Mar 27, 2009 GATE Village

<bits and bobs> Last week I promised to outline the Membership Recruitment and Investment Program and while there are still a few details to finalize, I do believe we know enough to explain the concept. I know that there is a critical mass of GATE Members required to be able to effectively market GATE Village, regardless of the specific skills and fields our Trusted Experts happen to have, we require significant volume in order to make an impression on the marketplace.

To date I've worked with the assumption that I would be the start of the membership tree, that it would be built from my personal network first and we would learn how to increase beyond that network as time went on. But I have come to realize that that approach only delays the inevitable and, in fact, puts GATE in jeopardy with too slow a membership drive. To reach the membership numbers that we want to meet we require a multitude of disciplines, a large variety of Trusted Experts but we can not know ahead of time what the makeup of the membership will be.

To cut to the chase here, we have chosen a Multi-Level Marketing approach to membership enrollment where the commission paid for new recruits is shared with the member doing the recruitment, the member who recruited them, and so on up the line for eight levels. This means that there is a pyramid of payments such that if a member recruits two new people who each in turn recruit two more and so on for eight turns, GATE will have 510 new members and that first member will have made approximately $57,000.

I think this provides a lot of incentive to find new GATE members and will work very well once GATE is established, however I am not convinced that this is enough incentive in and of itself to bring in the first members. I am working on a further incentive plan based on shares of the corporation that pays out on a decreasing basis for a limited number of early recruits, this rewards best those who sign up earliest. Because I'm still working out the exact formula and this is a public document, I think I'll stop there however I am sleeping better so I think that is a good sign.

It does mean that we need to solve another problem sooner than anticipated, but that is a good thing as well. Rather than prejudge the membership, we'll develop the capability to leverage the information we have about our membership to do the marketing of the membership. We'll learn about our members and then market to whom we have, not whom we think we have. I still imagine a high-tech bias will hold for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my network, but we'll be innovative earlier than we thought, see what the Membership becomes and react accordingly.

It's been a great week! </bits and bobs>