My Vision for the Empower Network Relaunch
When a company you built collapses in public, you get two choices. You can spend the rest of your life pretending it didn’t happen, or you can own it. I spent years on the first option. This site is the second.
Own the Story
Search the name Empower Network and you’ll find the wreckage. Criticism, complaints, autopsies written by people who watched it fall. Most founders in my position would launch under a fresh brand and hope nobody connects the dots. I’m doing the opposite. I’m relaunching under the same name, on the same domain I have owned since 2011, with the full account of what happened published right here where anyone can read it.
Not because the story is comfortable. Because owning it is the only honest place a rebuild can start. A comeback you have to whisper isn’t a comeback.
The Give-Back Comes First
Trust doesn’t get rebuilt with announcements. It gets rebuilt the same way it gets built the first time: deposits before withdrawals. I’ve always called that building a bank of goodwill, and the relaunch has to live by it or the words mean nothing.
So the first act of this relaunch settles a debt. If you bought courses from the original Empower Network, you get them back. Free. You paid for that material, the company shut down, and the thing you paid for vanished with it. That debt sat on this domain for nine years. Restoring the library costs me sales in the short run, and that’s fine, because the point of the give-back was never revenue. The point is that you watch me do the trustworthy thing before I ask you to trust me.
Publishing Is the Skill That Survives
Everything I’ve ever built started with publishing. In 2009 I was broke in a van in Hawaii. I borrowed money from my mom, started publishing online, and the entire arc that followed, the audience, the company, the events, traces back to that daily habit. When people asked me how I did it, my answer was two words: I blog.
That same year I studied what the top earners in this industry actually did, and the pattern held everywhere I looked: three to five pieces of content a week, sustained for years. Since then the platforms have churned over and over. Networks rose and died, algorithms rewrote themselves, reach that people rented disappeared overnight. The publishers who owned their audience kept theirs.
That’s the durable skill this platform exists to teach: publish daily, on a domain you own, to an audience you control. It compounds slowly, then it compounds hard, and nobody can take it from you. I am betting the entire relaunch on it, in public, on this domain.
What I am not doing is telling you it pays. Whether publishing earns you anything depends on your offer, your market and your writing, and I will not pretend otherwise: no income is promised or implied anywhere on this site.
What “Different This Time” Actually Means
Anyone can say lessons were learned. Here’s what I’m committing to concretely, so you can hold me to it.
No income promises. Not one, anywhere on this site. Results in this industry vary far too much for a blanket promise to be honest, so I won’t make one.
No check-waving. There was a time I showed people my checks. That era is over, and I’m the one ending it. Every number that appears here will be one I can stand behind and source, and the counts on this site are read live from the database rather than typed into the copy, so you can go and check them yourself.
Education first. The training teaches the skill before any offer shows up. If the free material doesn’t make you measurably better at publishing, you shouldn’t buy anything from me, and I’ll say so.
And the story stays up. The account of the collapse lives on this domain permanently, one click from every page. The day I take it down, you’ll know the mission changed.
Where This Goes
After the collapse I read, somewhere between 150 and 250 books a year, around four hundred in the last few years, rebuilding my thinking before I rebuilt anything with my name on it. The vision I came out with is simple enough to fit in one sentence: a publishing platform where the training is honest, the library keeps its promises, and the people who build audiences actually own them.
Judge It Against What I Ship
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. Take the free thing first and hold the rest of it to that standard.
Free: The Daily Shortcut, one short episode a day by email, plus the full archive, the transcripts and the recordings on a free account. No card, and nobody chases you.
If you want to publish: The Blogging System, $25 a month or $197 a year, 30-day refund, and your posts and your subscriber list export any day you decide I was wrong.
If you bought from the old company: claim your courses back, free. That is the give-back, and it comes before anything else on this page.
In Prosperity,
David Wood