Neucopia Review: Recruitment & cash gifting hybrid
Neucopia state that their name is derived from the latin word ‘copia’, meaning abundance. Neu is apparently ‘new’ in German so I guess the idea here is “new abundance”.
Neucopia list their company address as a virtual office suite in the state of Nevada in the US and is headed up by CEO Rich Cook (photo below right), who the company undersells as having
a background of success after success (and) becoming a top income earner multiple times over in the network marketing arena.
Rich is a leader’s leader…(who) excel(s) in virtually everything he does (and) create(s) friendships with everyone he meets.
I tried to research Rich Cook’s MLM history and didn’t really turn up anything.
Curiously, the domain ‘neucopia.com’ has was registered on the 15th May 2012, however the domain registration information is set to private.
Back in June 2012 though Neucopia affiliate ‘Kevin’, who claimed Neucopia was ‘not a scam, nor a spam!!!!!, wasn’t selling anything and was merely looking to ‘recruit…people to join us‘,’ stated that Rich Cook ‘actually lives in San Diego, CA‘.
The Neucopia Product Line
Neucopia don’t have any retailable products or services, with members only able to market membership to the company itself.
There are two types of membership available in Neucopia, ‘Basic’ and ‘Premier’.
Bundled with Basic membership ($49.95 a month) are ‘thousands of dollars worth of the top tools, trainings, and income generating strategies‘. Premier membership ($169.95 a month) also includes this, as well as ‘exclusive access to additional conference calls, webinars, training videos, and other secret strategies‘.
The Neucopia Compensation Plan
The Neucopia compensation plan revolves around the recruitment of new members and continuous payment of a monthly membership fee.
Using a hybrid 2-up/3-up compensation plan structure, new members must pass up their first three Basic membership sales, or first two Premier membership sales before they can earn a commission.
In turn after your initial qualifying sales, anyone you personally recruit then has to pass up their qualifying sales to you as well.
Signup Fee Commission
Once qualified to earn a commission (passing up 3 Basic or 2 Premier membership sales to your upline), Neucopia then pay out $100 per new member you recruit (at either the Basic of Premier membership level).
Premier Membership Monthly Commission
Making up the residual commission, for each Premier member you have in your downline (members passed up do not count), you earn a monthly $100 commission on their membership fee.
Basic members are not able to earn this commission with their monthly commission on Premier memberships rolling up to the first qualified Premier member in their upline.
Matching Bonus
Everytime a $100 Premier membership monthly commission is paid out, the member who recruited the member getting paid earns a $10 matching bonus.
Joining Neucopia
Membership to Neucopia comes in two varieties, Basic and Premier. Basic membership is $49.95 a month and Premier is $169.95 a month.
Both membership options come with a one time signup fee of $100.
Conclusion
With nothing able to be sold in Neucopia other than company membership, that means 100% of the commissions being generated are coming out of membership fees being paid by company affiliates.
As new members join the company, the only way they are then able to earn a commission is via the recruitment of new members. Once new members stop joining, those who joined last won’t earn anything and will leave and this trickles up to the top and it all falls apart.
Whereas this is as far as a bog-standard pyramid scheme goes, Neucopia have also added what appears to be a cash gifting element to their compensation plan. When a new member joins at the Premier level, 100% of their mandatory sign up fee ($100) is directly paid out as a commission.
Quite clearly the idea behind Neucopia is to sign up as a Premier member and then recruit others to do the same. No products are being sold and none of the money inside the company is non-affiliate sourced.
Pyramid schemes are bad enough on their own, introduce a cash gifting element into the equation and they only get worse.
This is the dumbest of the network marketing schemes I’ve heard. Who would join this one?!
Pay $50 or $170 a mo. plus $100 sign up fee, REALLY?! For what?! Then try to sign up more dummies & on & on?!
This is the dumbest friggin thing I’ve heard yet! But ya know who’s born every minute.
Well… he certainly looks like a trustworthy fellow… let me get my wallet!
Now, now, don’t judge a book by its cover… 😉
I actually kind of like this guy’s idea.
Let’s’ see… with a membership it appears you get access to some recycled, unoriginal, free ebook style content… I wonder how cheaply could a website like that be built? $1500? The front end of the website looks easy enough for somebody like me to build himself. How difficult or how expensive would it be to build the back office for this, anybody?
Seems that there are going to be a few 10s of thousands of angry zeektards in the near future, some of whom would be grateful for the opportunity to join a scam such as this.
I googled Neucopia and this video came up:
The guy starts out with a story of how he didn’t make money despite doing all the MLM things you are supposed to do.
Then he gives the big reveal on why you didn’t make money. “It’s not the compensation plan, it’s not the company, it’s the training!”
So he’s saying he sucked and didn’t make money and didn’t get trained. So he failed. He said he knew nothing about social media and online advertising, but now 2 years later he knows everything about PPV, CPV, PPC, SEO, writing blogs, etc.
Here’s my big problem with this. He’s going to get an online group and train them on how to do all this internet marketing.
The problem? The entire group he is training are competing with each other. Sure, let’s have all 100 (or however many) of us all compete for the same PPC keywords.
I like the “ra-ra MLM doesn’t work” but the premise that he can take a group of newbies and teach them IM and they all become the 3% who make money in MLM is as unlikely as someone learning how to do the rah-rah and recruit people-to-people.
His video also kinda sucked, bad lighting and lots of shadows, no mic or above the scene boom because you can hear the echoes.
It’s done with a camcorder on a tripod.
Clearly, he haven’t made the money to buy a REAL camera. 😉
To be fair it’s miles above most of the MLM affiliate videos I see. Due to the nature of this website I wind up watching way too many sales pitches and half of them are shot on either Skype (with the affiliate clearly reading a pre-typed word document nervously), or look as if they’ve been shot in their parents basement with a tin can and string for a mic.
Especially love the ‘welcome to my lifestyle office!’ videos shot in the outdoors somewhere where you can’t even hear the affiliate due to wind, traffic, waves, people talking etc.
This article is Not true at all. You get the same training you would go to a guru training and pay thousands for. The first training with Ryan Trainer was awesome and he gave all members a course he sells on the web for $1000 to members for free.
People go to seminars and buy training courses like crazy online. Neucopia for $297 to get a $1000 course is a great value. That course and the hour and a half training by one of the best internet marketers out there was awesome.
This product is great because there is value in it and thousands of people pay to get internet marketing knowledge.
I’ve paid thousands to go to seminars I can get here for the membership.
To say there is no product is ridiculous! Go ask Ryan Trainer to give you his time and $1000 course without the neucopia membership and see his answer.
@John
Says it all really, you’re purchasing, marketing and selling membership to a company. That in itself is not a viable product and because commissions are paid out on this membership, drags Neucopia into pyramid scheme territory.
Anything bundled with the membership is irrelevant.
Wow!…
Seriously all of you putting up this ridiculous comments about Neucopia and half of them don’t even come close to matching up with the information about Neucopia.
If you guys spent more time learning how to market effectively online and actually “Take Action” on implementing what you learn to your business you too can get the results that you.
For you to talk crap about a company, it’s comp plan, and the products and not even come close to backing up all of that information is absolutely ridiculous.
And for the comment from OZ: Dude you don’t even know what a pyramid scheme stands for…
A pyramid scheme is when all of the people at the top of the company are making money from the people coming in and not getting access to the products or services they are paying for. Seriously come on.
@Dave
Marketing and “getting results” is irrelevant when analysing a business model and writing a review of it.
What crap exactly?
when 100% of the commissions paid out are derived from membership fees with members not able to sell anything except membership to prospective members. Thus in order to earn a commission new members must be recruited.
This is Neucopia’s business model.
For those arguing from ignorance… Go look up FTC vs. Koscot before you claim whatever is not a pyramid scheme.
From my POV! Any business or MLM that DOES NOT have a tangible product is a pyramid scheme. TANGIBLE PRODUCT! Can you touch it? Hold it? Drink it? Eat it? Oh they send you a video of training…. pyramid scheme
@Mike: I suppose I should report my phone company, my cable TV company and my Internet Service Provider as “pyramid schemes” under your definition – since none of them provide anything I can touch, hold, drink or eat…
What separates a pyramid or Ponzi scheme from a legitimate MLM business is the presence of a product or service that has intrinsic value to the purchaser above and beyond the ability to sell it to other people for profit.
I’m not saying that Neucopia necessarily fits that category since I advise avoiding it for other reasons I won’t go into here…
The biggest problem with MLMs is that they’re filled with hordes of people who basically don’t have a clue about business, resulting in “the blind leading the blind.”
In my 30+ years in the industry, only a handful of the “next Microsofts” are still in existence today, and none of them have shown the growth that the REAL Microsoft experienced, and NONE of them have created the number of millionaires that MS or Google has.
My advice (for what it’s worth) – STAY AWAY from ANY “business” that has “making money” as its primary reason for involvement. A REAL business will provide a REAL PRODUCT or SERVICE that people WANT and are willing to PAY FOR – PERIOD!
Actually, what seperates a Ponzi from legitimate business is when you don’t have affiliates investing in a scheme and earning a ROI (directly or indirectly) paid from new investments made by affiliates.
What seperates a pyramid scheme from legitimate business is the actual selling of products or services to retail customers (not affiliates). Having a product is not enough, you need to be selling it to retail customers and this needs to be how the majority of revenue is created within the company.
Neucopia has no retail customers and affiliates sell membership to the company itself. Thus it fits the definition of a pyramid scheme.
What separates an endless chain recruiting scheme from a legitimate business is not what members DO but what members CAN do.
Any legitimate business will move to shut any loopholes which allow its’ members to profit largely from recruiting, rather than actual PRODUCT sales.
The very fact get-rich-quickers such as “Digital” Don Hill find the Neucopia “opportunity” attractive is a warning in itself for anyone contemplating joining an MLM.
I was in Neucopia from November 2012 until August 2013. I earned about $6,000 from their affiliate program.
They actually DO have Products. The basic level is software, albeit most of it is not so great. But the premier level “product” is training from industry leaders like Matt Trainer, Mia Davies, Jairek Robbins, Jeff Schwerdt; on SEO, Social Marketing, Blogging, etc. And I have applied much of the training to my .com retail biz.
It’s definitely NOT a pyramid, as my 2 top members that joined under me made a LOT more money than I did!
But I didn’t join it to make money off of Neucopia. I joined it to learn about marketing 🙂
Did they recruit more new affiliates then you did?
It’s perfectly possible to have your downline earn more than you if recruitment commissions are in play and they recruit more than you.
Also having a product bundled with affiliate membership doesn’t automatically negate pyramid scheme concerns, that’s defined as per an MLM company’s business model and compensation plan.
if you can’t buy the product itself, then it’s just another potential pyramid scheme. I suggest you lookup “Burnlounge” and why FTC closed them before you speak any further.
Your logic doesn’t make much sense. You have joined as a Premier member ($169.95 per month), and yet you claim you didn’t join it for the income opportunity but for the training.
Neucopia has 2 types of memberships …
* Basic, $49.95 per month, for non participants
* Premier, $169.95 per month, for participants
You should normally have joined Neucopia at the $49.95 Basic level rather than the $169.95 Premier level, according to your own statement:
The only difference between those two memberships is the $120 per month income opportunity. You have clearly PAID for the income opportunity itself and actively participated in it, and yet you claim it wasn’t very important to you?
We won’t use that type of logic. If you’re paying for something then you’re probably interested in it. We simply can’t reflect all the weird ideas people have about their own motives for doing something.
Looks like Neucopia finally collapsed. Apparently they’ve “merged” with My Lead System Pro now.
Neucopia website is still online and active (no mention of the collapse on there), but seems all affiliates are getting migrated over. Not surprising there’s no mention as the last “blog entry” over at Neucopia was in October 2013.
I’m guessing MLSP have a similar recruitment-driven business model. Rich Cook and friends have probably been given positions at the top or close to the top of MLSP’s compensation plan.
MLSP does not pay out on more than one level.
Cheers. Knew there was a reason I hadn’t reviewed it (the name was familiar).
So I guess they’ve just given up on the multi-level gifting model altogether. Sucks to have been at the bottom of Neucopia’s compensation plan.