What Happened to Empower Network? The Founder’s Full Story

On October 31, 2011, I launched a company with my business partner and a beat-up email list of about 15,000 people. Within a few years it was one of the most trafficked websites on the planet. By 2017 it was gone.

If you type “Empower Network” into Google right now, you will find other people telling you what happened to it. Some of them were there. Most of them were not. Almost none of them built it, signed the checks, stood on the stages, made the mistakes, or sat in the wreckage afterward wondering what the hell just happened.

I did all of those things. So this page is me, David Wood, telling you the whole story on the actual domain where it happened. The rise, the collapse, the criticism, the parts I got wrong, and why, fifteen years after I bought this domain, I brought it back to life.

No spin. You will be able to smell it if I spin, so I won’t.

Where Did Empower Network Come From?

Every version of this story has to start in the van, because the van is true.

In 2009 I was living out of a 1996 Dodge Caravan in Hawaii with my wife. I had failed at network marketing for years. I had chased away most of my friends. I got a ticket for sleeping in that van and paid it with money I could not spare. Someone once threw a coconut at it. That was my net worth: a rusted van, a coconut dent, and an unshakeable, borderline-delusional belief that I was going to figure this out.

I used to sit inside a Safeway in Honolulu because that’s where the internet was. One day I sat there with a pen and filled ten pages of a notebook with exactly what the next ninety days were going to look like. Then I borrowed money from my mom, got a cheap laptop, and started publishing content online like my life depended on it, because it did.

Three months later I had my first $30,000 month. Within a year I was one of the top recruiters in the industry, working from Costa Rica, closing everything through content and Skype. I had been running a Monday night call at 9pm Eastern since 2009 and never missed one. That consistency, not talent, is what built the audience that made everything after possible.

I tell you this part first because Empower Network was never a clever financial scheme cooked up in a boardroom. It was the product of a guy who had been broke enough to get vagrancy tickets, deciding that people like him deserved a shot at publishing their way out.

What Was Empower Network?

In January 2011 I went for a walk in the mountains of Costa Rica, the way I always did when I was stuck. I had spent months asking one question: what would a company look like if it was built for the people who never win? The whole thing arrived at once. The product, the structure, the stages. I have had exactly a few moments like that in my life, and that walk was the biggest one.

My partner in building it was David Sharpe. We were an odd pair, two recovering disasters with complementary skills, and we built the company on one promise: radical transparency. Tell the truth about money, about failure, about struggle, and teach ordinary people to publish content and sell online.

The core product was a blogging system. You bought it, you published, you could resell it and earn commissions. On top of that sat training products, audios, and events. We launched on Halloween 2011 with that list of 15,000 people.

Our first event tells you everything about the scale we started at: 37 people, and I mean 37 people crammed into an actual hotel room, not a conference room. People sitting on the floor along the walls. That was the whole movement.

In our first month we paid out over a million dollars in commissions. I have launched a lot of things in my life. I have never seen anything move like that, before or since.

The rhythm underneath it was almost boring, which is exactly why it worked. The same Monday night call I had been running since 2009 became the company’s heartbeat, except now thousands of people dialed in every single week. Publish daily. Show up Monday. Get to the events. That was the whole gospel, preached over and over until people who had never finished anything in their lives suddenly had a streak going.

How Big Did It Get?

Fast forward eight months from that hotel room. June 2012, Atlanta, Georgia. The event we named, in a fit of subtlety, “Don’t Be A Wussy.” 1,250 people. Eight months earlier I had counted 37 in a hotel room. And the rooms kept growing: 1,250 in Atlanta became 3,000 in San Diego, then 4,000 in Austin, then Chicago with 5,559 registered, until 6,200 people filled Denver.

I stood backstage listening to that crowd and thought about the coconut hitting the van. Eight months from 37 people on a hotel room floor to a ballroom I could not see the back of. You do not process something like that in real time. You just walk out and talk.

The numbers from that era still sound made up, and I want to be precise about them because this page exists to be accurate, not impressive. Our tax return showed roughly $64 million in company sales in a single year. At peak, the company was doing about $7.2 million a month. In 2012 I was handed a commission check for $464,913. One check. I had spent years of my life failing to earn that much in total.

The traffic was just as unreal. At its height, empowernetwork.com ranked 93rd on Alexa’s list of the most visited websites in the world. Not in the industry. In the world. Our sales page collected around one and a half million organic visits from search alone, and over two and a half years, more than 300,000 people came through our world.

And the culture. If you were there, you remember. Grown adults crying at events because someone finally told them their dreams were not stupid. People who had been laughed at by their families getting standing ovations. I watched people walk into those rooms as one person and walk out as another. Whatever else you read about Empower Network, that part was real, and no amount of criticism gets to delete it.

Look at the faces in these photographs. Nurses. Truck drivers. Retirees. Laid-off professionals in their one good shirt, taking notes like their lives depended on it, because in their minds they did. These were not sharks. They were people who had run out of institutions to believe in, and for a couple of years, they believed in us.

Was Empower Network a Scam?

Let’s do this directly, because this is the question the internet has been answering on my behalf for a decade.

People called us a scam. People called us a pyramid scheme. People also called us the thing that changed their lives. Here is my honest accounting of all three.

The easy move here would be to tell you the critics were all haters who never built anything. That would be bullshit, and I’d rather close this page down than feed you that.

First, what we actually were: a real company with real products. The blogging platform existed and worked. The training existed, and a lot of it was genuinely good; people still quote those courses to me fifteen years later. Money came from actual sales of actual products, and we paid out exactly what the compensation plan said we would, on time, for years. A skeptical industry watchdog named Len Clements once grilled me for four hours looking for the con. His conclusion, on the record, was this:

“You are the most open company owner I’ve ever ran into, times one hundred.”

And the pyramid question deserves a straight answer rather than an eye-roll. A pyramid scheme pays people for recruiting, with no real product underneath, and mathematically requires the bottom layer to lose. We sold real products at real prices, and plenty of people bought them purely to use them, never reselling anything. That is why we operated in the open for six years, through banks, processors, lawyers, and scrutiny, without being shut down by anyone but ourselves. If you want to argue we sat closer to that line than a company should ever sit, keep reading, because that argument has more merit than the scam one.

Now the other side, and I am not going to flinch here.

The compensation model was controversial for a reason. The people most excited to buy our products about making money online were, overwhelmingly, people who wanted to resell products about making money online. That is a loop. It is legal, it was disclosed, and versions of it run through huge parts of the marketing industry to this day. But a loop like that concentrates hype, and when the average customer is also a salesperson, the marketing culture polices itself downward. The loudest voices win, and the loudest voices are rarely the most careful ones.

Some affiliates made claims I would never have approved and could not realistically stop at that scale. Most people who joined did not get rich. Most people in every sales business do not get rich, and I had been saying so publicly since before Empower existed, but let me say it again here, on the record, on the domain: most members made little or nothing. The winners were real and the strugglers were real, and the strugglers vastly outnumbered the winners.

So: was it a scam? No. A scam takes your money and gives you nothing. We delivered products, training, community, and commissions for six years. But was every criticism wrong? Also no. The structural critique, that the model rewarded promotion more than it rewarded patient skill-building, had teeth. It took me years and a collapsed company to fully respect that.

What Actually Went Wrong?

Everyone who writes about Empower Network wants a villain. The truth is less cinematic. Here is what I believe actually killed it, from the only seat with a full view.

We grew faster than we grew up. Eight months from a hotel room to 1,250 people in a ballroom at the Omni in Atlanta. There is no management book for that. Systems, support, compliance, leadership depth: all of it was being built mid-flight, by two founders whose core genius was marketing, not operations. Speed was our brand, and speed compounds errors exactly the way it compounds growth.

The culture ran hotter than the math. “All in” started as a rallying cry and became a doctrine. When 600 people go all in during your first month, you learn the wrong lesson: that heat is free. Heat is never free. A culture that celebrates the biggest check on the stage will quietly teach ten thousand people to measure themselves against it, and most of them will come up short and go home discouraged. I was on those stages. I set that temperature. That one is mine.

I was drinking what we were pouring. Success at that speed is a drug, and I do not use the word casually. I believed my own legend. The same certainty that let a homeless man build a movement made a rich founder hard to warn.

And then the partnership broke. While the company was consuming everything, my marriage ended; my wife left about six months before one of our biggest launches, and I wrote about the heartbreak publicly at the time because transparency was the deal. Dave Sharpe and I split. I am not going to tell that story here. Partnerships end, and this one did not end clean. The outcome for the business was the same either way. Empower Network was a two-engine machine. The front-of-room fire and the funnel discipline needed each other. With one engine out and the culture already cooling, altitude became a countdown.

Nobody stole the money. Nobody got indicted. No dramatic exposé brought us down. Two burned-out founders and a model that needed constant fire, running out of fire. That’s the real story, and in some ways it is harder to accept than a villain would be.

Why Did Empower Network Shut Down?

In 2017 the company collapsed and shut down. Not a rebrand, not an acquisition. Shut down. The platform went dark, the checks stopped, and everyone still building on it watched years of work end mid-sentence.

I want to say something to the people who were still active when it ended, because I have never had a proper place to say it: I’m sorry. You believed in something I built, and it did not finish the job. Some of you had businesses on that platform. Blogs with years of work on them. Whatever the causes, and whatever fine print made it defensible, the human result was that your work vanished, and the man responsible was too wrecked to say so at the time.

Because I was wrecked. In the same stretch of life I lost the company, the partnership, and my marriage, and for a while I lost the plot entirely. A person I had once worked with drugged me, and I ended up on the internet with a bloody face, not making sense. You may have seen the clips. I am not going to dress that up as a “learning season.” It was the bottom, it was public, and it belongs in this story because hiding it would make everything else on this page less believable.

Years later came the quiet final insult: the old company database, was deleted. Not out of neglect. The company had collapsed, there was no money left, and the server bills did not stop arriving just because everything else had. When the payments stopped, Amazon deleted the data. Every customer record. Gone. The company that once ranked 93rd on the internet no longer even had a list of its own people. Remember that detail, because it matters at the end of this story.

What Happened in the Years After?

After 2017 I stopped doing network marketing seriously. I said so publicly, and I meant it: after you have stood in front of 6,200 people at your own event, nothing halfway feels worthy of a full heart.

I moved into the mountains of Costa Rica and did the unglamorous work. I read between 150 and 250 books a year now, around four hundred in the last few years. I still wake around six and read until noon most days. I rebuilt my health, my faith, and my relationship with the truth, which is the one relationship that makes all the others possible.

Could I still build? A couple of times I tested the muscle, mostly to see if the old skills were mine or the moment’s: once helping build a team of about 4,000 people in around 60 days, another time about 91,000 in three months. The muscle worked fine. The heart wasn’t in that game anymore, and pretending otherwise would have made me exactly the kind of guru I used to warn you about.

What I never let go of, through every one of those years, was this domain. The domain was first registered in 2006, years before the company existed. I bought empowernetwork.com from its previous owner in 2011, as the company was being born, and I have owned it ever since. Through the glory, through the collapse, through the years when it pointed at nothing. Every January the renewal came up, and every January some quiet voice said: not yet, but not never.

Why Bring Empower Network Back in 2026?

Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

First, the story. For years, the top results for this brand have been other people’s versions of it. Some fair, some lazy, some flat wrong. I finally understood that the silence was a choice, and it was the wrong one. The domain where it happened should carry the honest record of what happened. That is this page.

Second, the work. Thousands of hours of training were created under this brand, and the good parts did not stop being good because the company died. Buried in those courses is some of the best instruction on publishing, selling, and self-belief I have ever produced. Letting it rot in a dead archive serves nobody.

Third, and this is the real one: the debt.

What Happens to the Courses People Bought?

Here is the part of this relaunch that I care about most, and the part that makes the rest of it honest.

If you bought courses from Empower Network back then, they are yours again. Free. Not re-subscribed, not upsold, not “credited toward” something. Yours.

Remember the deleted database? I cannot look you up. Amazon erased the record of every customer this company ever had. So I am doing it the only way left: you come tell me. If you were one of the people who pulled out a credit card and believed in this thing between 2011 and 2017, come claim what you paid for.

Nobody is making me do this. There is no legal obligation, no settlement, no court order. There is just a man who owes a debt to the people who built the best years of his life, and finally has a way to start paying it.

What’s Different This Time?

Everything that made the old model combustible is gone.

There is no compensation plan. No affiliates, no ranks, no downlines, no “all in.” Nobody will ever earn a commission by recruiting you into empowernetwork.com, which means nobody has an incentive to oversell you a dream. This is a publishing company now: the story, the archive, the training, restored and rebuilt, standing on its own.

And I am different, which matters more than the model. I loved the big events, and I will not pretend otherwise. But even at the biggest ones I took the stage two or, at most, three times in three days. The room was never about me. The man writing this page has spent years in the mountains learning to exist without an audience. I am not chasing the old high. I am settling the old accounts.

I told you the truth when I had nothing left. That was the promise the whole thing was built on, and it is the only piece of Empower Network I never let collapse.

So that is what happened to Empower Network. A homeless man built a rocket, the rocket flew higher than anyone believed it could, and it came apart because the men flying it were more combustible than the fuel. The parts that were false died in 2017. The parts that were true are on this page, in those photographs, and in the thousands of people who still write to me about what they became during those years.

If you were one of them, do this now: go to the courses page and claim back what you bought. It is free, it is yours, and it is fifteen years overdue.

In Prosperity,
David Wood

Income references are historical (2011–2013) and were not typical; no income is guaranteed. See our Income Disclaimer.