Just When I Thought I Had it all Figured Out....

[MJ DeMarco]

The hall was filled with young working adults. The kind that struggles with job stress and challenges.

Speakers came up, and red flags starting waving in my head when I heard the words'Amway', 'Diamond' and 'passive income' peppered throughout the speeches. I thought of getting the hell out of there, but decided to have some respect for them.

So I stayed on until the end, which wasn't very long.

Mr. G took me aside and offered to help me learn more about this 'opportunity'. I decided to humour him, so he started talking about how the Amway business model worked

I used to think network marketing was wiped off the face of the earth, but now it seems it has put ONLINE BIZ into the equation with some scheme called Network 21. All other mechanisms like inviting (harassing?) friends to buy your stuff still apply. Then another guy, Mr.W and an accountant (lol), Ms. E popped in to chime in.

3 folks against 1? Huh?

Finally, I had to put my foot down.

I asked them 2 questions:
- How many products have you all sold PERIOD.
- Do you have control over your products? If a customer hates a product, can you do anything about it? Make it better?

Instead of giving me clear answers, the geezers got Ms. E to REPEAT the entire explanation of the model, with numbers that might as well as well be imaginary.

Ugh, so sorry you had to go through this! Strong work on the escape!

 

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[ZF Lee]

Ugh, so sorry you had to go through this! Strong work on the escape!

Thanks @MJ DeMarco. Grateful for the support.

I definitely will. Thankfully, I was not robbed or murdered or anything like that in that dubious meetup lol. That's one thing to be happy about.

I didn't get to launch the test site as planned, after finding a shit ton of material on Stratygyzer on perfecting marketing testing. A few pages into reading, turns out the way I am querying the market is too general.

A big bummer, but at least I saved myself some dough and time on some stuff that could go wrong.

I'm kind of worried on TIMING of the tests. Like, how long should each test last? A week? Two days?

The Reddit posts seem to just take 2 days for much of the input to flow in, then the later comments trickle in by the dripful. For e-commerce landing pages, I'll have to see.

Disturbingly, I only put the queries in r/Malaysia, not in Reddit as an international or niched audience. I'm wondering if the locals are less expressive on market feedback, compared to the more vocal Westerners.

For my product, I don't think I can sell on Lazada, the equivalent of Amazon here. Shitty customer service, bad reviews arrangement, bad sellers management. Also a F*cking hoard of thieves. I spotted ripoffs of Mary Kay stuff on there. Although Mary Kay is a network marketing company, its products are good, and it makes me a bit angry to see great products being sold without dues paid to the biz.

I do remember some businesses that didn't rely on Amazon to sell stuff, such as Dollar Shave Club. Amazon would have killed off their efforts anyway lol.

I'll see what else I need to do tomorrow to patch up the ship.

I've arranged hopefully some better meetups. A money planning group and an e-commerce one. They had at least 5 people joining up, and they seem to be regulars too, judging from past records on the meetup.com app. I should have taken that as a more solid assurance of quality.

 

[sparechange]

just run facebook & instagram ads, see how much interest there is in the product & then if its positive you can sell it

but if the reddit input is negative most likely you are dealing with another me-too product

ive been to an MLM myself, a coworker mentioned some event of a free fiance class so i thought ok cool maybe this would be helpful, oh never mind its a group to sell life insurance and sign up for a fee LOL #cya