Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
Most people pick their network marketing company in the wrong order.
They meet a person they like. That person shows them a compensation plan. The comp plan looks like a machine that prints money. Somewhere near the end of the conversation, almost as an afterthought, someone mentions what the company actually sells.
I’ve been in and around this industry part-time since 2002, and I’d guess that order — person, plan, product — describes eighty percent of the enrollments that happen this week. It’s backwards. The product is the only part of the business you have to defend to a stranger who doesn’t care about your dreams. Everything else is internal.
So here’s the checklist I’d want a beginner to run before they sign anything.
In this guide
- 1. The no-comp-plan test
- 2. Price it against the open market
- 3. Is there a reason to buy it again?
- 4. Find out what you’re legally allowed to say
- 5. Who buys this who isn’t a distributor?
- 6. Refunds, guarantees, and how hard it is to leave
- 7. Can you personally use it for 90 days first?
- What this checklist doesn’t do
1. The no-comp-plan test
Ask yourself one question and answer it honestly: if there were no commission attached, would I pay this price for this product?
Not “would I use it if it were free.” Not “is it good.” Would you hand over the money, at that price, every month, with no business attached?
If the answer is no, you have a problem that no amount of training fixes. You’ll be selling something you don’t privately believe is worth the money, and people can smell that through a phone screen.
This isn’t just a mindset thing — it maps to how regulators look at the business. The FTC’s business guidance concerning multi-level marketing makes the point that compensation should be driven by real demand from ultimate users, not by purchases people make to qualify for bonuses. A product that only moves because a comp plan pushes it is a structural risk, not just a marketing challenge.
2. Price it against the open market
Go find the closest equivalent product on Amazon, at a health food store, at a salon, wherever it lives. Write down the price per serving, per ounce, per month.
Now compare. You will almost always find the MLM version costs more. That’s not automatically disqualifying — distribution costs money, and some formulations genuinely are different. But you need to be able to say out loud, to a skeptical friend, why it costs more. “It’s higher quality” is not an answer. “It’s a different delivery form and here’s what that changes” might be.
If the gap is 3–5x and your only explanation is a company video, walk. You’ve found one of the classic MLM red flags, and pricing gaps like that are where customer retention goes to die.
3. Is there a reason to buy it again?
Network marketing income is built on reorders, not first orders. So the question isn’t “will someone try this,” it’s “will someone still be buying it in month seven, without me nudging them.”
That usually requires three things:
- It’s consumed. It runs out. Durable goods make terrible network marketing products for beginners.
- The customer notices something. Energy, sleep, skin, cleaner floors, lower phone bill — something they’d miss if they stopped.
- The noticing happens fast enough. If the benefit takes six months to appear, most customers quit before they feel it.
Ask your prospective upline a specific question: what percentage of customers are still ordering at month six? If nobody in the organization can answer that, that tells you something too.
4. Find out what you’re legally allowed to say
This is the criterion beginners skip entirely, and it’s the one that will bite you.
If you’re looking at supplements, understand that the FDA does not approve dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness before they go on the market — the FDA’s own guidance on dietary supplements spells this out. Companies can make limited structure/function claims, but disease claims — “cures,” “treats,” “prevents” — are off-limits, and the liability lands on the person who said it. That’s often you, in a Facebook post, at 11pm.
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.
The FTC’s Health Products Compliance Guidance covers the substantiation standard: claims need competent and reliable scientific evidence before you make them. And if you’re posting testimonials or before-and-afters, the FTC’s Endorsement Guides apply to you as a distributor, including disclosure of your material connection to the company.
Here’s the practical test: ask the company for their approved claims document. A serious company has one. If the answer is a shrug, or worse, if the top earners are visibly making claims the document forbids, you’ve learned how that culture actually operates.
5. Who buys this who isn’t a distributor?
Ask to see a real customer. Not a distributor who also uses the product. A customer — someone who bought it, uses it, has no position in the comp plan, and reorders.
If your upline can produce three of them in a phone call, good sign. If the entire customer base turns out to be people who “signed up at wholesale to save money,” you’re looking at an organization where the product is a membership fee wearing a costume. I’ve written about that pattern in more detail in the complexity trap and the real customer.
6. Refunds, guarantees, and how hard it is to leave
Read the return policy before you need it. Specifically:
- How long is the customer guarantee, and does it require an unopened product?
- Who eats the refund — the company or your commission?
- Can a customer cancel autoship in the app, or do they have to call and be talked out of it?
That last one is a character test for the company. Retention built on friction is retention you’ll spend your evenings apologizing for.
7. Can you personally use it for 90 days first?
Buy it at retail. Use it. Don’t enroll yet.
Ninety days of honest use will tell you more than any convention. You’ll find out whether you actually reorder, whether anyone asks you about it unprompted, and whether you can describe the benefit without a script. If you can’t sell it to yourself over three months, the recruiting conversation is going to be an uphill walk.
This also quietly filters out the pattern where the excitement is really about the opportunity and the product is incidental — the same structural setup that keeps migrating into whatever the current hot vertical is, with the product swapped out and the plan left intact.
What this checklist doesn’t do
It won’t tell you whether the comp plan is good. It won’t tell you whether the company survives five years. It won’t tell you whether your sponsor will still be around next spring — and for what it’s worth, I’ve stepped back from network marketing seriously since 2017 for reasons that had nothing to do with product quality.
What it does do is stop you from building on sand. A product that passes all seven of these gives you something rare in this industry: a business you can explain to a skeptic without changing the subject to lifestyle.
Run the checklist. Take the ninety days. The company that’s right for you will still be there.
If you want the ground-level version of how I’d start from scratch today, start here.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
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.
The no-comp-plan test is a nice heuristic but it’s not actually testable by the person asking it. You already know the comp plan exists. You can’t un-know it and answer the counterfactual honestly — that’s a classic problem with self-reported willingness-to-pay. The month-six reorder question is much better because it’s an external number, not an introspection exercise.
Ran the 90-day self-use test on a product two years ago without meaning to — just kept using it because I liked it, then realized around week eleven I’d never once thought about whether to reorder, it just happened. That’s the tell. Compare that to a supplement I tried the same year where I had to set a phone reminder to finish the bottle. One of those is a business. The other was a chore I was renting.
I worked field development for eight years and the honest answer on the customer-guarantee question is that most companies genuinely don’t track it by segment — distributor versus true customer — because the two purchase through the same system and nobody built the report. It’s not always concealment. Sometimes it’s just that no one asked for the number until a checklist like this made them look.
The part I’d add: ask the upline the month-six reorder question and watch how fast they answer, not just what they say. A person who’s actually looked at that number has it within a few seconds. A person who’s never checked will improvise something that sounds like a number. I’ve seen the same tell in loan applications — hesitation on a number you should already know is the number itself.
Improvised numbers. Never trust one that arrives too smoothly either.
For anyone stuck on step one — the no-comp-plan test — here’s an exercise I give clients evaluating any purchase decision under bias: write down your answer, then write down the answer you’d give a friend who told you they were about to spend the same money on the same product with zero business attached. If those two answers diverge, the gap is the bias, not the product. What’s the actual gap for you?
Simone, I think what’s being missed in some of the pushback here is that the exercise doesn’t require the answer to be perfectly unbiased — it requires the person to notice where their own reasoning bends. That’s still worth doing even if it’s imprecise. Raj is right that it’s not a clean test, but a slightly noisy honesty check beats no honesty check.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but Ade says the point is noticing where your own reasoning bends — how would a person actually catch themselves doing that, though? If I’m already the kind of person who wants the answer to be yes, wouldn’t I also be the kind of person who doesn’t notice myself bending toward it?