NextLevelX Review: Crowd-funding gifting scheme

At the time of publication NextLevelX is currently in prelaunch, with the company website indicating the opportunity is a marriage between crowd-funding and MLM.

Named on the NextLevelX website as the founder of the company is a “Leslie Robert Wolfe”. In his NextLevelX corporate bio, Wolfe is credited with a whole stack of marketing achievements, however outside of NextLevelX, none of them appear to be directly MLM related (although some do appear to tie in with MLM training).

On the NextLevelX website, the company’s crowd-funding platform, “Crowd Fund Giving”, is credited as a trademark of the “Chamber of Commerce Network”. In his corporate bio, Wolfe provides some history of the Chamber of Commerce:

In the year 2000, I started the Blue Diamond, Nevada, Business Chamber Of Commerce. It was me and a few other people. After a year, the other people decided it wasn’t worth their time, so I took over all operations.

As I added more benefits to the Chamber, I realized it could be done on a National basis. So I also created the Chamber Of Commerce Network.

The idea is to make the membership so powerful, that people had to join. Our Platinum Membership (the only one we have) retails for $395. The membership is primarily used as a premium or incentive for licensing purposes.

What other Chambers won’t do is give their members an endorsement. You can be a member, but they will not endorse your business. WE DO endorse businesses. In addition, we also give them a AAA+ Rating and a guarantee that we will not tarnish their name in the the (sic) media or publish complaints.

We also guarantee that the business will profit from using the Endorsement and AAA+ Rating. If they don’t, they get their money back.

Wolfe (right) goes on to provide an example of how he “guarantees” membership with his Chamber of Commerce generates profit for businesses who sign up, using restaurants as an example:

Created The “Chamber Of Commerce Network” Restaurant, 5-Star Rating.

This 5-Star Rating business model guarantees fine-dining restaurants at least $60,000 in additional profits per year.

They choose which entree and dessert is suited for the 5-Star Rating. Now that they have it, those items will increase in sales and profits.

Restaurants cannot lose.

Exactly how Wolfe “guarantees” to “increase the sales and profits” of products given a 5 star rating by his Chamber of Commerce is not explained.

Read on for a full review of the NextLevelX MLM business opportunity.

The NextLevelX Product Line

NextLevelX has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market $15 affiliate membership to the company itself.

Bundled with NextLevelX affiliate membership is access to the company’s crowd-funding platform:

The product is a Crowd-Funding Platform. The platform allows you post a “project” in which you need funding. The price for the platform is $15 per year.

An affiliate does not need to use the crowd-funding platform they receive access to when they sign up in order to generate commissions.

Additional compensation plan positions are also available, ranging in price from $20 to $7000. NextLevelX bundled what they call “Support Local Business Day kits” with each position purchase.

What we encourage, is that people shop at a locally owned business on every 3rd Friday of the month.

NextLevelX claims each “kit” is worth $25, with the idea being that affiliates give the kits away to local business who then participate in their Support Local Business Day scheme. Each kit contains Support Local Business Day signage and a certificate:

NextLevelX compares their Support Local Business Day to well-known shopping days such as “Black Friday”, “Small Business Saturday” and “Cyber Monday”, and asks “where is it written that these “awareness” programs can only be once per year?”

The NextLevelX Compensation Plan

Referred to as “compounded funding”, the NextLevelX compensation plan revolves around affiliate purchasing positions in one of six fixed-length straight-line queues.

The basic idea is that an affiliate buys into one, some or all of the six queues available, and then earns a commission when recruited affiliates buy into the same queues.

• Queue 1 ($15, max 3 payable positions) – $10 paid to recruiting affiliate, $5 admin fee
• Queue 2 ($25, max 9 payable positions) – $20 paid to recruiting affiliate, $5 admin fee
• Queue 3 ($125, max 27 payable positions) – $100 paid to recruiting affiliate, $25 admin fee
• Queue 4 ($600, max 81 payable positions) – $500 paid to recruiting affiliate, $100 admin fee
• Queue 5 ($1500, max 243 payable positions) – $1000 paid to recruiting affiliate, $500 admin fee
• Queue 6 ($9000, max 729 payable positions) – $7000 paid to recruiting affiliate, $2000 admin fee

Note that an affiliate cannot earn on positions if someone they’ve recruited purchases a position in a queue they themselves haven’t bought a position in. In this scenario the commission is passed up to the first affiliate in the upline who has purchased a position at the applicable level. This is where the MLM component of the business opportunity lies.

Affiliates appear to be able to purchase as many positions in any queue as they want, with the NextLevelX FAQ coyly referring to the positions as “projects”:

Can I Buy Multiple Positions? …

It’s not that your buying multiple positions. But anyone can have more than one project.

All position fees, including admin fees on each position held, are payable annually. This is billed as the residual income component of the compensation plan.

Joining NextLevelX

Affiliate membership to NextLevelX is at a minimum $15 for a position in queue 1. The maximum cost of participating in all six queues within the NextLevelX compensation plan is $11,265.

Conclusion

Under the guise of helping people and local businesses, NextLevelX can be boiled down into a simple cash gifting scheme.

For starters, an affiliate does not need to use the crowd-funding platform. So long as they pay their fee, they’re good to go and can earn by recruiting other affiliates.

You can make a fortune by helping other people achieve their project needs. How is this done?

NO! you DO NOT have to do any fund-raising. All you do is simply refer other people.

These recruited affiliates sign up and, after they’ve paid Leslie Wolfe his admin fee (which increases with each buy-in level), they gift their participation fee to the affiliate who recruited to and go off looking for their own recruitees.

As for the Support Local Business Day Kits bundled with positions in queues 2 to 6, they can be tossed in the bin, used as firewood kindle, toilet paper, hamster bedding etc. Again, so long as an affiliate hands over their participation fee to the affiliate who recruited them (+admin fee for Wolfe), they can go off and recruit other affiliates who in turn do the same.

NextLevelX openly encourages affiliates to start with the first queue and then use gifting payments from their recruited affiliates to pay their way into the next level. The idea being that each person brings in 3 people at the base-level, thousands of recruits later (via direct or indirect recruitment), they then get paid $7000.

On its own there’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with the idea behind a “Small Business Day” or crowd-funding platform, but coupled to NextLevelX’s compensation plan, unfortunately they’re both reduced to nothing more than a cover for an underlying gifting scheme.

You could swap out both the kit and crowd-funding gimmick with anything and the end-result would remain the same. Affiliate money is paid to those who recruit, with Wolfe skimming his cut off the top in admin fees. The more people play, the higher the gifting amount becomes and so to do Wolfe’s fees.

Once affiliates stop purchasing positions, the whole opportunity goes kaboom. With position fees payable annually though, unfortunately for those at the bottom who can’t recruit it’ll already be too late.

Finally, and somewhat curiously, NextLevelX presents the following “warning” with their compensation plan material:

As with any business, funding or opportunity, you may not make a dime or raise any money.

Compounded Funding™ is an essential, additional financial resource for our CrowdFund-Giving Platform.Results depicted above definitely are not typical, and there’s absolutely NO guarantee of income.

I say curiously because the first thing a visitor to the NextLevelX website sees is the company logo at the top of the page:

Sure looks “guaranteed” to me…