Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
When you’re new, product selection feels like a taste question. You try the thing, you like the thing, you sell the thing.
At six figures it stops being a taste question and becomes an underwriting question. You now have a team whose income depends on the same product line you picked, a customer base that will notice a reformulation, and a personal brand that absorbs the reputational cost of anything the company does badly. You are not choosing what to sell. You are choosing a liability you’ll be carrying for the next several years — and one you can’t unwind quietly, because unwinding it in public is exactly what a downline watches for.
I’ve been in this industry part-time since 2002. Over twenty years, the pattern I’ve watched destroy the most earned income isn’t bad recruiting. It’s a good recruiter tied to a product that never had real demand underneath it. The volume covers the problem right up until it doesn’t.
Here’s the criteria I’d actually run at your level.
In this guide
- 1. The no-comp-plan price test
- 2. Reorder behavior with no pressure applied
- 3. How much of the sales story is legally unavailable to you
- 4. Whether a discounter can eat your margin
- 5. Supply chain and single-point failure
- 6. The company’s own incentive geometry
- 7. What you own when it ends
- Running this in a week
1. The no-comp-plan price test
Strip the opportunity out entirely. Would this product sell at this price, to a stranger, with no compensation attached to the purchase and no relationship pressure in the room?
If the honest answer is “not at that price,” you don’t have a product business. You have a distributor-funded one, and your revenue is downstream of recruiting velocity rather than demand. That’s a fine thing to know — it’s just a completely different risk profile than the one most six-figure earners think they have.
The test is simple to run. Sell to twenty cold buyers with zero mention of the business. Not warm-market friends, not team members’ relatives. Cold. What happens to your close rate and your objections tells you more than any comp plan analysis.
2. Reorder behavior with no pressure applied
Reorder rate is the single most informative number in this industry, and it’s the one companies are least eager to publish clean.
What you want isn’t the headline reorder percentage. You want reorder among people who are not distributors, who have no rank to maintain, and who receive no follow-up nudge from a sponsor. That’s demand. Everything else is a combination of qualification volume, autoship inertia, and social obligation.
Ask the company directly for customer-only reorder data separated from distributor purchases. The quality of the answer — and the speed of it — is itself a data point. Companies with real retail demand tend to be proud of this number.
3. How much of the sales story is legally unavailable to you
This is where most product lines quietly fail, and where six-figure earners take asymmetric damage — you’re visible enough to be worth an enforcement letter.
Read the FTC’s Health Products Compliance Guidance before you commit to any supplement, device, or wellness line. Then read it again from the perspective of your team’s least careful poster. The question isn’t “can I describe this compliantly?” You can. The question is: once you remove every claim you’re not permitted to make, is there still a compelling reason to buy?
Some product lines pass this easily. Coffee tastes good. Skincare feels nice on your face. Others collapse — because the entire reason anyone wanted them was the health claim you can’t legally make, and the business only functions when distributors make it anyway.
The same test applies to testimonials. Under the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, your team’s before-and-after posts are advertising, disclosure obligations attach, and atypical results need context. If the product’s marketing engine is fundamentally testimonial-driven and the typical result isn’t impressive, you’ve selected into a compliance treadmill that gets more dangerous as your team grows. For supplements specifically, the FDA’s dietary supplement guidance sets the boundary on what the product itself is permitted to claim on-label — which is usually much narrower than what’s said on stage.
4. Whether a discounter can eat your margin
Ask what happens if a well-funded direct-to-consumer competitor launches a comparable formulation at sixty percent of your price with free shipping and a subscription discount.
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.
If your answer is “our quality is better,” you need to be able to prove that in a way a buyer can verify without trusting you. Third-party testing, published assays, a genuine patent, a supply relationship no one else has. “Proprietary blend” is not a moat. It’s a phrase.
Products that survive price attack usually do so on one of three things: verifiable differentiation, service the competitor can’t replicate, or a genuinely superior experience. Note that the second one is often you — which is a real moat, and also a non-transferable one, which matters for criterion seven.
5. Supply chain and single-point failure
At your volume, a stockout isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a churn event across your entire team simultaneously.
Find out how many manufacturers make your core SKU, whether any single ingredient has a constrained global supply, and what the company’s historical stockout record looks like. Ask about reformulations too — a company that changes formulas without warning will eventually change the one thing your best customers actually buy for.
6. The company’s own incentive geometry
The FTC’s Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing is direct about the distinction that matters: compensation should be driven by real product sales to real end users, not by recruitment and wholesale purchases by participants.
So read the comp plan as a machine that produces behavior, not as a chart of what you could earn. Where does the money concentrate? If qualification requires personal volume you can’t move retail, the plan is instructing your team to buy inventory. If rank advancement is gated on leg count rather than customer count, the plan is instructing them to recruit. Whatever the plan pays for is what your organization will do, regardless of what the culture deck says. This is the complexity trap — a plan intricate enough that nobody can see it’s paying for the wrong thing.
Pair this with the red flags I’d walk away from before you sign anything. And if a company is pitching you on tokens, prediction markets, or a “financial education” product rather than something a customer consumes, read why that structure keeps reappearing first.
7. What you own when it ends
Assume the company shuts down, changes its comp plan against you, or gets an enforcement action. Two years from now.
What do you still have? If the answer is “nothing,” your six figures is rented. If the answer is an email list you control, a customer relationship that isn’t mediated by the company’s back office, content that ranks, and a reputation for being straight with people — you’ll survive the transition and most of your peers won’t. That asymmetry is most of the reason I stepped back from doing network marketing seriously and built assets I own instead.
Running this in a week
Score each of the seven honestly, one to five, no benefit of the doubt. Then look at the low scores rather than the total — a product line with one hard zero on the claim-surface test or the no-comp-plan price test is not saved by strong marks elsewhere. Those two are gates, not weights.
Do it in writing. Date it. Give the same document to the people you’re asking to build with you — that alone will change who joins you, and it will change them for the better.
If you’re rebuilding your selection criteria from the ground up, start here for how I’d sequence the decisions.
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.
Criterion seven is really the moral one dressed up as a business one. Asking what you’d still have if the company vanished tomorrow is another way of asking whether the years you’re spending are building something that’s actually yours, or something you’re renting from someone else’s back office. Worth sitting with even if you skip the other six.
Hollis, I’d want to see this operationalized before calling it a character question. “What do you still have when it ends” is doing a lot of work as a rhetorical device but the article never says how you’d actually measure it in advance — an email list you control is verifiable now, but reputation and content-that-ranks are lagging indicators you can’t score until the event you’re trying to predict has already happened. It’s a good question. It’s not a test you can run today.
Raj’s point in plain English: you can’t grade “what will I have left” like a test today, because half of what’s on that list — reputation, whether your content still ranks — you can’t check until the disaster you’re worried about has already happened. Only the email list is a real answer right now. Fair point, once you take the jargon off it.
One correction worth making since it gets conflated a lot: the Endorsement Guides disclosure obligation sits with the person making the endorsement, not just the company issuing the product. So a distributor at this level posting a colleague’s before-and-after carries their own disclosure duty on that post — it isn’t satisfied by the company having a policy somewhere. Rest of the compliance framing in the article is solid.