New Platform: co.labr8 - distributed creativity!

co.labr8.com is a new creative crowdsourcing platform. I had a short but interesting Q&A with Eric Schmitter, the founder of the platform. We discussed the set-up, their marketing & sales strategy, as well as how participants’ contributions are rewarded to stimulate collaboration.

1) What is co.labr8 all about?

There are really two consumers here: The user requesting the ideas, often a business; and the users supplying the ideas.

For the user requesting ideas, I like to think of co.labr8.com as being similar to being able ask a giant room of people to help come up with ideas for a design or request for which your business has a need. For example you could ask “What should my logo look like?” or “What kind of billboard campaign should we run?” The requests could be large, small, quick or long-running - it could be anything! The resulting brainstorming and interaction between all those people – bouncing ideas off each other, adding and subtracting contributions from user to user, would create many new ideas, designs and innovative directions for you and your business. And, it’s not just a lump of random ideas either – since the community votes continually during the project, the best and most relevant idea rise to the top.

And for the user generating the ideas, we have a few incentives. First, people who design, or think creatively do it because they enjoy it. Helping other people out with ideas and information, for many people, is satisfying in its own right – look at the success of Wikipedia and other collaborative ventures on the Internet. But co.labr8.com offers more than altruism – we have a reward system that allows contributing users to earn prizes and cash deposits through PayPal for their effort. Creative users can see their top-voted ideas earn them something other community kudos – although we try to support that as well. We also have an upcoming portfolio system planned where users can show off their ideas as well as partnerships with online career sites so that users can use their time and effort to help self-promote.

2) Who is behind this project? When, where, how did it start?

I bootstrapped the whole venture at this point. It has taken a few years to do it myself during the evenings and weekends. Patents were finalized earlier this year so now we are focusing on getting people to use the platform and provide feedback on future improvements and additions. We are very agile at this point, so we take user feedback seriously and encourage it. We have a few big partnerships in the works, one being a large video game publisher who is interested in using the platform for an upcoming title – so we want to get our kinks worked out before then, obviously.

3) The success of new online platforms largely depends on the number of contributors they are able to attract. What is your marketing strategy to attract new project submitters and contributors?

We are continuing to explore partnerships with companies that can bring their existing user communities into our service to add value to their own products. For example, the video game publisher that I mentioned could use co.labr8.com to gather new ideas and feedback from their customers on an on-going basis – collecting user-generated monsters, maps and storylines to put into the game itself. Another avenue for partnerships includes getting our platform into the education system. Getting teachers to use co.labr8.com for classroom activities will open up our service to a fantastic, proven word-of-mouth medium: Students. And, as we all know – students are creative, talented and certainly could benefit from the rewards!

4) Most crowdsourcing platforms offer regular idea or design contests, meaning: each individual sends in his or her proposal, the contest organizer selects, and the winner gets the reward. On co.labr8, I really like the idea of collaboration and community voting, which taps into the creativity & wisdom of the crowd on a whole other level. However, a natural problem that comes with collaboration is the issue of dividing rewards amongst contributors. I understand that Ideapoints are rewarded for each action you contribute on co.labr8. Could you give an overview of the system that is behind this?

We use a point system similar to popular credit cards or airline mileage. You earn points and then can redeem those points for prizes and cash. When a user starts a project or a request for ideas, they will specify what the reward for the winning idea will be at the end of the project. The Ideapoints can come from the user’s own point balance or can be purchased outright with a credit card. Users earn Ideapoints whenever they contribute to an existing idea, add their own idea, refer other users, etc. However, most of the earned Ideapoints for a user will come from having the winning idea at the close of the project. We use a proprietary method of calculating and weighting the user contributions for an idea, but the end result is that the reward is split among all the collaborators for the winning idea. The original owner of an idea will naturally get a larger share, but all users who contribute to the winning idea will get some share of the reward. The users can redeem their Ideapoints for a variety of prizes – our Premium Members can redeem their Ideapoints for PayPal cash deposits.

5) Let’s talk financials to end with… How much does it cost me as a company or individual to organize a project on co.labr8 (suppose I don’t have Ideapoints)? From the contributors’ point of view, I’ve read that as a premium member you can redeem 11,000 Ideapoints for 100 USD, meaning that you can earn at maximum about 100 USD per project that you win. Will you try to boost these prizes in the future?

As a business or an individual starting a project or request, you can specify whatever amount of Ideapoints for the reward that you wish. We have a minimum of 150 Ideapoints for the reward and no maximum at this time. Therefore, if you wish to put up 100,000 Ideapoints (currently equivalent to around 1,000 USD) as your project’s reward, you certainly can. Keep in mind that you have to purchase those points if you haven’t already earned them! As for redeeming, we are constantly adjusting the system to accommodate real usage. Premium Members can redeem Ideapoints for cash every 24 hours. In the future, we will match the redemption amounts to the project reward amounts so that users don’t have to redeem 5 times over a period of a week to claim a 50,000 point reward! So the answer is, yes, we will be adjusting the prizes – we just need to see what the real usage looks like over time.

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