Yes, 8,000. And I am very pleased – Also, I have done some more personal recruiting and now have 69 direct referrals – remember I posted my goals in my December 13th blog and it included saying I was hoping to reach 10,000 referrals by the end of February. I am looking pretty good on this.
Just a couple of quick things on AGLOCO. --- I did a Google search for “agloco” a minute ago – got 847,000 page hits – I guess they are moving on up to the big 1 with 9 zeros. This is always very encouraging to me as while I like having 8,000 referrals, AGLOCO needs to be very big for it to achieve its goals for its members. Very big would be 2,000,000 by the end of 2007 (another of my December 13 predictions.)
I do read the AGLOCO Official blog and comments. I usually don’t comment myself as most of the points made are already covered in the FAQs etc. But I do think some of the members write excellent ideas for improvements. This is another reason that I think AGLOCO will be a huge winner. Because the members own AGLOCO, they will work hard to make it better. It is like Linux for the web, only better because the people doing all the work to improve it get most the benefits.
Also, I think there are some legitimate complaints. My feeling on that has been one word “patience”.
AGLOCO is a true Silicon Valley start up (including a solid Stanford University tie - like Cisco, Sun, eBay, Yahoo and Google). Right now is when a startup is the weakest AND it is right now that the most money is made for the least effort (ask the founders of YouTube and their $1.6 billion about that thought).
So I think this is ‘our’ risk as well. John Chow wrote a nice blog on November 30th when he crossed over 1,000 referrals talking about the risk of failure. http://www.johnchow.com/1000-agloco-sign-ups/ .
I agree with John. We are all taking a risk with our efforts (but our money is still in our wallets). This is a rare opportunity and as you can see I am trying to make the most of it.
Recruiting tip. ---- In my recent recruiting I have been successful when I tell people I have 8,000 referrals. That impresses them with the fact that a lot of people are signing up and that I have been successful in recruiting my friends. People like to join a winner and like hearing success stories (and I am happy I am one of them).