About · Our Why & Culture
AI Technology To Unleash The Magical Power Of Referral Marketing
Rodd KirbyFounder & Chief Visionary OfficerWe start with why. A business that can't name the reason behind the work will eventually forget what the work is for.
- AI Technology.
- The instrument, not the point. AI does the work no human should be doing, so people can do the only work only people can do.
- Unleash.
- The power is already there. Every group of people who love what they sell carries that power. Our job is to remove whatever holds the power back.
- The Magical Power.
- Two things happening at once. A real person recommends something they believe in, and earns from the efforts of the group that grows beneath them, duplicating, compounding and snowballing as the group grows. The referral is the spark. The compounding is the magic. AI sits underneath so each person shares more, follows up better, and grows their own group faster.
- Referral Marketing.
- The most human and powerful form of commerce there is. One person telling another about something they believe in, and being rewarded when the people they brought go on to do the same.
Why any of this matters to you
People trust people. That truth is older than every platform and will outlast every one of them.
Influence is not a follower count or a media kit. Influence is the trust a real person already has with the people who know them: a friend, a sister, a coach, a neighbor, a nurse, an expert whose word you would act on, and the friend of that friend, because trust travels. Everyone has influence with someone. A brand's most powerful sales force is not one voice with two hundred thousand followers. The real sales force is a thousand people with forty real relationships each, and the people those people bring.
The friend of a friend is where the magic lives. One person recommends something they believe in. The people they bring do the same. The group beneath them grows, and the reward grows with the group: duplicating, compounding, snowballing. I have watched groups grow through friends of friends for twenty-five-plus years, and the sight still stops me every time.
What most people lack is not influence. What's missing is the right message at the right moment, and a system that never lets a relationship fall through the cracks. We build the system a relationship never falls out of. The AI does the work no human should be doing so the person can do the only work only a person can do: be known, be trusted, and be the reason someone said yes.
The people are the power.The money duplicating is the magic.The technology unleashes both.
A waiter named Henry
I was introduced to referral marketing by a waiter named Henry. Henry, with the power of his mind and his words, changed the course of my life.
I had just sold my convenience stores and come back from a year off in Florida. Money in the bank, and lost. Confused, with no business purpose. Henry stepped out of his comfort zone, saw something in me, and shared. Not once. Over and over, until I finally said, okay Henry, I'll come to a meeting with you, just to shut you up. And WOW. I was blown away. I was hooked. I had found my purpose.
Within a year the checks that mattered most weren't mine. They were my team's. Watching people I had introduced open their own envelopes on a Friday changed what I wanted to do with my life. I met Jim Rohn and Les Brown, heard “profits are better than wages” for the first time, and discovered personal development and the magical power of referral marketing in the same season. And I made Henry a bunch of money, too. He shared and blessed me up, and I blessed him up. That exchange is exactly why NaXum exists.
Then the company closed. So did the next one. And the one after.
Three closures taught me one thing: never, ever give up. And they taught me what the people inside those companies had needed all along. Not a better pitch. A system that survived the company. A commission engine that never broke. Tools that duplicated, so the newest person could do what the leader did. I had been building those tools by hand since the beginning: a 24-hour call-in line so I didn't have to do every three-way call, a ten-page fax on demand that hundreds downloaded the first day, live closing calls on a conference bridge three times a day with fifty people on the line. On January 1, 1999, I stopped renting someone else's platform and started building my own.
There are thousands of stories like mine, maybe millions. One person taking the time to care and share. NaXum is art painted with designs and code from people's dreams: we design and code your dream, then we launch beside you and help you make the dream real. That has been the whole job for twenty-five-plus years.
And I still need to find Henry and say thank you.
Gemba and Ginosko
Gemba is Japanese for the real place, the place where the value is made. I fell in love with the word when NaXum was four people: me, one programmer, one support person, and a mentor from the industry. I read everything I could find on building a company, and when I got to The Toyota Way and The Lean CEO, I read both twice. Toyota's leaders don't run the plant from an office. They walk the floor, stand where the car is being built, and look. I named our engineering floor Gemba that year, and the name stuck, because the software is built there, not in a conference room.
Gemba shapes how we work with you, too. We don't diagnose your business from a dashboard. We go to the real screen, the real member, the real number, and look. You cannot solve a problem facing a whiteboard. Most of what's wrong in a business is visible in ten minutes to anyone willing to stand where the work happens.
Ginosko is the second word, Greek, from a theology class I took at Baylor. To know something personally, intimately, by experience. Never to guess. When we get to the real place, we put the crystal ball down, ask real questions, find the data-backed answer, and tell you the truth. Nobody at NaXum will speak with confidence about anything they haven't seen with their own eyes.
Gemba is going to where the work happens. Ginosko is knowing what you find there.
Kaizen
Kaizen means constant and never-ending improvement. Toyota applied the word to an assembly line. I applied the word to our minds.
Masaaki Imai, who taught the world the word, wrote that Kaizen is much more than a way to make cars; Kaizen is a mindset. The sentence stopped me cold, because I had heard the idea before, in a different language, long before I ever read a business book. The first sermon I ever preached, at seventeen, was on Romans 12:1–2: “Present your bodies a living sacrifice… And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The cassette of that sermon still sits on my desk. Years later, when both my parents were taken from me by diseases of the mind, renewing and protecting the mind stopped being a philosophy and became a mission. Renew your mind, and keep renewing, or the old thinking creeps back in. Garbage in, garbage out. We guard what we think with. So we practice. Every person at NaXum listens to a minimum of seven hours of audiobook a month, from one list of a hundred titles, taken in order so the whole company shares one language, from The 10X Rule to Atomic Habits to The Checklist Manifesto. The notes have to be the person's own thinking. A machine can summarize a book; a machine cannot do your Kaizen for you. And we read for a reason that matters to you: what you most want to find is usually where you least want to look, and the lessons a team learns from people who have already been there are the mistakes you never pay for.
Toyota's assembly line was cars. In my world, the assembly line is the mind of every person on the team, and the product is the thinking that shows up in your software and in every message you get from us. The standard is one percent better than yesterday. Not a leap; a direction. Eyes on the windshield, which is big for a reason, not the rearview mirror, which is small for the same reason. Always be Kaizening; never settle. For you, Kaizen shows up as a platform that quietly gets better underneath you every week without asking you to buy it again, and a team that treats your feedback as material, never as a complaint.
Our 9 Core Values
Scroll in. Play each core value to unlock it.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Seven North Stars
Most companies choose one North Star and steer toward that single star. We chose seven, and we don't aspire to those stars. We run on all seven, every day, and you can hold us to every one.
Brand Promise: 0 to 24 hours.
Anything live and broken on your platform is fixed within twenty-four hours, then documented so the same mistake never happens twice.
Make Me Feel Secure.
You entrust us with your members, your orders, and your commissions. When our system is secure, your business is secure, and so are the livelihoods of everyone in it.
Speed: Don't Make Me Wait.
Every page loads in three seconds or less.
Omnipresence.
The whole platform and the APP work on every device, in every browser, everywhere, at all hours.
Don't Make Me Think.
If your people have to stop and think about the software, we built the software wrong.
Poke the Box.
Innovate or die. We take the risks on our own product so you never take those risks on yours.
Fund, Launch & Grow.
We launch new platforms every month, without exception. A team that launches constantly launches well, and yours goes live on a date you can name.
Circle of Safety
A team that feels safe tells the truth.
I learned what safety is worth from my father. He was never an entrepreneur. He found an honest founder who had vision and cared, gave more than was asked for years, and when the company went public, he rang the bell. He never had to carry the founder's risk, and he was never left behind. That arrangement is a circle of safety: a vehicle a person can pour their whole talent into, knowing they'll be safe, and knowing the company has their back the way they have the company's.
NaXum is built to be that vehicle. When the whole company went permanently work-from-home, I stopped thinking of Gemba as one floor in one building and started calling every person on the team a Mini-Gemba: a place where value gets made, wherever in the world the person sits. Our people are spread across three continents, every one of them a Mini-Gemba, connected by one WHY. We hold ourselves to one question every day, from Simon Sinek: what are you doing to help the person next to you? No right people left behind.
Here is why the circle matters to you. Problems surface early at NaXum, because the person who sees a problem knows they won't be punished for saying so. Teams without that safety hide problems until the problems are expensive. And the safety is why people stay, which is why the person on your account has usually been here for years, has held other seats on the way, and remembers the conversation you had last spring. Nobody hands you a new account manager every quarter.
A safe haven for the business soul is what we built for our team, and what you feel on the other end of the line.
Two Are Better Than One
Ray Dalio put a number on the idea: two people who collaborate well are about three times as effective as either one alone, because each sees what the other misses, and each holds the other to a higher standard. Ecclesiastes said it first. Two are better than one, because they have a better return for their labor; if either falls, one can help the other up; and a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Napoleon Hill named the third strand: no two minds ever come together without creating a third, invisible force, a third mind.
One plus one equals three. The math runs through everything we build for you.
Nothing at NaXum ships on one person's word. A design gets a second set of eyes before a line of code is written. Code gets reviewed by a peer before it reaches a tester. Every deliverable passes two checks after the person who built it, a leader's and a champ's, before you ever see it, and anything that touches your money is never built by one person alone. Those checks aren't gates; the checks are the third mind at work on your platform, catching what one mind would miss.
And here is the other half of the equation. Every person on our team is also alone, in the best sense: a Mini-Gemba with their own name on their own work, their own accountability, their own skills, their own discipline, and their own commitment to the long game. You are not alone, and you are alone, at the same time. The mastermind only works when each mind brings its own one.
Because when every person is a full one, one plus one stops equaling three. One plus one starts equaling ten.
Your money is the one thing we never experiment with
We'll let a team member scratch a fender while they learn. We will never put anyone in a position to total the car. And your commissions are the car.
Live, money-related mistakes are unacceptable in our culture. Every line of code that touches your payouts is checked by the person who wrote it, by a leader, and by the champ who looks at the output before you ever see it. Quality accountability is built into the fabric of how we work, done by the people who do the work, never by a separate island of QA. When a referral marketing company gets the money wrong, the people who trusted the company are the ones who get hurt. Nobody on our platform will ever be hurt that way.
In their words
Les Brown planting ‘you have greatness within you’ is the seed the whole NaXum culture grew from.
Marcellus NwankwoSmart Contract EngineerPast success cannot protect a company from future change… never become too comfortable with what already works… innovate or die.
Kayes QayumMobAPP EngineerOne of the things that makes NaXum special isn’t our technology or the platforms we build — it’s our people.
Phoebe Mae SecretariaVice President of HR & Finance
NaXum's sister brand, and the movement behind our culture.
Where NaXum serves the companies, BlessUP serves the individual: the leader, the creator, the person building something of their own. BlessUP is the reason our culture reads like a movement and not a handbook. We believe the point of all the technology is people growing, not software shipping. BlessUP carries its own WHY, its own community, and ACT.X, the reward layer of the BlessUP ecosystem.
Renew.ACT.Transform.
Three words, from Romans 12:1–2 and a sermon preached by a seventeen-year-old who had no idea he'd still be living by those three words forty years later. Renew your mind. Take action on what you learned. Transform, and then help the next person do the same.
Those three words are what we built the technology for.
Rodd Kirby, Founder & CVO, NaXum