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7 Signs You Should Start a Crowdsourcing Project

BY MAUREEN MURTHA | 3 min read

Sometimes it's hard to tell if a new venture is the right one, or just sounds really cool. With all the hype, you might wonder if crowdsourcing is just another fad, set to fade away. A bit of skepticism is healthy, but if this list starts to sound familiar...you might want to take a closer look at starting a campaign.

You’ve Run Out of Ideas

Creative ideation should be the easy part, but these days it's getting harder and harder to get inspired. Maybe it's burnout, maybe it's just a dry spell, but either way, your innovation well has run dry. But what to do in this situation when you still need ideas? Well, you can always try asking the crowd. 

You have too many ideas

When it rains, it pours. While it may seem like a good problem to have, an overabundance of good business ideas creates a paradox of choice. How does one prioritize? Where does the energy go? Should you do start pursuing multiple, and see what pans out? Here comes the crowd, to help you decide. Your crowdsourcing project (or projects) can set up participants to help you select the best ideas and grow them. Sometimes it's nice to be told what to do.

Work-life balance is seriously out of whack

More about the rain and the pouring. When you've got a lot of great stuff happening, it can feel exhilarating -- until you realize you've forgotten to eat for a full day, again. So when pulling those 80+ hour workweeks, remember that a huge chunk of your efforts can be crowdsourced. Smaller, straight-forward, and repetitive tasks can be "crowdsourced" via outsourcing platforms such as Remote.com. 
Open-ended, conceptual, or projects requiring very specialized skills might be best left to a traditional crowdsourcing project or longer campaign. It may seem like a longer time investment than just "doing it yourself," but that's a perception trick. The amount of time shifting those burdens to someone else will save you, in the long run, is invaluable. 

You've had bad luck with consultants and contractors

In an effort to get good advice in a short amount of time, contacting experts seems like the logical thing to do. In many cases, contractors and consultants can provide you with extremely valuable insight and leave the project or business better than they found it. Like most things of this nature, it comes with a huge price tag. Unfortunately, the high cost of these services means one bad experience can leave you feeling burned for a long time. Consultants are not magical -- they can't see every side of a problem, no matter how good they are -- but most importantly, they are just one person. This is the inherent brilliance of crowdsourcing, it eliminates the folly of trusting the first opinion you hear, and instead reinforces the emerging best solutions with many, many other perspectives.

Your favorite organizations are doing it

Did you grow up with a bit of envy for those astronauts on space walks? Do you think NASA is one of the coolest government agencies, ever? Do you know that this massive institution loves crowdsourcing? That's right, in just the last year, HeroX alone has run FIVE crowdsourcing projects contracted and/or sponsored by NASA Tournament Labs. It doesn't stop there, either - some of your most useful household platforms: Netflix, Facebook, and Zillow have all embraced crowdsourcing for some of the most challenging and important work they do. Why are these monolithic organizations so comfortable with throwing their ideas and vulnerabilities to the wind and see what catches? Because they know it works; they know that no matter how much they can pay and how well they recruit, someone, somewhere else, has a better answer to their problem. 

You've got “disruption” on the brain

Speaking of tech companies, we haven't stopped hearing the buzz about "industry disruption" ever since Uber started patrolling our neighborhood blocks. If you somehow haven't heard, to "distrupt" an industry (or a market) is to snipe their value proposition with a completely different, sometimes even upside-down, way of getting from A to B. In Uber's case, it was to eliminate the need for a vertically integrated taxi company that owns cars and hires drivers...and instead just empowered people with cars to chauffer their neighbors around for quick cash. Amazon.com dared to ask if people would actually buy into the idea of having all of their shopping done site unseen, delivered through the mail -- and it eliminated the largest overhead in the big-box business, closed distribution lines.
If you're getting excited and antsy just wondering what the next big "disruption" will be, chances are you've taken a stab at coming up with your own idea. You know what can help flesh out that idea and provide the mechanics for implementing it? Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing can and will do that.

You’re in desperate need of some outside perspective

So work-life balance isn't too bad, your projects are all on track, and maybe consultants have done right by you. Still, you're wondering if you could be doing it better, or at least in a completely different way. Call it curiosity, or the desire to be audited (gently) -- the crowd is your friend here, too. People from all over the world can provide excellent insight into what you're missing or opportunities that are right in front of your nose, but going unnoticed all the same.

What's the diagnosis?  

Now that you've seen a sampling of the signs, do you think it's time to investigate crowdsourcing? You're in luck, we have a platform for that. Even if you're not ready to start today, you can begin investigating the finer details fo what it would take to be ready. Ready to explore a little deeper? Go to our How it Works page and see what speaks to you. Oh, and good luck. 
 

 

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