I reported on Exponent Trading early on here when it was about 3 months after launch. For some reason I thought about it today and went to the site and now it’s gone. Replaced by a parked page. And did anyone notice? In my post of 10/2007 I had said:

I will be surprised if this is around by this time next year. This just doesn’t look sustainable.

Boy, I guess I called that right! I can’t find anything that talks about its closure either on the web or in the blogosphere. I don’t even know exactly when it disappeared. The last entry on the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine) is from about one year ago, February 2008.

Maybe it just dried up and blew away with the sour economic winds. The truth is, it didn’t have much going for it and it leaned too heavily on eBay. And I mentioned in that post, it had a questionable compensation plan. I recall being in on some of the early conference calls in the summer of 2007 for this company and how much hype they were giving it then. How they used words like “amazing” and “unprecedented” to describe the opportunity.

And that kind of brings me to a point here. Those MLM conference calls. Remember that they are designed to get people interested and that’s their main focus. You should never be afraid to look at a network marketing opportunity with a critical eye and look beyond the hype. There will always be loads of hype; particularly when a company is launching and trying to get off the ground. You have to take the facts (the compensation plan and the business model) and visualize yourself in it. If you can’t visualize yourself in it and have to ask “how will I make any money in this?”, you should listen to that voice. Sometimes, it just doesn’t feel right and this just never felt right.