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March 22, 2003
Why I never "joined" Quixtar
By QBlog in
Sometimes I sit and wonder why I never "joined" Quixtar. I ask myself what defect in my personality prevented me from ever getting excited and enthusiastic about the potential success this business has to offer.
I'll be honest, I've tried to get excited about this business. Every time I saw someone show the plan I would think about how I could do it better. How my gift for understanding people's needs and emotions would propel me to unimagined success.
Yet, I kept coming back to a few issues that just nagged at my integrity and would not let go. I'll try to list some of them here. Maybe getting them out will be somehow cathartic and work to change my feelings of being some sort of social misfit.
1. Saturation. Other sites do a fine job of addressing the saturation issue so I won't go into details here. My main hang up was how my questions about saturation were answered. They weren't. The answer given was "don't worry about it, it's never going to happen." My favorite non-answer was "someone turns 18 every minute." That answer smacked of the old huckster line, "there's a sucker born every minute."
The thing with saturation is that most businesses have competitors to take business from if the market becomes saturated. Or, like Microsoft, they have services to offer as well as products. In Quixtar, as far as I know, there is no plan to implement if a market becomes saturated. There is also no mechanism to detect saturation. As you can tell, saturation still is a concern.
2. Conflict of Interest. If a doctor is earning $10 each time he sells Pill A and he prescribes Pill A for my condition then I'm going to wonder why he prescribed Pill A. Even if Pill A is the best medicine for me, I'm still going to question his motives. You'd be naive not to question.
Similarly, when an upline says "buy this tape, you need it" I question if I really need it or if they are just wanting my money. I may really need it but the question remains. To compound my conflict of interest concern I learned that discussing things with people other than my specific line of sponsorship (where the conflict of interest is less) is frowned upon.
3. Deification of Uplines. Ok, this is my term but it seems that diamonds have almost celebrity status. Why? What did they do? All they did was work a system by following the plan laid out for them. I'm not knocking their success at all, getting to diamond isn't easy, but they didn't really do something so spectacular to deserve the type of adoration that I've witnessed. I mean few people do. Off the top of my head I would say Lawrence Lessig, Steve Wozniak and Tim Berners Lee deserve some amount of adoration. But some 5 year diamond? Give me a break.
4. Quixtar Web site. I was underwhelmed. This site was far short of what it could or should be in my estimation. Especially given the excitement and hype surrounding it. If I did get "active" in the business I'd have to apologize for the site to everyone I meet. Oh, and I heard it was designed by Fry Multimedia. If so it's the worst work they've ever done. Not sure why but Quixtar is not listed in their display portfolio.
5. Information Suppression. I'm not saying anyone tried to suppress information but it sure seemed that way to me. My wife says that I may have given up on getting a straight answer from the uplines too quickly and she may be right. I asked quite a few questions that were never answered to my satisfaction and I finally felt that I was wasting their time because I wasn't really "active" in the business. I can see their point if that was the case. Why spend hours each week answering questions from some guy who wasn't going to be making me money?
Anyway, that's some of the issues. Don't know if that makes me feel any better but now they are on the Web. Somehow I can't help but think that's a good thing.