Rippln charges $9.50 for “rewards system” details
Whilst the Rippln hype-train rolls on at full steam ahead (the company just announced it had clocked up 500,000 signed affiliates this last weekend), the dilemma of none of the company’s affiliates knowing what it is exactly that they’ve signed up for.
Apart from a Rippln branded mobile app that the company claims is ‘set to make waves around the world‘, since retracting their previously released compensation plan material, the company has thus far failed to inform those signing up of the finer points of Rippln. Namely the compensation plan the company will be using and how affiliates will earn money.
Meanwhile a few days ago Rippln announced an upcoming “Rippln Huddle”, to be held on May 16th.
When Rippln initially announced the huddle, affiliates were simply told that it was an “official event” that would have several corporate staff of Rippln’s in attendance, along with some top-affiliates.
No further information was provided, leaving many (myself included), left scratching our heads as to what the contents of the huddle would be.
Possibly picking up on this, Rippln put out a followup announcement today and provided a little more detail on what will be covered at the huddle:
-Hear a state of play for Rippln
-Get a glimpse into what’s ahead in the upcoming weeks through the rollout
-Learn more about the Rewards System for Players
-Have FUN socializing with fellow RIPPLE MAKERS!
That third point in particular is of importance, as for the hundreds of thousands of affiliates who have signed up to the company, it’s the first glimpse they’ll get of the revised compensation plan.
While it’s great to see Rippln finally provide affiliates with some compensation plan and commission information, there is a catch.
The Rippln Huddle costs $9.50 to attend and is being held in Las Vegas. The ticket price might sound cheap but when you factor in travel and accommodation expenses, costs could quickly balloon out.
Whether or not affiliates who do stump up and attend will be able to share the information provided, and how long after the huddle Rippln choose to share the information with the rest of their affiliate-base is not specified.
As it stands now for Rippln’s affiliates, if you don’t pay $9.50 and get down to Las Vegas, you don’t find out how Rippln are going to pay you.
Shortly after the Rippln Huddle is the No Excuses 4 Summit, which Rippln are sponsoring. A bit more pricey at $497 a pop, Rippln have announced “exclusive training sessions” will take place, but not whether they will exclusively further reveal aspects of their compensation plan and business model at the event.
I’ll re-iterate at this point that no MLM company that is taking affiliate signups (free or otherwise) should withhold vital information from its affiliates such as the compensation and business model.
This is crucial information required by prospective affiliates, without which they are rendered completely unable to make an informed decision as to whether or not to join the opportunity.
Charging your affiliates $9.50 to learn about the Rippln compensation plan?
Not good enough guys.
In other Rippln news, the company also recently made an announcement congratulating
Michael Rutherford for being the first person to get 100,000 in their ripple!
At the time of publication the Rippln website advises the company has signed on a total of over 516,000 affiliates. This would mean that Rutherford has approximately 1/5th of the company’s affiliate-base in his downline.
If Rippln were to press ahead with the pass-up compensation plan they’ve now retracted or a variation of it, this would of course result in a mountain of affiliate-fees being passed up to Rutherford when Rippln launches.
So who is Michael Rutherford?
Before Rippln, CEO Brian Underwood launched the MLM company iZigg back in 2010.
Covering the launch of iZigg, Ty Tribble wrote on his MLM Blog:
Zigg is a new MLM company that promises wealth based on text message advertising.
Let’s state the obvious: Texting is a big trend.
Now let’s state the not-so-obvious: The cast of characters behind iZigg are the same bunch who were closely involved with Burnlounge, where the FTC filed a lawsuit and shut them down.
Then they went on to another company called LocalAdLink, another alleged scam that had people paying a bunch of money to get listed on Google.
This is a classic “lots of hype” money game that will not last.
Tribble goes on to compare iZigg to several high-profile pyramid and Ponzi schemes busted by US authorities in recent years.
Nestled in the comments of the article, reader “jason” shares his personal experience with iZigg:
To begin my business with iZigg I invested $2600 and have spent surely hundreds of hours training people in my organization of 58 people.
iZigg has NO training program available to help me unless I’m recruiting – and SADLY that only entails a 3 way sales call or my prospect showing up at a meeting where the ‘top earner’ tells them, “you can text my name to 90210 and I’m available to help you any time, we’re going into business together and we’re a team”.
Currently my organization has sold nearly $100,000 and all I’ve earned is $1600.
I continue to listen to calls where, inevitably, I hear ‘top earners’ like Dr Scott Elliot, Michael Rutherford, etc.. claim “our company pays back .70 cents out of every dollar to agents!!”
So as it turns out, Michael Rutherford is one of Brian Underwood’s “top-earning” buddies from back in the iZigg days…
While Rippln run around the internet telling everyone about their “brand new app that will change the way people communicate”, it’s nice to see that in some MLM companies, certain things don’t change.
Namely placing your close buddies at the top of a compensation, releasing it to the public and launching a glossy marketing campaign, solely designed to encourage affiliates to mass-recruit on as little provided information as possible.
I’ll leave you for now with the following message, recently published on Rippln’s Facebook page:
Stop asking how much it will cost you start building your team, that is all that matters now.
Ripple on folks…
Update 14th May 2013 – Co-incidence or not I have no idea but within an hour of this article going live, Rippln announced a “HQ Live Call” to take place on Tuesday May the 14th.
It certainly looks like it was somewhat hastily put together as Rippln’s Facebook announcement contains no less than three conflicting dates and times:
Rippln state that on the call they will be discussing the “Rippln State of Play” and providing those who call in “more on the Rippln business model”.
They could of course just provide this information on their website and in a single stroke inform all their affiliates of what’s happening, but then that kind of goes against the whole uninformative recruitment campaign they’ve got going on at the moment.
I used the same source when I first checked Brian Underwood’s background experience. “Jason” was experienced enough to both recruit and sell. He called himself “pissed consumer” in the source I found, pissed by all the false marketing from higher up in the organization he and others had to listen to.
Rippln is aimed towards the “consumer” type of network marketers, people willing to PAY for products, services and training, but motivated by potential income promises. They are looking for people they can market something TO, not traditional marketers or sales people.
An idea like that isn’t bad in itself. If you’re able to attract a lot of consumers, you will also be able to attract experienced sales people. But you can’t treat experienced sales people as consumers, you will only get “pissed consumers” never wanting to do business with you again.
The “masses” are easier to dupe. Just look at Wazzub…
It’s all vaporbiz until they show something. What’s so unreasonable about that? It’s not as if they are giving away money…
Rippln is just treading water.. they know they got exposed and are just trying to figure out what to do.. They’ll come out with some modified version that still won’t sneak past anyone (at least here..).
The last attempt will be the “BOLD FACE” sucker attempt just to see what they can get.. hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, oh yeah, did I say HYPE??
Ugh, just wasted 40 mins listening to Rippln’s Tuesday night call.
Nothing about the specifics of the comp plan, mostly just more marketing hype.
CEO Brian Underwood prattles on for about fifteen minutes, mentioning that the app market place is still 10-15 months away, that at the end of June “hard dates” will be provided to inner-circle affiliates.
Details on the “chat app” and compensation plan are supposedly going to be “drip fed” in the first week of June.
Jonathan Budd then talks for ages about Rippln trying to hit 1 million affiliates by June 15th. Underwood comes back (via SMS) and “challenges” every Rippln affiliate to commit to recruiting 10 new affiliates in the next 24 hrs.
I tuned out for most of Michael Rutherford’s speech and Mark Hoverson ends the call by going on and on about throwing balls in the air.
Not his, I hope
I tried it too, but I lost interest completely after the first 6 minutes. “Our marketing strategy was just to create som buzz in the market” doesn’t make much sense if you can’t rapidly follow it up with something of interest.
We can compare it to Wazzub. Most people had actually LOST interest long before the project reached its official pre-launch date “100 years after Titanic”. The same thing seems to be happening to Rippln too. That’s not a recipe for success.
Wazzub mostly delivered unfulfilled promises, and wasted people’s time. Rippln has done the same until now.
That depends entirely on a) your definition of “success” and b) knowing the motive of those behind Rippln.
It is far too easy to assume those behind Rippln have set out to make a million bucks in double quick time, or are in it for the “long haul” when it’s just as probable they would be happy with a much smaller amount and don’t intend being around any longer than Wazzub, anyway.
After all, the get-rich-quickers’ oft repeated mantra of “diversify, diversify, diversify” can be equally applied to both players AND organizers.
Ten relatively small time MLMs, each “only” pulling in $100,000 is still a cool million bucks for what amounts to nothing more than sitting behind a keyboard for a few hours or days.
Do we REALLY know who is behind Rippln and/or how many other “opportunities” the same crew are running as we speak ?
I referred to my OWN definition in that statement, the only one I can know anything about.
If you start marketing something too early, people will have lost most of their interest long before launch date. The market has already cooled off when the product or opportunity finally hits the market.
Success isn’t solely about the current results, e.g. whether you make some money or not on a current project. It’s also about the impact it will have on your future results. I don’t think the Rippln marketing strategy will be remembered as a successful one.
If Brunson is inolved you can be sure some very unpleasant surprises are in store.
This man is an expert in writing and voice over ads that leave you whipped up into a buying frenzy. RESIST he will take you for everything you got and more.
Pedro
I’m not being pedantic.
Past experience has shown it would be wrong to assume the fraudsters behind these things are looking for big dollars OR longevity.
“Get in, make a few bucks with minimum cost and get out” is a “legitimate” strategy in the get-rich-quick pseudo MLM world.
In real terms, what has it cost those behind Rippln to date ???
Anything over those costs is pure profit, and those behind it have an advantage in that many/most people won’t ever consider its’ inevitable demise to be anything more than bad luck or the result of a bad business plan.
The history of pseudo MLM “industry” is littered with examples of the same or similar strategy being employed and the same names popping up time after time.