OPINION10 September 2009

Social concept testing

A site allows users to submit product concepts and choose which make it to market.

Via @researchrocks on Twitter comes a link to http://www.quirky.com/ - a site offering “social products”. Their process is as follows:

People submit ideas for new productsOther people vote on them and commit to buying themOnce a product reaches a certain number of commitments it goes into production

I’ve not used the site – and I’ll be honest, inventions like the write-on mouse pad don’t set me afire with wonder – but it’s an extremely elegant process. It’s a kind of cafepress (T-shirt designers) for products, or a vanity press for small inventors, with the voting-and-discussion mechanism adding a nice tint of game mechanics.

It’s also a reminder that everything – even the nuts and bolts of product/concept testing! – can be made more interesting and more social. And it underlines Clay Shirky’s idea that one of the really big deals about the web is that it allows small projects to coalesce more easily and even profitably.

Tom Ewing

@RESEARCH LIVE

1 Comment

Mark Herron

15 years ago

Part of what Quirky does is pay community members for submitting the winning product idea and for influencing. or voting for, the winning product. The folks behind Quirky are also behind Kluster(www.kluster.com) and namethis(www.namethis.com). Namethis was a site that allowed users to submit products or companies that needed naming. Community members submitted names and voted on them. Winning namers and those that voted were to be paid for their effort. Namethis shut down several weeks ago owing many community members a lot of money. Namethis continued for months accepting money from clients that waned an item named, but never shared this money with community members. Finally, they announced they were having financial problems and closed up shop with some vague promises of starting back up at some time in the future and vague promises to pay us. Ben Kaufman is the founder of all of these endeavors and I just want to caution people about him. While this Quirky idea sounds very interesting, be very careful with your dealings with Ben Kaufman and Quirky.

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