Xseed Prelaunch Review: More info required!
No information is provided on the Xseed website indicating who owns or runs the business. Infact, no information about the business is currently provided at all. Visitors to the Xseed website are only able to “pre-enroll” or watch a marketing video.
The Xseed website domain (“xseedhealth.com”) was registered on the 12th of June 2013, however the domain registration is set to private.
Further research reveals that the Xseed Facebook page names a “John de Vries” as Xseed’s CEO:
Marketing videos from Xseed Media on Youtube go on to announce that the company is currently in prelaunch, with an expected launch date of January 2014.
In another video, hosted by Jason Lyons (presented as an Xseed affiliate), an office building referred to as Xseed’s “worldwide headquarters” in Las Vegas, Nevada is shown:
Prior to Xseed, John de Vries (credited as John Devries and listed as Xseed’s Director, Secretary, President and Treasurer in official company documents), was the initial master distributor for Nutrie.
Nutrie, who appear to have official launched earlier this year operate in the health and nutrition MLM niche.
The marketing copy attached to the above Nutrie marketing video provides some additional insight into de Vries’ MLM career:
Prior to joining Nutrié, Mr. de Vries was CEO of Crust Gourmet Pizza Bar. He was the lead in developing the hottest and most profitable unit franchise system worldwide.
Prior to Crust Gourmet Pizza Bar, Mr. de Vries was President of Extreme Investment Group, where he provided consulting services to turn around companies, developed business plans, raised capital for startup companies or helped with the refinancing of companies.
He worked with clients ranging from quick service restaurants, payroll companies, Real Estate companies, cosmetic companies, etc. .
Prior to being President of Extreme Investment Group Mr. de Vries became a distributor with Monavie. While at Monavie, Mr. de Vries became the fastest growing distributor in Monavie history, breaking every previous record from growth, to volume, to rank.
Why de Vries left Monavie and his master distributor position at Nutrie is not immediately clear (I wasn’t able to find anything specific).
Read on for a full review of the Xseed prelaunch MLM business opportunity.
The Xseed Product Line
With no information provided on the Xseed website about their products, I had to turn to their affiliate’s marketing efforts to learn what it is they plan to sell.
From what I can gather Xseed are going to operate in the health and nutrition MLM niche, which is not surprising considering Nutrie and Monavie operate in the same niche.
Xseed Health has 6 products available at this time. A meal replacement shake, super greens, aox antioxidant & multivitamin, slender weight management, nutritional bars & an energy supplement.
From the company name I gather some seed or the other is a key ingredient, however the above information was all that was available at this time.
The Xseed Compensation Plan
The Xseed compensation plan offers a binary frontend backed by unilevel based residual commissions. Several additional performance bonuses are also offered.
Retail Commissions
Xseed offer pay out a 25% commission on all retail orders placed by non-affiliate customers.
Jump Start Commission
Xseed’s Jump Start commission is what you’d typically call a Fast Start Bonus. It pays out on the volume a purchase by a newly recruited affiliate makes.
The Jump Start Commission pays out 50% of the commission to the recruiting affiliate, 30% to their upline (the affiliate who recruited them) and 20% to their upline (3rd level upline).
No specifics on the how much of a Jump Start Commission is paid out are provided in the Xseed compensation plan, however a figure of $100 is quoted (which would then be split over three levels as per the percentages above), generated off a $500 affiliate joining pack purchase.
Binary Commissions
Binary commissions are paid out on both retail and Jump Start Commission volume.
A binary compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of two binary teams, left and right.
These binary are filled with recruited affiliates, either directly or via the recruiting efforts of an affiliates up and downlines.
As mentioned earlier, retail and Jump Start Commission volume is tracked within both an affiliate’s binary teams, with payments being issued on the volume of the weaker of the two teams.
This percentage starts at 10% but can rise to 20% as an Xseed affiliate is promoted.
Note that no affiliate membership rank qualification criteria is provided in the Xseed compensation plan material, however a company conference call I listened to mentioned that rank qualification is unilevel volume and recruitment (3 recruits to max out the plan) based.
Unilevel Commissions
Residual commission in Xseed are paid out via a unilevel compensation structure.
A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate being placed directly under them (level 1):
If any of these level 1 affiliates go on to recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team. If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretically infinite number of levels.
Xseed pay out on seven of these levels, with commissions being paid out on “up to 5%” of the volume generated across these levels.
No specifics are provided, but it is assumed the percentages and amount of levels an affiliate is paid out on goes up according to their Xseed affiliate membership rank.
Check Match Bonus
The Xseed Check Match Bonus is a matching bonus paid out on volume generated within a unilevel team.
The bonus is paid out over affiliate rank generations (typically this involves a generation being defined up until an affiliate of a specific rank is found within an individual unilevel leg), payable up to 10% down a maximum of five generations (subject to an affiliate’s membership rank).
Check Match and Unilevel Doubler
The Check Match and Unilevel Doubler, as the name suggests, doubles the commission paid out to an affiliate on their highest earning unilevel level and Check Match generation.
Presumably there is some qualification criteria attached to this bonus, however none are currently provided in the Xseed compensation plan material.
Commissions Insurance
At various affiliate rank levels, Xseed guarantee a minimum commission level via what they call “Commission Insurance”.
For Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Ambassadors we have a new bonus never before seen in the industry.
When certain requirements are met, these levels are eligible for 6 months of security on your income. Thus making sure that you will not earn less than $500, $1000, $1500, and $2500 per month.
Rank Achievement Bonus
As with much of the Xseed compensation no specifics are provided on their Rank Achievement Bonuses, however the company does state they pay out $580,000 in bonuses as an affiliate advances in rank.
Lifestyle Bonus
Xseed’s Lifestyle Bonus is a monthly bonus paid out at various affiliate membership ranks.
Starting with the Ambassador rank (requiring 4000 unilevel group volume each month), an affiliate can earn $150 a month. This is increasable to $10,000 a month
Joining Xseed
Other than a $500 affiliate pack purchase, I haven’t seen any provided costs for Xseed affiliate membership.
Pre-enrolling during the company’s prelaunch to “lock your position in” is free.
Conclusion
Off the bat, prelaunch or otherwise, Xseed need to update their website with information about the company.
Having a splash page which requests people to sign up but doesn’t provide them with any information (other than a short marketing video that encourages them to sign up), is just not good enough in today’s MLM market.
Product wise I can’t say much, other than it seems Xseed is going to compete directly with both Nutrie and Monavie, CEO John de Vries’ previous companies. Again, prelaunch or not, if you’ve finalised your product lineup then not having information (including retail pricing) on your website is just not good enough.
On the compensation side of things, based on what we know, the only red flags I identified was the possibility of recruitment focus due to unilevel-volume based affiliate rank qualification and Jumpstart Commissions.
If there’s no retail requirements built into the compensation plan (either volume or customer requirements), I’m not seeing why affiliate’s wont just ignore retail and focus on affiliate recruitment.
Sign up ’em up on a package, get your upfront Jumpstart Commission and binary volume, and then so long as they maintain autoship you get paid each month.
One would hope there are some further retail incentives or qualification criteria that Xseed haven’t revealed yet, otherwise there might be a potential problem with overall retail volume in the company.
Another red flag is calling a commission guarantee “commission insurance”. Uh, yeah… Xseed might want to change that. If for nothing else than to avoid the opportunity being marketed as “spend $x, get your recruits to spend $y and then enjoy a company guaranteed commission of $z for 3 or 6 months (however long it is)”.
It’s an interesting concept but I think needs more work on how it’s presented and what they’re going to call it before the January launch.
Other than that, if they Xseed can strike a balance between retail and recruited affiliate volume, whilst maintaining Group Volume based qualification in the unilevel, this might be worth taking a deeper look into.
First things first though, update your website guys! No MLM company should not be signing up people without disclosing what they plan on charging affiliates come launch.
Footnote: This review is written on information that is currently available on Xseed, both officially and unofficially via their affiliate’s marketing efforts. I’ve done my best to include as much as I can but there’s obviously bits of information that is missing.
Pending any major changes to the compensation plan I’ll either update this review or write another one from scratch after the January 2014 launch.
Update 10th July 2014 – Following the launch of Xseed and observable differences in their prelaunch and postlaunch compensation plan, I’ve published an updated BehindMLM review of Xseed.
Address is 675 Grier, Las Vegas, NV. Which is almost next to the LAS airport.
Real building, finding multiple other businesses with same address, so can’t tell if they’re just leasing a small space inside or actually leased the building.
One blog claims that XSeed was started by 4 “black diamonds” from Monavie, which apparently includes de Vries.
In usual pseudo-MLM fashion that statement contains a large amount of what could be best described as “poetic license, aka, spin doctoring
Mr De Vries WAS, in fact, the master franchisor of Crust Gourmet Pizzas IN THE USA
Gourmet Pizzas is and was an Australia company which handles its’ own franchising.
As far as I can determine, the “Crust Gourmet Pizzas” with which Mr de Vries was associated was a single store in Studio City, Ca which opened in 2012 and whose website is currently delivering a “500 internal server error” message
The trademark application for CRUST USA LLC is currently showing as being “dead – ABANDONED-FAILURE TO RESPOND OR LATE RESPONSE”
Recruiting rears its ugly head. MLM can not exist without recruiting. No recruiting, no MLM, it is amazing to me how the concepts can not come together without raising all KINDS of flags.
I asked in another thread if recruiting was illegal, and if there was a safe way to strike a balance. If I remember the answer I got was it was illegal to recruit if your “purpose” is to recruit people whose “purpose” it is to recruit.
That really doesn’t clarify things too much, because you may swell shut them all down if recruiting has to be treated like some sort of exotic delicious fruit that IF you can stand far enough away from it to maybe try and touch it with your big toe and be only 1% obvious about what your doing without slipping into 2% or higher obviousness…, you get the picture hopefully, it is really nuts.
Especially when you’ve got powerful high profile people endorsing it, like Donald Trump does with ACN. Who, incidentally, won their case against the entire state of Montana.
de Vries is a total crook! Just look at the Clark County Nevada District Court website and do at clarkcountycourts.us/Anonymous/default.aspx and do a search for the last name de vries and first name john under the District Court records.
This guy ripped a business off for $1.9 MILLION dollars; and ran up an AMEX for $30K. Guess how much he paid back?
Did you guess nothing – bingo!
He got Crust after taking the $1.9MM and now claims that he is an MLM guru. Plus if was a diamond level at MonaVie, why leave? Those guys make $300K a year.
But not only did he “walk” away from MonaVie but Nutrie too. Would you walk from that much “streaming” cash? (If you said no, let me know how big your yatch is.)
No amount of lipservice should make you believe anything other then that this guy is all talk. He made his money the hard way, playing the con game. There are good MLMs, just don’t pick it because this self proclaimed master marketer tells you too.
I can state that, as a marketing VP local to Las Vegas Team, the building is wholly ours and the prior comments are surely understandable. The building will be done soon and many additional features are being rolled out on the websites.
It was a tough decision to either roll out the website when it was 100% perfect, which would have required collecting pre-enrollment costs from future distributors (like almost every other MLM would have done) or roll it out ASAP but with a few hiccups but allow current pre-enrolled members to build their teams for free.
We selected free pre-enrollment, which is still going on so that when everything is 100% perfect (another couple weeks from the date of this posting) people can have such a pre-built downline that they’ll earn enough commission to cover product costs from day ONE and many will earn checks above and beyond their product costs.
Even monthly requirements were kept low and just lowered another $25 per month to maintain at the highest level.
Oftentimes, MLM is more about the recruiting (although nowhere near as bad as direct sales or gifting) than it is the products but NOT with XSeed Health. We are about the associates first, the customers second and the recruiting third.
Without team members, there would be no one doing the selling….that’s true, unless you have a retail-ready product that could be sold outside MLM and that’s what we have; yet it will only be sold through the MLM.
You certainly can sell retail but through a small network of 5-6 members, producing retail sales volume to their customers and downline members when utilizing my marketing system (which provides another up front & residual income stream) you will see 6-figure months within a year.
No more having to worry if your company will be gone in a year or two…or if your products are worthwhile enough to not just be a veiled attempt to provide “something” or “anything” trying to keep it legal when we all know it’s about selling people! Those days are gone but the high ticket commissions are not!
I loved the commissions from SFW, PAS, EN, and so on but we all know the ‘real world’ of marketers would look at those ‘products’ and laugh their ass off. Those products are nothing you would pay $10 for much less $1,000’s!
(Ozedit: recruitment spam removed)
Huh? How do you focus on affiliates without encouraging your current affiliatebase to recruit new affiliates?
A legit MLM company has a product that can be sold retail within the MLM compensation plan (preferred customers or retail commissions spread out over multiple levels), and actively encourages affiliates to make those retail sales.
Having to have retail “outside” of your MLM business model only reveals that as far as the model itself goes, it’s all about affiliate money.
Any update on these guys? I’ve been trying to look more indepth into XSeed and Limitless, haven’t found much yet.
Nothing on my end Jeff. Doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. I hope all those MonaVie leaders who jumped ship are doing better now than they were, otherwise that’s some kick in the balls they gave themselves.
Haha well some people are into that sort of thing so if it’s a ball kicking they want, then by all means!
The site looks like it at least as more info and it says they have “Taken off”…whatever that means.
Hi guys,
Looks like this thread is not really alive but I take a chance. Im writing cause I am extremely concerned about my brother who is from my view getting brained washed by Mr De Vries.
We can’t do much about that. If he really WANT to be brainwashed … 🙂
It’s generally easier to change how you see things yourself than to change how others (your brother) see it. He’s already in the program, so there must have been something there that attracted him. It doesn’t sound like he WANT to be “saved” right now.
I looked briefly at the program without digging into details, only had a quick overview. There’s no specific problems visible from that viewpoint, other than what you can expect in MLM.
“Specific problems” is typically about being drained for money through monthly “qualifying purchases”, buying higher positions, buying leads (potential new recruits), advertising costs, etc.
“Normal problems” are typically about programs being too recruitment oriented, too reward focused (too much money being distributed upwards in the system), lack of retail sale outside the network itself. Those factors will lead to that fewer people will make any money, the few near the top will make more money at the expense (losses) of most others.
Note: I have no personal experience with MLM other than saying “no” a couple of times. Xseed HAD much focus on selling the opportunity in the quick overview I had, but the products seemed to be retailable.
The logic I have used here is that I tried to look at how HE see it rather than how YOU see it. It doesn’t sound like he want to be “saved” right now. But he will probably prefer that you are relatively relaxed about it. The rest of the post was mostly about me trying to look into the program, but that became very general.
@Oz
Newer compensation plan, v. 11.2:
xseedhealth.com/Xseed/UserFiles/Images/Documents/Xseed_Compensation_Plan_11.2.pdf
I used the search string “-personalized site:xseedhealth.com” to find some pdf presentations. I didn’t check any details.
Thanks for that update Norway, I’ll add it to the review list.
I didn’t really study the details there, e.g. to detect any changes. I just found it, and that was all.
My impression of the material I looked at was “marketing BS”, e.g. statements telling how fantastic the compensation plan is rather than telling people the factual details. I had the same impression when I looked at other parts, e.g. when I was looking at the product descriptions.
They’re probably selling the opportuniy itself = signing up new recruits, sell them jump start executive packages (product based), sign them up for monthly autoship orders, wash/rinse/repeat.
This thread hasn’t been very active, so I wasn’t able to pick up much information from it either (e.g. about brain washing).
I have only had a quick look at the program, e.g. a quick look at the basic idea (selling “lifestyle products”). Any red flags from me will primarily be about “marketing BS” and “vagueness” = I didn’t find the factual information I was looking for, only “presentations” of the information.
That vagueness is also reflected in the headline of this article, “Xseed Prelaunch Review: More info required!”.
The other potential red flag here is based on your own mentioning of “brain washing”, the vagueness I mentioned and some details from the article about “fastest growing distributor in Monavie”. The combination of those factors indicates some specific problems mentioned in post #11:
To identify the problem correctly, I will need to know something more about how people are being recruited, e.g. the advertising methods they used to initially come in contact so they could get your brother on the hook. Add a few more details?
The type of problem was found in some Herbalife complaints. From my understanding of it, Herbalife was the “mothership” for multiple pyramid schemes before it cleaned up the most controversial parts in the first half of 2013. I can see some potential similar problems in this program.
Common story, one that rarely has a good ending. Either he lucked out and managed to recruit a ton of downlines (i.e. be the judas goat leading the sheeple), or he’s the sheeple (but thinks he’s a lion or will be soon).
Unfortunately, while he’s in the “you just don’t understand” phase there’s really no talking to him other than encourage him to keep track of his expenditures, and keep a record of the promises his uplines gave him, and see how fast those promises are yanked when he started to show doubt in the system.
I think Dr. Jon Taylor at MLM The Whole Truth have a 12-step intervention plan. You’ll have to look for it. I don’t have the URL handy.
Here’s the link:
http://www.mlm-thetruth.com/tools1/actions-mlm-victims/deprogramming-victims/
I don’t think his methods will work very well on someone who really want to believe in something. It will probably be interpreted as “propaganda”.
One problem here is that we only have vague information. I wasn’t able to identify any specific problems on the surface when I checked the company’s website. I BELIEVE it may be extremely recruitment oriented, but it wasn’t visible on the surface.
“My brother getting brain washed” was too vague. I will need more specific information than that to identify the problem, e.g. about recruitment method.
An updated review of the Xseed Health opportunity has been published today (July 10th 2014).