u/PostHocRemission wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
That my friend is a MLM
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited
I've spent some time digging into a few MLMs (NuSkin, Vorwerk, Herbalife, LuLaRue, J.Hilburn) and have MLM documentaries on rotation along with many other types of content haha.
This is my personal opinion -
This isn't an MLM for these reasons:
1. People are paying for a service, receive that service, and assuming the service is legit, you are receiving some kind of valuable education for the cost.
2. Students aren't joining with the main goal of being promoted up the chain or receiving commissions themselves in the future after there training. They are joining to hopefully leave immediately after graduating.
3. No instructor above them is getting a commission from the people they brought into the system.
4. Instructor compensation isn't directly tied to the individual performance of people they brought in.
5. In the vast majority of cases, successful instructors want to leave the system and get a good industry job, and in an MLM the most successful people stay inside to receive recursive financial benefits from their reporting chain.
So for a bootcamp to be an MLM, it would look more like this:
1. People join with the intention of moving up the pyramid, to more and more senior instruction roles
2. People receive a commission for each student they bring on, they teach this student entirely, and then that student needs to bring on their own students to be promoted to instructor.
3. The services offered have to provably be either entirely fake or prove the value of the services is actually much lower. E.g. if someone pays $10,000 and they are given literally a $10 Udemy course to watch, and the instructor got a $7,000 commission for recruiting you, that might be in MLM territory. If you pay $10,000 and the school makes a strong case you are receiving $10,000 of comparable services to others, then it's hard to make the case the business is based on commissions over offering valuable services.