A little while ago, we posted about Made.com, a firm that let customers vote about what furniture designs it should produce. Now we get Quirky, a firm that takes crowd sourcing to a different level.
I guess that I am a sucker for odd business models. Where Made.com controls what products if requests opinions on, these guys are letting “influencers” actually help shape the product. Made.com is counting on people who are just interested in furniture to visit their site regularly while Quirky is offering cold hard cash. The homepage identifies a Featured Infleuncer who has earned over $2,300 by impacting 47 products. Not exactly enough to retire on, but not a bad return if the time invested is sufficiently small.
So there is the question of whether this will work. Clearly, it is good to have committed demand before you move into production. Also, I think that they benefit from having a variety of products that are relatively inexpensive. That is, while there are limits on how much furniture one person is going to buy, the ability to indulge in impulse purchases for gadgets can be unconstrained. On the other hand, some of the items seem very much late night info. I wonder whether there would be a market for some of these items without the open design process that gets many people hooked into the product before it launches.
how is it ?
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Here’s the problem with Quirky; it’s very difficult to crowd-source quality. In fact, much of the end result at Quirky—from products, to taglines to logos—is the result of the lowest common denominator by a group that knows very little about what they’re voting on beyond being consumers. If the Quirky honchos weigh too heavily on what gets chosen, the crowd gets in an uproar…and so too much is left up to amateur “curators.”
The system is set up to pump something into the production cycle week-to-week, which means you’re not finding innovation and you create too much noise in the channel. However, to keep a community engaged, there always has to be something new, and products have to reach the market…many don’t…and when they do, the quality isn’t there. The successes lie in glomming onto a trend and feeding off it for as long as possible (i.e. iPad, iPhone).
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Arie Goldshlager, Kellogg School, kproductivity, Quirky, Mitch Lowe and others. Mitch Lowe said: RT @KelloggSchool: How to #CrowdSource product design http://ow.ly/2ok2F #Kellogg Prof Marty Lariviere shifts from Made.com votes to Quirky.com $$ [...]
Using feedback from potential customers seems like an interesting concept to design products. I looked at some of the products and they looked more ‘gadgety’ than innovative for my taste… More generally, I wonder what role firms will find for internet ‘buzz’ in coming years. In the marketing department at Kellogg, some researchers have been looking at the impact of internet buzz on products and firm performance.