Beachbody isn't an MLM. They sell workout programs (used to be dvds but have now moved to a subscription model). From personal experience, I can say that at least one of their programs - Tony Horton's P90X - is very good.
They have been historically [0], it looks like they only changed their model last October [1], a few months after Marc Suidan switched to Backblaze.
TFA even specifies this:
> Instead they hired Marc Suidan who joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI) - a publicly traded health and fitness company where he was CFO between May 2022 and August 2024 when the company was operating as a “multi-level marketing” company.
They WERE an MLM until they stopped being able to make money. There are good YouTubers out there dedicating time to getting people out of MLMs (some are basically cults). 99% of people in MLMs lose money.
If you think he is a good CFO I think you drank the coolaid.
The workouts, including P90X, were great. The MLM part, which you and I may not have been aware of, was on the coaching side. Coaches would try to recruit other coaches to be downstream of them, and so on. Part of it was also selling their over priced protein shakes. But yes, if you were just a person who bought a P90X dvd and did the workouts, your were oblivious of this and just got in good shape and loved the products.
Conversely, “they’re not an MLM, they sell a product.” Is a bullshit, non-defense statement. MLMs always have a product. That’s what keeps them from being Ponzi schemes.
A finer distinction might be between MLMs (where the multi-level part is very literal — everyone is being garnished by their upline and profiting from their downline), vs. flat marketing organizations that just give (centralized, corporate, one-time) recruitment bonuses to their salespeople.
Vector Marketing, for example — the company that sells Cutco knives door-to-door — might be incredibly scummy, sure. Their entire business model is to
1. talk college students into thinking they can make a continuous monthly profit by selling $800 knife sets (when really the profit is one-time at best, by tapping into each college student's family and friends — who are only sympathetic enough to buy the knives [if they even are], because it's their family/friend asking);
2. forcing those college students to "buy into" the company, purchasing a knife-set of their own to use in sales demos (which they can't return if they quit);
3. and also forcing those college students to recruit other college students on campus.
But, because every transaction is ultimately just lining Vector Marketing's pockets directly — without any revenue structure involving making more money as you recruit others whose sales "become your sales" — it's not Multi Level Marketing.
It's just sleazy.
(And yes, this is just me taking this opportunity to rant about Vector Marketing. I have half a Cutco knife set laying around, from when my college roommate attended a "job offer" and got essentially bullied into buying a set before they could leave. Every time I use it, I think of how tarnished the Cutco brand is by these awful tactics of Vector Marketing's practices. Which is a shame, because they're decent knives. But obviously not knives I'd ever recommend anyone buy, because I don't want to support a company that thinks it's a good idea to work with a company like Vector Marketing.)
> Instead, Backblaze’s new CFO, Marc Suidan, joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI), a multi-level marketing company
eek