Crowdsourcing
Ultimate validation of your idea is your customers sell it for you. #evangelism
Basically, you know your product has legs, when it literally moves without you pushing it. When your customers, collectively, put as much time as you’ve put into them you’re successful. As the [(customers’ time) to (your time commitment)] ratio increases, your product does exponentially well.
Value differs based on financial/emotional motives. Maintain emotional consistency.
People buy products at different income levels differently. When you’re poor or ignorant about the product, you purchase the highest features to price model. As you become more wealthy in terms of knowledge, time, and money, the product you buy will be higher quality products to graduate as you graduate from the “cheaper” stuff. This may be used to show opulence because you’re buying a “prestigious” good. Finally, when you’ve when choosing between many similarly developed products, decisions are based on which company most suits your emotional/moral values.
At a certain pt ppl see they realized their world state and want others to feel the same emotions. They want the world to change.
Continuing from the previous point, you realize that you’ve made your world the way you want to. So your mission becomes helping others achieve the same level of satisfaction. As social animals, we thrive on sharing with others the way we feel. I have a hunch that humans communicate via emotions. Language is one of many representations of emotional communication (part of why I now feel that language should be cherished and maintained as culturally relevant. In short, a language encompasses the entire culture’s range of emotions).
Crowdsourced incongruent to evangelism. Crowdsource is akin to saying “customer you’re smart, do my work.” #crowdsource
Many people think that if you crowd-source something, it will instantaneously become successful. The belief is if someone creates something they’ll tell all their friends. Actually, it tells your customers you’re too stupid and lazy to think for yourself and are looking for cheap labor.
Successful crowd-sourcers build a community and innovate on community development opposed to the selling product.
However, successful crowd-sourcers (or is it sorcerers) actually put an amazing amount of time and dedication to creating a community. Their innovation and expertise lies in community development. Furthermore, they listen to the customers well and determine what’s the best for the community. I have never heard of crowdsourcing the community, because that’s THE JOB of crowd-sourcing. They think and provide for the community better than the community can for itself.
Crowdsourcers sustain with the profits of the product but manage the community well.
Finally, crowd-sourcing product is the community as opposed to the tangible. Threadless is selling their customers a medium to outlet their creativity and they sustain themselves with the production of collective sweat. Yet, they’re working incredibly hard to make sure their community is well-served and their community reciprocates with marketing, sales, and creating cool shit people buy.
