5 Reasons Why I Would Not Sell Master Resell Rights in 2024

People ask Alston Godbolt about Master Resell Rights every single day. Should they buy it? Should they promote it? Would he ever sell it himself? The answer is always the same: no. Not because the original course creators are bad people, but because the structure of how most people are using MRR raises serious concerns about ethics, brand-building, and long-term business viability. In this video, Alston lays out the reasons clearly so he can stop answering the same question on repeat and so you can decide for yourself with full information.

Full disclosure upfront: Alston has never purchased the Master Resell Rights course himself. He has not gone through the training. It could be a genuinely valuable product. What he’s reacting to is what he observes on social media every day from the people promoting it, and the patterns he sees are consistent enough to be worth addressing directly.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why buying a course for the purpose of selling it signals a real credibility problem
How the private Facebook community setup quietly strips your authority with your own buyers
The revenue-funnel structure that makes MRR sellers worse off than standard affiliates
Why the big MRR success stories usually have a foundation you don’t see in their marketing
The MLM saturation math and why latecomers are almost always locked out
What a sustainable online business model actually looks like in contrast
How to figure out which online income path fits where you actually are right now at finder.platformproof.com

Reason 1: You’re Buying a Course to Sell a Course

The first concern is the most fundamental. If your primary reason for buying a course is to turn around and sell that same course to someone else, you have not actually learned how to make money online. You have learned how to spend money online. That is a critical distinction, and most people glossing over it are the same people six months later wondering why their results don’t match the income screenshots they saw before they bought.

Alston puts it directly: the only proof you have that the course works is that you fell for the marketing. You haven’t applied the methods, built the skills, or earned income from the actual content inside the course. You’ve purchased a product and you want to resell it. At that point the “education” is just packaging.

He uses the telephone game analogy to explain what happens at scale. Remember playing telephone in elementary school? A teacher whispers “the sky is blue” to the first student. By the time the message reaches the last kid in line it has turned into “the sky is yellow with pink balloons and a panther running through the clouds.” That is what happens when hundreds of people who have never made money online start teaching other people who have never made money online. The information degrades at every step. The people at the end of the line are left confused and frustrated, and by the time they realize it, the people at the top have already moved on to Master Resell Rights 2.0.

If someone had never woven a basket in their life but decided to teach basket weaving based on videos they had watched, you would feel something was off. You would be frustrated paying for advice from someone who has never actually done the thing they are teaching. Online business is no different. The lack of real experience shows up eventually, and it damages the trust of everyone who bought in.

Reason 2: You’re Building Someone Else’s Brand, Not Yours

One of the most overlooked problems with Master Resell Rights is what happens the moment someone buys from you. They get access to a private Facebook group. That group is not run by you. You are not the leader of it. You are a member, just like everyone else in there.

This matters enormously in online business. When people pay for something, they want to follow the leader who is actually running the room. As soon as your buyers see that you are just another member of the same community they are in, their motivation to buy from you again collapses. You have positioned yourself as a peer, not an authority. That makes follow-up sales almost impossible.

Meanwhile, the actual creators of Master Resell Rights are quietly accumulating a massive warm audience built entirely by the resellers. Alston points out that he has never even seen these creators on TikTok or YouTube in any serious way. They don’t have to show up. The resellers show up for them. Every customer a reseller brings in is a contact the MRR creators can reach directly when Master Resell Rights 4.0 launches. And when that happens, the reseller can’t compete. Their own buyers can get the new version straight from the source, often at a discount for existing community members.

Compare that to building a real brand around your own products or around affiliate recommendations where you maintain your independent voice. The difference is that in a real brand, when the market shifts, the audience follows you. With MRR, when the market shifts, the audience follows the MRR creators and you are left starting over again from scratch.

Reason 3: You’re a Glorified Affiliate Without the Upside

Alston’s third reason is one that most MRR promoters don’t consider carefully. He describes MRR sellers as “glorified affiliates” who are actually in a worse position than traditional affiliate marketers.

Here is why. A real affiliate can promote any number of products. When their audience needs email marketing software, the affiliate recommends something and earns a commission. When they need web hosting, same thing. The affiliate has the ability to serve their audience across many needs and earn from all of them.

With MRR, once your buyer is inside the Facebook community, the email recommendations for all those tools come from the MRR creators, not from you. Every upsell, every follow-up product, every affiliate recommendation flows up to the next level. You made one sale of $400 or whatever the course price is. Everything after that goes to someone else. You did the customer acquisition work and handed the long-term customer value to the people above you in the chain.

There is also a practical limit on what you can sell to your own buyers going forward. You can’t offer one-on-one coaching to people who essentially know everything you know, because they bought the same course you bought. You can’t build a membership community around a proprietary method because there is no proprietary method. You can’t pivot to a new offer and bring your buyers with you, because when you try to sell them something different they are going to ask why you are abandoning the product you spent months pushing. The only path forward is always finding new people, which brings us to the next problem.

Reason 4: Don’t Teach What You Haven’t Done

Alston says this to everyone who joins his programs, free or paid, and he stands by it as a hard line: if you have never made money online, you should not be telling people how to make money online.

The problem isn’t just that the advice will be incomplete. The bigger issue is what it does to the industry overall. When large numbers of inexperienced people position themselves as make-money-online experts because they bought a course, the reputation of affiliate marketing, content creation, and online education as a whole takes a hit. Real practitioners get lumped in with people who have no experience and no results. The entire space starts to look like a scam, and that makes it harder for everyone doing legitimate work.

Buying a course and reselling it does not make someone a business owner in any meaningful sense. It makes them a reseller of someone else’s information. If that information is actually solid, the original course creators deserve the credit. If the information is thin, the people who paid for it deserve an honest answer about why they are not getting results, not a new upsell into the next version.

Reason 5: Market Saturation, Chase Mode, and Circular Proof

The fifth set of concerns Alston raises overlaps enough that they are worth addressing together. They all come back to the same structural problem: MRR is not a business model, it is a product you are temporarily reselling, and the market for it has a hard ceiling.

The Saturation Math

Alston references a documentary on LuLaRoe, the multi-level marketing clothing company, where a researcher found that MLM structures can only go about 11 levels deep before they have reached everyone they are going to reach. The same math applies to Master Resell Rights. The people who got in at the very beginning had the best odds of finding buyers. Each level down gets harder. By the time a late adopter joins and starts promoting, the market they are fishing in has already been worked hard by everyone above them. The only solution is a new version of the product, but by that point the original creators are the ones positioned to sell it, not you.

Permanent Chase Mode

The best businesses in the world don’t have to hunt for every single customer from scratch. McDonald’s doesn’t chase. Walmart doesn’t chase. Amazon doesn’t chase. They have built-in customer bases that come back without being individually recruited. MRR sellers have the opposite problem. The moment someone buys from you, they have everything you have. There is no reason for them to buy from you again. So you go find another person, sell once, and then start the hunt over. Alston calls this “chase mode” and points out that being in permanent chase mode is one of the clearest signs that a business is struggling rather than growing. A struggling business is always hunting new clients. A strong business makes more money from the same people it already knows.

The Circular Proof Problem

The social proof most MRR sellers rely on is fundamentally circular. When someone asks if the product works, the answer is usually that people are buying it. Not that the buyers applied the method and made money from the actual content. Not that the seller themselves generated income from the training. Just that transactions are happening. Alston calls this pattern shady. Proof of purchase is not proof of results. Using buyers as testimonials for a product those same buyers are now trying to resell is not marketing. It is a loop that benefits the people at the top and leaves everyone else holding a course they cannot honestly endorse from their own experience.

The Hidden Foundation Nobody Shows You

There is one more factor Alston wants people to understand before they look at any MRR success story. The people who are making meaningful money from Master Resell Rights almost always already had something built before they started. An email list from years of affiliate marketing. A social media following built promoting other products. A budget for paid ads. A network from years in the network marketing community. They had infrastructure in place, and MRR gave them a product to sell to an audience that already trusted them.

When you see someone claiming they went from zero to $5,000 in a month with MRR, that “zero” is rarely what it looks like. They are counting revenue from MRR sales, not counting the three years of list-building that made those sales possible. If you are genuinely starting from scratch with no audience, no email list, and no ad budget, you are not in the same position they were in when they started. Copying their tactics without their foundation is going to produce very different results, and that is not something most people promoting MRR will mention upfront in their marketing.

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What a Real Alternative Looks Like

Alston isn’t saying there is no way to make money in digital products or online education. He is saying that MRR specifically has structural problems that make it a poor foundation for a long-term business. He points to two approaches he actually endorses.

The first is building your own products. When you create something from your own knowledge and experience, you own the relationship with every person who buys it. You can update the product, add coaching, build a community, create follow-up products, and establish yourself as the authority in the room. Nobody else has a back-channel to your customers. Nobody else is routing their future purchases somewhere above you in a chain.

The second is affiliate marketing done with intention. Alston was an affiliate for Legendary Marketer for a period before he developed his own products. He notes that Legendary Marketer functions somewhat similarly to MRR in structure, but with a key difference: as an affiliate you maintain your own brand, you can recommend multiple products, and your customer relationship isn’t funneled into someone else’s community the moment they purchase. You can still offer coaching, additional recommendations, and your own perspective alongside it. Alston moved away from Legendary Marketer not because it was a bad product but because he built his own products and those became his priority.

Both paths require doing real work. Neither is a shortcut to fast cash. But both let you build something that grows over time rather than something that requires constant new-customer acquisition just to stay even.

Honest Drawbacks of This Take

To be fair, this perspective isn’t the full picture for every person in every situation. If someone has an existing audience who trusts them and they are genuinely confident in the quality of the course content, selling MRR is not categorically different from any other product recommendation. The problems Alston describes are mostly aimed at people who buy MRR as their entry point into online business with no prior foundation and no real experience to draw from.

The original course itself may have solid training in it. Alston hasn’t been through it and says so clearly. His objection is structural: the incentive for most MRR buyers is not to learn from the content but to resell it, and that creates the cascade of problems he describes. If you genuinely study the material, apply it, generate results, and then recommend it from first-hand experience, you are in a completely different position from the people he is warning about in this video.

Find Your X

The real question is not “should I sell MRR?” but “what is the online income model that actually makes sense for where I am right now?” The answer looks different for someone with an audience versus someone starting from scratch, for someone with a technical skill versus someone with a lived experience to share. If you want a direct answer based on your actual situation, finder.platformproof.com walks you through it and tells you exactly where to start.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Master Resell Rights exactly?

Master Resell Rights is a licensing arrangement where you purchase a course or digital product and receive the right to resell it and keep 100% of the revenue. The buyer of your resale typically also receives the right to resell it to someone else. In practice, this means many people end up selling the same product in the same market at the same price point at the same time, which drives the saturation problem Alston describes.

Is MRR the same as a pyramid scheme?

Alston stops short of calling it a pyramid scheme directly, but he references pyramids and triangles multiple times as comparisons. The legal definition of a pyramid scheme involves mandatory recruitment and fee payments that MRR doesn’t necessarily require. What he does say is that the structure creates incentives that feel similar: early entrants benefit most, the product becomes secondary to the act of selling it, and the people at the bottom of the chain tend to see the worst results.

Who actually makes real money from MRR?

Based on what Alston observes, the people generating serious income from MRR are typically those who came in with existing infrastructure: an email list, a social media following, paid advertising experience, or a network marketing background. They are selling MRR to audiences who already trust them, which is a fundamentally different situation from someone trying to build from zero.

What’s the difference between MRR and affiliate marketing?

With traditional affiliate marketing, you promote someone else’s product and earn a commission without buying the product at full price to resell it. You also keep the ability to promote multiple products across different categories, and you typically maintain your own relationship with your audience rather than routing them into someone else’s community permanently. Alston describes MRR sellers as “glorified affiliates” who are actually worse off because they don’t have those flexible relationship-preserving structures.

Why do some people say MRR completely changed their life?

Some people genuinely did generate significant income from MRR, particularly early adopters and people who already had an audience. Those results are real. The issue is that those results are being used to market MRR to people in very different situations, without disclosing the infrastructure and timing advantages that made those outcomes possible. The success stories spread; the context behind them usually doesn’t travel with them.

What should I do instead if I’m starting from zero?

Alston consistently recommends starting with skills or experience you already have and building an audience around genuine value before deciding what product to sell. Affiliate marketing for products you actually use and believe in can work as a starting point because it doesn’t require a large upfront purchase or any claims about results you haven’t had. Creating your own digital product from real experience is the longer-term goal. The path between where you are and a product of your own is what finder.platformproof.com is designed to help you map out.

Is Legendary Marketer a better option than MRR?

Alston was an affiliate for Legendary Marketer for a period and notes it is structurally similar to MRR in some ways. He no longer promotes it because he developed his own products. He does not position Legendary Marketer as a strong recommendation in this video, but he contrasts it with MRR to illustrate that even imperfect alternatives can be preferable when they let you maintain your own brand and don’t permanently funnel all customer relationships into a single external community you don’t control.

How do you know when you’re ready to teach making money online?

According to Alston, the test is simple: have you made money online yourself? Not just spent money on courses, not just started a website, but actually generated income from an online source? If the answer is no, you are not ready to teach others how to do it. Once you have a track record of real results, even small ones, you have something honest to share. Until then, be a student rather than positioning yourself as a teacher.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “5 Reasons Why I Would Not Sell Master Resell Rights in 2024” on YouTube, AodbVolt channel
LuLaRoe documentary referenced for MLM saturation research on network depth limits (approximately 11 levels)
Alston Godbolt commentary on Legendary Marketer affiliate program from firsthand experience as a former affiliate

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.