Three Places to Crowdsource Your Small Business Ideas

Ideas are great but they have to be marketable if you want to make a living off of them. If you’re a small business owner who wants to expand your products and services or you’re looking to start a new small business you can avoid some expensive mistakes through the power of crowdsourcing. These are three sites where entrepreneurs can get feedback and assistance for $10 or less.

Quirky (http://www.quirky.com/): Quirky is a social product development company. For just $10 you can submit an idea that will immediately go live on the site, which has over 100,000 members. Your idea stays posted for 30 days while people vote and give you feedback. Meanwhile, Quirky staff monitor the most popular ideas and choose two each week for potential development. If your idea gets chosen you earn a “perpetual royalty.” If not, you still get great analytics. Quirky’s track record is very impressive. Since 2009, they’ve helped to develop over 200 products and their retail partners include Bed, Bath & Beyond, Office Max, Toys “R” Us and Barnes & Noble. Their most successful product, Pivot Power, has earned its inventor over $100,000. It’s a rotating power strip that accommodates the bulky power bricks at the end of the plugs for many devices.

GeniusCrowds (http://www.geniuscrowds.com/ ): GeniusCrowds is a community for creating products people want to see in stores. You can submit product ideas for free. The community reviews all the ideas and votes for their favorites. Then, expert panels including GeniusCrowds staff, retailers and manufacturers conduct their own review and select contenders. If your idea gets deemed one of their “genius products,” they build it and you earn royalties. Their Exclusive Product Development Agreement states that you’ll be paid a direct 25%s share of royalties. Even if you don’t get that far, you can earn gift cards just for being a crowd favorite.

Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/): Kickstarter is a funding platform for inventors, artists and other creative types. The emphasis is on creative projects and no money changes hands until a project is fully funded. The most common projects are $5,000 or less so people use it to test concepts or conditionally sell stuff without risk. It’s free to use. You submit a project and within about two days you get a response from a team member to let you know if it meets the guidelines. The key to success is to offer products, benefits and experiences that will motivate people to fund your idea.

Maybe you’ll become the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or maybe you’ll design a new product that becomes your next best seller. Either way, crowdsourcing provides valuable feedback at little cost.