Quirky: Crowd Sourcing product ideas, design, logo, graphics; Users get rewarded with cash

We all have, at some point, some really wonderful (if not some crazy or wacky) ideas on certain products that we would like to see being sold. So here comes a website that uses Crowd sourcing to do their Research and Development on the products that they manufacture, and it’s called Quirky (pretty neat name huh?). What’s cool about it…

… is that they reward people who contribute to their development process. Just to name a few, they have Submit product idea, Product naming, Logo and Graphic designs. It is somehow a competition based where users could submit their ideas and the one chosen will be rewarded with the prize money.

– Quirky’s product for pre-order called Slingback –

 

The product idea, however is quite different, what you do is submit a product idea and pay $99 upfront (I’ll explain this in a bit). Users submit a product name, product pitch, photos (sketches or drawings) and phone number. It’s great for inventors to try to market their inventions or making it to reality (limitations to $150 retail price). But what you get in return is you get analytics and feedback of users (potential customers), and be able to earn $0.12 per $1 earnings of each item sold.

 

– Video Explanation of Quirky –

 

The community also takes 30% of the earnings (being influencers). By influencing the product to make it better and more sale-able, their contributions are rewarded. So if you don’t have much idea, you could still earn yourself some money by helping others achieve their goals.  The Minimum payout is $75, so you’d be needing a lot of contributions to get that payout.

 

Overall, great idea for a manufacturer to get people to do their research and development work, at the same time, they all get rewarded and so happy to contribute. It’s a great place for inventors to make their dreams into a reality, earning great royalties for their hot products (at only $99, cheaper than doing it yourself. Time + money). I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing and this is something that looks quite promising to me. However, there’s always a downside to crowdsourcing model. The founders of this website has done other crowdsourcing from their other websites, I hope they could bring the same success here. Goodluck.