@SpongebobetteI have a feeling it would encourage her (and I’d have to out myself)!
Here is a post from Yawn:
Run the £100 test
You don't need to build the whole thing to know if it'll sell.
The cheapest way to test an idea is to see if one real person will pay a small amount for a simple version of it.
TRY THIS TODAY
Offer a tiny, manual version of your idea to one person for a modest fee this week. See if they say yes.
This seems a very flawed way to assess whether a business based on recruitment will work. One person showing a polite interest does not predict how it will land with a larger number of people, in a diluted or expanded form when her behaviour and her customers’ behaviour will also be different than in a one to one situation. How would she measure the outcome? ‘They didn’t pay me £100 for the edited version because they are a negative hater. I’m still going to launch my biz anyway’.
Anway, I think the principle of testing something quietly is what she wishes she had done. Instead she went for the “launch” and then the big fanfare and reveal without ever really road testing anything and it turns out it’s downhill all the way from launch. Now she is desperately trying to catch any individual she can in a reverse of the above Top Tip.