” customer
Be strict, because the entire test collapses if you are generous here.
A real customer:
- Pays full retail price with their own money
- Is not enrolled in the compensation plan in any form
- Did not buy primarily to support you personally
- Bought for the product’s stated purpose, not for a “kit,” “position,” or “spot”
- Reorders without being chased
That last bullet does most of the work. I have written before about the complexity trap and the real customer — companies add tiers, packs, points, and qualification volume precisely because complexity makes it hard to see who is actually buying. Simplicity is the enemy of a plan that needs to hide its economics.
While you are checking, also check the claims you are being handed. If the company or your upline supplies testimonials and income examples for you to repost, the FTC’s Endorsement Guides apply to you, not just to corporate — endorsements must reflect honest experience, and material connections must be disclosed. If the compliance answer to “can I say this?” is a shrug, you already have your answer. That shrug belongs on the same list as every other item in my MLM red flags writeup.
Why “without paid ads” is a feature, not a limitation
People assume ads would give them a cleaner read. The opposite is true.
Paid traffic lets you buy volume, and volume hides a bad product. Spend enough and you will find someone, somewhere, who converts — and you will mistake reach for demand. You will also be measuring your ad copy rather than the product.
Ten face-to-face conversations with people who owe you nothing give you something ads cannot: the actual objection, in their words, unfiltered. You learn where the price breaks. You learn whether the benefit is legible in one sentence. You learn whether they can explain it back to you afterwards, which is the single best predictor of whether it will ever spread on its own.
This is also why the test works best with people who have real jobs, real budgets, and no patience for hype — the same reason I argue for a strategy built around recruiting professionals. Serious people give you serious feedback. They will tell you no in a way you can use.
What to do when the test fails
Sometimes it fails. That is a successful test — you spent two weeks and zero ad dollars to avoid a two-year mistake.
But be honest about which thing failed. Three different failures look identical from the inside:
- The product failed. Nobody wants it at that price. Walk away.
- The plan failed. People buy it happily, but retail commissions are a rounding error. The company wants recruiters, not sellers. Walk away, or go in with eyes open about what you are actually being paid to do.
- You failed. People wanted it and you could not ask for money. That is a skill problem, not a business problem, and it is fixable — usually faster than people expect.
Do not let a fixable number three convince you it was a number one. And do not let a real number two get rationalized into a number three, which is the more common and more expensive error. The story we tell ourselves about a failed test is often a form of self-sabotage — quitting the thing that worked, or defending the thing that did not.
The reason I stopped treating this industry as my main vehicle has nothing to do with disliking it, and I have explained why I stepped back in detail. But the discipline stayed with me. I still run this test on every offer that reaches me, including the ones dressed up in new language. The playbook did not die — it bought crypto and a prediction market, and the test still applies unchanged: strip the upside, show the product, ask for money, wait for the reorder.
Run it before you commit. Two weeks, ten conversations, no ad spend.
If you want the rest of the framework I use to evaluate and build this way, start here.
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Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Five steps, two weeks, zero ad spend, the piece says. Fine. But step three, ‘take the money,’ assumes you can legally process a cash sale outside your compliance department’s radar.
Plain version of Marla’s point: make sure you’re actually allowed to sell for cash outside your company’s system before you promise anyone a product you can’t hand over yet.
I read the five steps and immediately started planning how I’d need at least three more weeks to prepare the product properly before showing it to anyone, which is exactly the kind of thing this article is quietly calling out without naming me specifically. The test only works if you actually run it messily and soon. I notice I want to perfect it first, which probably means I’m avoiding step three, not preparing for it.
The bit I’d automate here is step five, checking what you’d have earned from just the retail customers with none of the team volume mixed in. Most back offices bury that number on purpose or don’t break it out at all, so you’d need to pull raw order data and calculate it yourself. Took me about twenty minutes to build a spreadsheet that does this once and reuse it every time I want the honest number instead of the dashboard’s blended one.
Trina, we did a version of this by hand in the 90s with actual paper order forms and a highlighter, which took considerably longer than twenty minutes and was wrong more often. The number the article’s asking you to isolate hasn’t changed in thirty years. Only the tools for getting to it fast have.
I think what’s being missed in some of the reaction to this piece is how useful Trina’s spreadsheet idea actually is against the article’s own method, because the whole test falls apart in practice if you can’t isolate that one retail-only number cleanly from everything else in your back office. Most dashboards blend team volume and retail volume together on purpose, whether anyone intends it that way or not, and the article assumes you can just go look up the honest figure when for most people that figure doesn’t exist anywhere until someone builds it. Trina, if you’re willing to share roughly what fields that pull actually needs, I suspect several people reading a thread like this one would go build their own version of it this week rather than next year.
Ade’s right that the tool matters, but the gap I’d flag across this whole thread: nobody’s mentioned that step four, waiting sixty days and doing nothing, is the step most people will quietly skip regardless of what spreadsheet they’ve built, because doing nothing for two months is the actual hard part, not the math.