I've Tried That - We lose money so you don't have to!

Last week, we took a look at iJango, the self-proclaimed center of the Internet. We weren’t impressed, nor interested in the program, but I’ve Tried That reader Brent attended the iJango kickoff convention in Vegas. Here is his experience:

I attended the Las Vegas Launch Party at the Encore. I was approached by Mr. Sharp. Very nice guy, but he was very thin, and seemed to be wiping his nose a lot, and his eyes were a little out of whack.

Now on to the presentation. Steve Smith opened the event by telling you that they have the best legal staff on the planet, I think he said they now have over 4 lawyers on staff. (That should scare anyone, why would you need so many lawyers) Steve went on to say that now, his son, with no real experience, is now the CEO of the company. (That makes you feel so safe in this investment).

Mr. Sharp took the stage crying, telling everyone that he was so proud that so many people who could not afford this trip to Vegas, came. It was very moving. He introduced the guy behind the software which is IJango. Me told everyone that he with 3 other programmers have made an amazing product. (Wow they have more lawyers then they have programmers for a software company. I wonder if Google has 15,000 lawyers)

They then jump into showing you iJango. It is clearly iGoogle, but now it is green and has iJango at the top. No other changes, but now they have removed the Google, Yahoo and other names from the top. They want to show everyone how you make money, so they go to Hulu, and want to show you a movie. The movie begins to play and it opens with a commercial. The commercial is Vaseline. I thought Mr. Sharp was going to fall off the stage. Wow, how right on was that presentation. It was clear that was not the commercial they wanted everyone to see. (But if you are going to get screwed, you better have some around), then the clip that was shown of the movie was about a drug addict. Again, wow.

But, not the kicker, I wanted to know how this thing was going to make money. And very quickly, and lines written by the attorneys, Mr. Sharp stated, “if you direct everyone to your iJango personnel page, and they then click on Hulu, then BAM you make money” You will all be making money by every click.

He said it so fast, then focused everyone on the making money part, that no really heard what he said. People have to go to your personnel iJango page. NO ONE WILL EVER DO THIS, NO ONE. You are kidding yourself to think that people will want to see your personnel iJango page, and then use it to go to sites that you want them to go to.

I looked around the room, and wanted to stand up and scream, run people run, don’t drink the kool-aid, but it was clear that everyone was wrapped up in the hype, that they were not thinking. It was very sad.

There is a chance that the iJango website will be a moderately successful Affiliate website and that the company may make some money on the internet portion of their business model, but the overwhelming evidence is that they will generate almost all of their revenues from people paying the $390 a year for the privilege of being a distributor. If they can get a couple hundred thousand people to use iJango as their home page and then get people to use these pages as there home pages (very unlikely) and then get a portion of them to purchase from sponsored links, they may make a little money on this activity, but it will pale in comparison to the money iJango receives from people signing up for $150 and then paying $20 per month.

For those of you signing up to be a distributor, just know that the money you will be making will be from convincing others to pay $169 to sign up, not from future commissions on internet usage. If you are comfortable with that, then you can probably earn some money with iJango by convincing others to part with with $390 per year.

PLEASE DO NOT DRINK THE KOOL-AID

Another year. Another hype.