Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
People keep asking me the same thing, so here is the honest answer to why I quit network marketing as a serious pursuit back in 2017. The short version is not what you would expect from a guy who once built a team to about 91,000 people in roughly three months. I did not burn out. I did not get run out. I simply stopped finding anything worth my whole heart, and I refused to fake it. Reviewed and updated June 2026.
This post has been a long time coming. I’m typing it out by hand instead of having AI write it, because some things you owe people in your own voice.
In this guide
So why haven’t I done network marketing seriously since 2017?
Quite simply, I haven’t wanted to.
That answer annoys people, so let me be clear it isn’t sour grapes. Plenty of decent things have crossed my desk, and I’ve dabbled. One team I built to about 4,000 people in roughly 60 days. The next team I built to about 91,000 people in about three months. So when I say I haven’t done it seriously, understand it isn’t because I forgot how. It’s a choice.
A lot of you know that back in 2011 I launched a company called Empower Network.
Some of you were in the room for the events, the ones that grew from a first turnout of 37 people to crowds running anywhere from 1,200 to over 6,000.
Some of you remember the checks. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a few that crossed a million. Here’s a real one from 2012 for $464,913, written before any of this got too big to believe.
The money flowed like wine. Here’s a snapshot from a tax return showing the sales we processed in one of those years.
That line shows more than $64 million in company sales for the year. With the affiliates running their own merchant accounts hooked to our site, I’d put the real total somewhere north of $90 million, though I never knew the exact figure. There was just a lot of money, and it was moving fast.
It grew big. Then it crashed bigger.
I’m not going to tell the whole rise-and-fall story here, because that’s a book and not a blog post. But if you’ve ever built something that large, you know there’s a feeling to it. A current. A kind of synergy you get from creating it that you will not find anywhere else. And while you’re riding it, you are certain the momentum lasts forever.
It doesn’t.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the crash
Sometimes in life you hit a stride where everything bends in your favor, where events line up in a sequence so improbable that standing at the end of the chain, you know something bigger than human hands built the outcome. And sometimes the reverse runs true. One thing breaks. Then another. And no amount of effort revives a thing that is meant to fade.
The complete answer to “what happened” could fill a book. But the honest core of why I haven’t poured my soul into a single project since 2017 is smaller than people expect, and harder to argue with.
Nothing has been worthy of it.
Projects came. Projects went. A little money got made along the way. But there has been nothing with the real power to transform. Nothing with the potential to be a genuine game changer at a deeper level than what I’ve already lived. Nothing built to actually unify people and help them create new kinds of lives, the kind that reaches past the money games and the dressed-up pyramid schemes the online opportunity world keeps recycling.
The three things that kept turning me off
When I strip it down, my objection lands on three things, and you’ve probably felt all three yourself if you’ve been in this business more than a year.
- The products were mostly soulless. A juice, a patch, a gadget, a “system” that existed mainly to justify a buy-in. Sold for a price that only makes sense if you’re really buying a position, not a product.
- The owners treated reps as a means to an end. Corporate people who saw the field as a tool to be used and discarded once the money came in. I watched comp plans get quietly rewritten the moment the math stopped favoring the company. If you’ve ever opened your back office to find the rules changed overnight, you know exactly the feeling I mean.
- The stories were weak. Uninspiring, and missing any real magic. And a great story is the one thing this business actually runs on.
None of that is a knock on the real ones. The ethical leaders, the genuine team builders, the salt-of-the-earth people out there doing their best and building something real with their hands. To those teams, may you rise and do something you’ve never managed before. I mean that.
But I wasn’t willing to put my name on anything I couldn’t stand fully behind. So I watched, and I waited, and I told you the truth in the meantime.
Here’s the one objection I could never get past in any deal I was offered: I had to trust the owner not to change the rules on me. What finally got my attention is a comp plan written into a public smart contract you can read yourself, before you trust a word I say. Drop your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough.
Show me the contract I can actually read →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
What I’d do differently now
For years my answer ended there. I’m watching, nothing’s worthy, talk soon. And for a long time that was the whole truth.
Then something showed up that actually answers the three complaints above, and I want to be careful about how I say this, because I am allergic to the hype I just spent a thousand words criticizing.
Go back and read my three objections. Owners who rewrite the plan. Pay you can’t trust. A structure built to use you. Every one of those problems comes down to the same root. You have to take someone’s word for it. You take the comp plan on faith. You take the commission math on faith. You take the owner’s promises on faith. And faith is exactly what gets exploited when the money comes in.
So the question I started asking was simple. What would network marketing look like if you never had to take anyone’s word for anything?
That’s the system I’d build today, and it’s the one I now point people to. The commissions are paid on a public smart contract on the Base blockchain, settled in the same block as the sale, in roughly twelve seconds. One hundred percent of the commission, in USDC, with nothing skimmed off the top. You don’t trust me that the math is right. You open a block explorer and read the contract yourself before you believe a single thing I tell you. No “the plan changed” email. No upline quietly moving your rank. The contract is the truth, and the truth is public.
The structure is three stages and nine rungs, and each rung is a real digital course you keep, starting as low as $3.30. I’m not going to pretend this is a magic money button, and the program itself states plainly that most people earn little to nothing. That’s the kind of honesty I went quiet for years waiting to find. What I can tell you is that for the first time since 2017, the mechanics underneath an opportunity don’t insult the intelligence of the capable, skeptical people I actually respect.
Notice the difference in your own body for a second. The builder who can pull up the contract on their phone and show any prospect exactly where every dollar lands carries himself differently than the recruiter quietly hoping the owner doesn’t change the rules next quarter. One of them is calm. The other is braced. I spent a long time being the second one. I’m done with that.
If you want to see the rest of what I actually stand behind these days, here are the systems and tools I actually recommend, and if you’re new here, start here and I’ll walk you in from the beginning.
So am I “back”?
I’m not going to oversell it. I haven’t rebuilt a 91,000-person team, and I’m not promising I will. What I’m telling you is that the reason I stepped back in 2017 was never about being tired of the work. It was about refusing to lead people into something I couldn’t verify and wouldn’t buy myself.
For the first time in a long time, that objection has an answer that doesn’t rely on my charisma or anyone’s promises. It relies on math anyone can check. And that’s the difference between a position you buy on faith and a system you can audit before you ever commit a dollar. One of those keeps paying when you step away. The other one ends the way Empower Network ended, with a lot of good people holding promises that got rewritten.
If you’ve been waiting the same way I was, watching, skeptical, unwilling to put your name on the next soulless launch, then go read the contract. Not because I told you it’s good. Because you can check whether it’s good without trusting me at all.
I stayed quiet for years because nothing was worth your trust. This is the first thing I’ve seen that doesn’t ask for it. Every commission settles on a public contract you can read before you believe a word I say. Enter your name and I’ll send you the full walkthrough.
Show me the system I'd build today →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Talk soon,
David Wood
Dream Builder
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Sorry if this is a silly question, but if a comp plan is written into a contract you can read yourself, does that actually stop a company from launching a second contract next year and just moving everyone over? I don’t code so genuinely asking, not being snarky, I want to understand what the verification actually protects against.
Bonnie that’s the same question I had reading it between shifts… I think the honest answer is it protects against the rules changing under the same contract, not against a company simply starting over somewhere else. Still worth something, just maybe not everything it’s presented as.
Twenty-two years in corporate life taught me that ‘the plan changed overnight’ isn’t a network marketing problem, it’s a power problem, and it shows up wherever one party controls the ledger and the other party has to trust them. What’s actually new here isn’t the complaint, which every rep who’s been through a comp plan rewrite already knows in their bones. It’s the proposed fix. A ledger neither party controls unilaterally is a genuinely different structure, whatever you think of the specific opportunity wrapped around it.
Graham, I want to believe the ‘you can verify it yourself’ pitch solves the trust problem, but I notice I’m doing the thing I always do, which is treating the verification step as a reason to keep researching instead of a reason to actually start. Reading a contract I don’t fully understand isn’t the same as being protected by it.
The honesty is appreciated, but ‘little to nothing’ needs a range. What percentage break even, over what time frame? Without that it’s a disclaimer, not data.
Yuki, I can’t give you the range for this specific model since it’s new, but I can tell you what four years in an older one looked like from the inside. Month one was building the list. Months two through five were mostly rejection, the kind where you start dreading your own phone. Somewhere around month six the pattern changed, not because the product got better but because I’d finally figured out which ten conversations a week actually mattered and stopped wasting time on the other forty. That’s the part no comp plan disclosure captures, verifiable ledger or not. The structure can be completely honest and you can still spend half a year figuring out the skill underneath it before anything moves. I don’t think a smart contract changes that timeline at all, it just changes whether you can trust the number once it finally shows up.
The verified-ledger part doesn’t move me much. I’m not tired from distrusting the math. I’m tired because this still needs hours I don’t reliably have.