I've had distributorships with a couple of companies and looked at some others. I'm comfortable admitting that I failed to build my MLM businesses and it always puzzled me why I failed. I have no trouble seeing that any business that requires exponential recruitment is eventually going to run out of steam. There's only 6+ billion of us. The attrition that occurs due to disenchantment is only going to reduce the available growth time very slightly.

Let me give an example of this. If I start in a MLM business today and work at getting 3 customers and 1 recruit per month with total replication. Month 0 is just establishment and all I would get is some customers.

Month #	Personal customers	Personal recruits	Network customers	Network recruits
0	3	0	3	0
1	6	1	9	1
2	9	2	18	3
3	12	3	42	7
4	15	4	87	15
5	18	5	177	30
6	21	6	357	58
7	24	7	717	110
8	27	8	1,437	206
9	30	9	2,877	383
10	33	10	5,757	709
11	36	11	11,517	1,309
12	39	12	23,037	2,413

The above table shows quite a respectable network and customer base and is similar to those quoted by companies as their successes. However, if the growth is continued for 30 months, the total customer base exceeds 6 billion and the whole thing stalls.