A business like no other.

Rightly or wrongly, there is no start-up like this anywhere on earth...

‘We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity’

Daniel Gilbert, “Stumbling on Happiness”.

This is the story of how we created a start-up which has — in the last month — replaced the handbag of a pensioner who’d been mugged, pranked celebrities, helped an autistic girl to get the seizure dog she urgently needed, written a letter to the chief executive of the National Health Service which was 30 feet long, found soul mates for people, given away apps, T-shirts and limited edition artworks, decorated an old people’s home with 750 daffodils, got members work experience in professional restaurants, sourced a rare Batman script signed by Tom Hardy, provided fashion advice from a celebrity stylist and helped crowd fund research into curing cancer.

Back in January this year, we founded our start-up, Crowdwish. It’s a place where you can go to anonymously publish — in 100 characters or less — the things you most want from the future. These are typically a combination of material goods people would like to own, experiences they want to have, causes they believe in, services they need or advice they require. There may be other things, but the majority people’s ‘wishes’ seem to fit into one of these five categories.

There are plenty of places that let you do this online — from facebook to pinterest and a thousand other services. We get that. We also found the concept of ‘wishes’ slightly schmaltzy and Disney Princess-esque. Lame even. And we really didn’t want to create a half-empty ‘bucket-list’ style site where a few people could wistfully talk about climbing Kilimanjaro and a couple of others might say ‘Yeah, I agree’ before falling asleep in front of ‘Modern Family’. We wanted to build a place of action.

So the thing that makes Crowdwish unique is that every 24 hours we take the most popular wish of the day and do something meaningful about it, in the real world. We don’t miraculously guarantee to make all the wishes come true — we’re not delusional — more that we will do something resourceful to progress towards the fulfilment of that wish.

That’s our ‘secret sauce’, as people used to say about a year ago, slightly annoyingly.

The site was founded on three very simple principles:

1. Everyone on earth has hopes, dreams, ambitions and desires for the future.
2. Whatever you’re hoping for, someone else somewhere is going to want the same thing.
3. The greater the number of people who want something, the more likely it is to be delivered.

We’ve seen abundant evidence for these principles everywhere — from the astonishing success of Kickstarter, to the rise and fall of Groupon et al, to the role of social media in the socio-political changes in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The world’s population is more connected, informed, mobilised and agitated than it’s ever been before. People also — at a deep instinctive level — spend a huge amount of time thinking about the future — an MIT estimate once put it at 47% of our waking hours, although it’s obviously a tricky thing to exhaustively quantify. What is indisputable is that, for the most part, we construct our day-to-day activities and behaviour around the desire to progress towards our future goals; our lives revolve around it.

We were therefore pretty certain that there would be some kind of product/market fit as we were tapping into a universal human truth —it doesn’t matter if you’re a shoeless orphan in San Paulo or the world’s most affluent hedge-fund manager; there are going to be things you’re going to want.

Many of the wishes are altruistic and kind, others more inner directed or materialistic — the site makes no judgment whatsoever, even ‘actioning’ ‘I wish I was Batman’. There is nothing that we will not take action on, providing the wish adheres to our 6 rules:

1. Don’t be lame. No one cares that you wish you could fly. You can’t and this site can’t help you. Sorry.
2. Don’t be greedy. ‘I wish I had a free Rolex’ isn’t going to get traction.
3. Don’t be crude. We don’t need to hear about your Mila Kunis fantasies.
4. Don’t be vague. Try and be specific and imaginative at the same time.
5. Don’t be (too) selfish. The more a wish is shared, the more likely it is to come true.
6. Don’t be a dick — any form of behavior that breaks the law, or advocates doing so, won’t be tolerated.

So far, we’ve been pretty pleased with the feedback. Obviously, you can attach whatever metric you like to your start-up; rightly or wrongly, we just had one — is this an idea that people would excitedly tell their friends about? It seems to be. People like the proposition underpinning the site and they like the ways in which the wishes have been ‘actioned’. We never say ‘granted’ as that implies that we will completely fulfil every wish, which would be crazy. We just claim we’ll do something imaginative and resourceful every single day, nothing more. That much we can promise.

We’ve fucked up a bit. Too slow to launch a native iOS app, overly obsessive about design, too much time stressing over imponderables, general neuroses. The real issue, of course, lies in the business model; if you spend every day giving things away, how will you ever satisfy an investor base? It’s a legitimate question to which our answers are scarily hypothetical. Sometimes the absence of a conventional business model — buying a widget for X, then selling it for Y — is incredibly anxiety-inducing, truth be told.

Our focus will always be on providing something imaginative each day, more than making money from users, but the aspiration is to build a business that could be monetised in the following ways:

1. As a content destination in its own right — emotional content done right goes viral — so think of a future Crowdwish being akin to a British Upworthy (the fastest growing media site of all time) where the audience have had a hand in creating the stories in the first place. That could be something.
2. As a place for brands to assist in the facilitation of wishes, like a native advertising or ad-funded model. Smart brand owners realize that increasingly they are defined by what they do, not what they say. We already have people reaching out to us wanting to be involved. With critical mass, they would pay for the privilege. It would then be up to us to focus on integrity.
3. A premium offering where wishes get actioned more swiftly, closer to a concierge offering. We haven’t even begun to think about this and it’s quite a different kind of business, but we have a few potential partners in that area, so we’re keeping it on the table for now.

This is an appallingly banal and pious statement of the obvious, but — despite the relentless focus on how insular, selfish and miserable we all are — people like helping others, even if they have no idea who those people are. The desire to participate in making the world a better place — even if it’s only fractionally — is incredibly strong. So even if someone has just agreed with someone else’s wish, they feel like they’ve helped make its resolution happen. As indeed they have. That’s a cool place to build from.

You can follow us here if you like.