When I was selling MLM products years ago, I made sales.
Real ones.
Money changed hands. My uncles bought. My aunties bought. Friends bought.
And every sale felt like proof.
- Proof that I was onto something.
- Proof that the product was good.
- Proof that I was an entrepreneur.
Years later I understood what had actually happened, and it’s one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve had to sit with: they didn’t buy because the product was good. They bought because they loved me. Or maybe as Asians would say it, they “gave me face”. Or because they felt sorry for me. They were buying me — the relationship, the loyalty, the awkwardness of saying no to family.
The product was almost incidental.
I had been reading love as validation.
And love is the most dangerous false signal there is, because it feels exactly like the real thing.
Here’s why this matters far beyond MLM.
When you build anything — a product, a service, a business — you’re constantly reading signals to decide whether to keep going or stop. A sale is a signal. Encouragement is a signal. “I’d totally buy that” is a signal. And the whole game of building well is telling the real signals apart from the ones that just feel good.
A sale to someone who loves you is the counterfeit that’s easiest to mistake for the genuine article.
It may be false positive, as it seems to tell you to keep going when the honest data might be telling you to stop. It funds your delusion with real money, which makes the delusion more convincing…not less. People have spent years and life savings building things that only ever sold to their own circle — and the circle’s warmth kept them from ever asking the question that would have saved them.
So I built a test. I use a version of it on everything now.
Before I trust that demand is real, I ask one question:
Would a stranger pay for this — someone who owes me nothing, doesn’t know me, and gains nothing socially by saying yes?
That’s the core of it.
A stranger has no reason to be kind to you (though it’s “nice”…but these ain’t sustainable eh). A stranger’s money is clean data. If strangers won’t pay, you don’t have a business — you have a circle of people being generous with you. That’s a beautiful thing and a terrible foundation.
A few questions I run underneath the main one:
- Did they buy again, without me asking?
- Did they refer someone who has no relationship with me?
- Would they have bought this from a competitor they don’t know and don’t love?
If the yeses dry up the moment you remove the relationship, the relationship was the product — not the thing you thought you were selling.
This is why one of my own rules is to never design or price a product before there’s an audience to validate it. It’s the same error wearing a different suit. Building the product first and assuming demand is just trusting a yes you haven’t earned yet — the audience version of selling to your aunties. The market doesn’t love you. That’s exactly why its yes is worth more.
There’s a harder edge to this that I’ve made my peace with.
Truth is worth more than flattery — even when the flattery comes wrapped in real affection and real money. The people who love you will tend to tell you what they think you want to hear, because they love you. Sometimes, they will go the other extreme too, of course, to shut it down first before you get disappointed or you *gasp*, become on.
Strangers, competitors, and the market will tell you what’s true, because they don’t care about your feelings. If you want to build something real, you have to learn to weight the second group’s input above the first — without resenting the first for being kind.
The most generous thing the people who loved me did was buy. The most useful thing was something none of them could give me: an honest no from someone who had no reason to spare me.
I had to go looking for that myself.
So do you.