Image via CrunchBase
Who among us hasn’t fantasized about inventing the next Frisbee and watching it go viral? We all want to be the guy whose friends tell their friends, “I know the dude who invented the Thing-a-Ma-Bop, and he just bought a 50-foot yacht.”
Maybe you’ve had a multi-million dollar epiphany only to see someone else launch the same idea and make it really happen. Or maybe you’re sitting on a brilliant concept, wondering how the heck to make it happen.
If that’s you, meet Quirky, the crowdsourcing site for inventive people who lack capital, knowledge, time and courage to go it alone in the world of product development.
Quirky might be the first social media site that actually produces stuff, other than countless terabytes of glorified navel gazing, chit chat and all-about-me hyperbole.
The concept is very democratic and elegantly ingenious for its simplicity. Anyone can join for free. If you’ve got a winning idea, you can submit it. Don’t worry about pages of specs and precise blueprints. A couple of paragraphs and a back-of-a-napkin diagram will do just fine.
Once you’ve submitted your idea other members of the community (called “influencers”) review it and ultimately determine whether it has potential to succeed in the market by casting votes for or against your idea.
Even if they spit you out, chances are you’ll learn something in the process that might help you improve the idea. If so, you’re always welcome to try it again.
Winning ideas move into a pipeline of promising concepts that feed Quirky’s own team of engineers and designers. These people work to refine concepts and develop prototypes in cooperation with Quirky’s community of influencers.
Eventually, if enough members of the community commit to purchase the product, it goes into production and finds its way to the larger mass market. And everyone gets paid, both inventors and influencers.
The only down side I see is that Quirky charges you $10 to submit an idea. But that’s a small price to pay, really, especially if you’re confident in your brainchild. If not, it’s just enough to discourage a lot of harebrained stuff from getting tossed in the hopper for the hell of it.
