iwowwe-logoThe benefits of video in marketing and communication over the internet are unquestionably valuable. Perhaps not appropriate in every situation, most people will still find that watching or engaging something or someone with video offers a far more satisfying end user experience.

With this comes a host of business opportunities and in an ever expanding and geographically increasing marketplace, the demand and integration of video into our lives has never been greater.

Coupled with some stiff retail competition, an increasing penetration into the world of video conferencing and emails from free social networks and a matrix compensation plan, iWowWe combine a MLM business model with a premium video offering.

Read on for a detailed analysis and review of the iWowWe business opportunity.

The Company

iWowWe was started back in 2007 by company founder and CEO William (Bill) Starkey (photo right).

iWowWe offered video email and web conferencing as a business solutions provider till May 2011 when the company opened its doors up as a MLM business opportunity.

Competing with it’s distributor base, the company now focuses on larger corporate clients whilst relying on their MLM marketer base to market the iWowWe products locally and over the internet.

The iWowWe Product Line

The iWowWe product line is centralised around video and the internet. As such they’re two main product offerings are video email and video conferencing.

iWowWe’s video email is a free product offered by the company, however you do need to sign up and register with iWowWe as you need to login to the company website to send them.

The video meeting product on the other hand costs $20 a month and as the name suggests, revolves around video conferencing.

Additionally, secondary services are sold as products including

  • the removal of the iWowWe logo from video emails for $295 (one time cost)
  • a custom graphic package (logo design) for $495
  • a custom video trailer (introduction for your videos) for $99

The iWowWe Membership Ranks

Within the iWowWe opportunity there are ten membership ranks available to members. Along with their qualification requirements, they are as follows;

  • Affiliate – The entry level membership position a new member of iWowWe receives upon joining the company.
  • Director – To reach Director, you must personally sponsor three affiliates who purchase either the Basic or Premium Package, or sell it themselves.
  • Senior Director – To reach Senior Director, you must personally sponsor at least six affiliates who have purchased either the Basic or Premium Package.
  • Executive Director – To reach Executive Director, you must personally sponsor at least nine affiliates who have purchases either the Basic or Premium Package.
  • Executive Director II – To reach Executive Director II, three of your personally sponsored affiliates must reach the rank of Executive Director.
  • Executive Director III – To reach Executive Director III, six of your personally sponsored affiliates must reach the rank of Executive Director.
  • Field Vice President – To reach Field Vice President, nine of your personally sponsored affiliates must reach the rank of Executive Director and you must have a minimum of 1000 active affiliates in your matrix.
  • Senior Field Vice President – To reach Senior Field Vice President, three of your personally sponsored affiliates must reach the rank of Field Vice President.
  • Executive Field Vice President – To reach Executive Field Vice President, six of your personally sponsored affiliates must reach the rank of Field Vice President.
  • Global Field Chairman – To reach Global Field Chairman, nine of your personally sponsored affiliates must reach the rank of Global Field Chairman.

The iWowWe Compensation Plan

The iWowWe compensation plan offers a healthy mix of upfront direct commissions as well as a residual income tied into product sales via a 3×9 forced matrix.

Retail Direct Commissions

iWowWe offer retail commissions on all their products and services. This commission is paid out at a rate of 10% of the retail price and where applicable, 5% on monthly recurring subscription products (video conferencing).

Product Sales Bonus

The Product Sales Bonus is designed to instantly reward the member who sold either a Basic or Premium Package with an instant commission, and also to pay the uplines.

The Product Sales Bonus for the member who initially makes the sale is $25 for the sale of a Basic Package and $50 for a Premium Package. The upline commission is then paid out at either $1 for a Basic Package or $9 for a Premium Package.

To pay the upline, the commission system looks for the first available Executive Director. This member is paid out either $1 or $9 (depending on which package was sold) and then the system looks for the next qualified Executive Director II, who is then also paid either $1 or $9.

This process continues all the way up to the first qualified Global Field Chairman who is found and then paid the same commission. Note that the qualified members do not have to be personally sponsored by the initial member making the sale, they just need to be in their upline.

The Power Matrix

At the heart of the iWowWe compensation plan is what they’re calling a ‘Power Matrix’. This Power Matrix is essentially a 3×9 forced matrix that starts with you at the top with three branches out and works itself down to nine levels.

Tp give you an example of how the matrix works, the first few levels of the matrix look something like this;

iWowWe’s Power Matrix has room for 29,517 people and pays out a 5% flatrate percentage commission of the earnings of those in your matrix.

The levels you can be paid out on are dependent on your membership rank. An affiliate is able to earn a commission on levels 1-3, a Director on levels 4-6 and senior directors on levels 7-9.

Your membership level also allows you to start a new leg on your matrix. These new arms still behave like your original 3 legs (in that they spread out 3 new legs before spilling down to a new level).

From Field Vice President up to Executive Field Vice President, members are granted an additional matrix leg at each promotion level.

Upon reaching Global Field Chairman, each new member recruited will start a new matrix arm, meaning the matrix is effectively turned into a unilevel plan. This Unilevel plan is unlimited legs wide on the first generation and capped to 3 each subsequent generation down an unlimited number of levels.

Matching Bonus

iWowWe offer a Matching Bonus  which pays you a ‘matching’ commission percentage of the income earnt by those you directly recruit to the company and up to three generations on the members those you recruit bring into the company.

The Matching Bonus pays out a flatrate 30% commission and how many generations you are paid out on depends on your membership rank.

A Director makes 30% on their first generation, a Senior Director 30% on their first and second generation (members those they have directly sponsored have sponsored) and an Executive Director 30% on three generations.

Infinity Override

The Infinity Override is designed to take your 3×9 matrix and pay out beyond the original 9 levels.

Designed for members who are with iWowWe for the long haul, upon completing their 29,517 member 3×9 matrix, the payouts continue with the Infinity Override.

Unlocked at the Field Vice President membership rank, the Infinity Override pays out a 2-5% commission on your entire matrix starting at level 10.

The Override runs until a second generation (somebody you’ve personally sponsored who has sponsored another member themselves) Field Vice President is found.

At this point the Override stops but you are continued to be paid out a commission on all members starting on your tenth level up until the placement of the second generation Field Vice President.

The exact commission payouts for the Infinity Override are 2% at the Field Vice President level, 2.25% for Senior Field Vice President, 2.5% Executive Field Vice President and 5% for Global Field Chairman.

Joining iWowWe

Those wishing to join iWowWe can do so by picking one of two options;

  • Basic Package – The Basic Package costs new members $75 upfront with a $20 a month subscription fee for video conferencing (100 user max). The Basic Package allows users to send up to 500 video emails a day with up to 50 recipients per email sent.
  • Premium Package – The Premium Package costs nw members $195 upfront with a $20 a month subscription fee for video conferencing (100 user max). The Premium Package allows users to send up to 10,000 video emails a day with up to 1,000 recipients per email sent. The Premium Package also includes iWowWe’s ‘Advanced Internet Marketing’ and one ‘custom signature trailer’.

Conclusion

The main point to take away from the iWowWe compensation plan is that the seperation of retail sales and company membership is non-existant.

Retail sales come with an affiliate membership to the company and whilst you don’t have to directly participate, you still form part of the compensation plan and have an affiliate membership with the company.

Along with the recruitment requirements built into the membership ranks (the only way to advance is by recruiting people yourself and then getting them to recruit), it’s easy to see the strong recruitment focus in the iWowWe opportunity.

Technically you could call this a sales focus but given there’s no distinction between the two, and that the recruitment side of things pays out much, much more than the retail $25/$50 Basic/Premium Package commission, calling it a recruitment focus in my opinion is more accurate.

Breaking down the video meeting product, as part of the required monthly minimum product order, this serves as an autoship component of the compensation plan ($20 a month).

At 5% though you’re still only looking at a monthly $1 commission for each person you get in your matrix who is subscribed to the video meeting product.

This is potentially a nice residual but remember it’s only on the subscriptions of people you’ve personally enrolled.

As far as recruitment scam MLM companies go, $25/$50 upfront with $1 per member paid per month is a painfully slow way to grow a decent income. The iWowWe opportunity is actually far more profitable if you (and your matrix team) actually go out there and recruit members retail iWowWe’s product line.

As for being able to market iWowWe’s product line, in researching iWowWe’s products and services, I couldn’t help but feel most of it was already available for free and had been for years.

As far as video emailing goes, haven’t we been able to embed YouTube videos into our emails since the company started back in 2005?

Functionally differentiating between Youtube and iWowWe, I can

  • load my usual email client, upload the video to Youtube (YouTube lets me record directly off my webcam too), get the embed code and paste it into my email message.
  • log into iWowWe, record or upload a video, attach it to an email message and then send.

Upon receiving the message, with YouTube people can play the message right from within their email, or with iWowWe they click a link which opens the email message in fullscreen.

Not that I did, but if I was using video email why wouldn’t I just continue to keep using YouTube over iWowWe? Both offer HD, both are hosted ‘in the cloud’ so to speak and neither requires additional software installation.

Looking at iWowWe’s video meeting product, again the combination of Skype and free services such as UStream offer near identical functionality.

Skype needs no introduction and with the major difference being it requires a software installation. That said, installation is easy and you’ll find most internet cafes come with Skype as standard.

Oh, and did I mention Skype is free?

Recent advancements in Google’s social offerings even offer an easier alternative to iWowWe’s video meeting product.

Requiring no product, one can easily video chat using Google Video and Hangouts (part of the free Google + network), pushing this even further into conferences albeit with a 10 user limitation (iWowWe’s limit is 12).

And as far as webinars and presentations go, UStream offers this for free with live text chat and viewers don’t even need to login or even register to view the stream.

Beyond the whiteboard functionality and ease of use, I personally think selling iWowWe’s product line to the individual, in light of free alternatives readily available on the internet, is going to be a hard sell for $20 a month.

With a pay plan this is obviously more attractive but the real challenge is going to be keeping people paying that monthly autoship.

Businesses on the other hand can make use of the additionally integrated features such as document sharing, the whiteboard and shared desktops (although notably with a bit of extra effort this functionality can be added to Skype for free via ‘Skype Extras’).

iWowWe themselves chase large corporate clients around the world so they themselves clearly acknowledge that this is their premium target market. If you join iWowWe, it’ll become your premium target market too.

Getting these clients to join up and continue to pay that monthly autoship fee is going to be the key to success with your iWowWe business.

Unless of course you go the autoship/recruitment path which in the longterm probably isn’t going to build you a succesful MLM business.

Due to the fact that actual use of the product isn’t tied into the compensation plan, and nor is it a consumable commodity (barring people hitting their video email limits), you can pretty much join iWowWe and just focus on recruiting others.

Not only does the compensation plan actively reward you for doing so, by bundling compulsory membership with retail sales, the company itself actually encourages it.