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Interesting thoughts by Catharina van Delden of unserAller.de…

Are you a German Quirky.com? Why (not)?

For readers who aren’t familiar with us at unserAller: we empower customers to collaborate and develop products that they would like to see brought to market. Generally, these are consumer goods, like food or toiletries.

By allowing consumers to have a hand in development, we are able to reduce the risk of market failure for new products. We also create brand ambassadors for these new products. Consumers currently have a voice by choosing which products to buy: for instance, they may choose organic or fair-trade products in order to tell corporations to treat the environment or their suppliers well. But at unserAller, they can voice those wishes directly. Companies should listen to their consumers and take them seriously.

In terms of the collaboration aspect, there are similarities between unserAller and Quirky. We both aim to create products on our platforms that suit a mass of people. Beyond that, I think that we are quite different. The principle difference is that we see unserAller as a communication platform for companies. We neither produce nor sell the developed products ourselves.

At unserAller, we want to involve the “average” consumer who has no professional design skills to contribute only “mini-suggestions” that come together as a whole, mostly for consumer goods like food items. Quirky asks designers and other professionals to evolve concepts from a technical standpoint.

unserAller is designed as a Facebook application and makes use of many of Facebook’s social networking functions to make it easier to discuss new ideas with friends.

Take, for example, our first product developed on unserAller: mustard. Over 1,500 consumers participated and designed three major product attributes:
1. Kind of mustard: for dipping
2. Flavors: mango curry, wasabi, and plum cassis
3. The design of the jar’s label.

All together, 11,000 Facebook users participated to develop a line of products for a Bavarian mustard manufacturer. The mustard is now on sale on the unserAller online store (www.unseraller.de/shop).

What is your key differentiator in the market?

We offer companies a chance for close, honest, and direct communication with consumers about the most interesting and engaging topic a company can discuss: new product development.

In addition, we offer everybody—not only professionals—the chance to participate and strive for real collective and collaborative development, meaning that all members of the community are able to stand behind the new product. Suggestions are made anonymously, and the ideas are then iterated and further developed. Anybody can participate in any of the steps, and the final results are approved by the community. We bring together the crowd and let them collectively reach decisions and conclusions.

Most companies cannot afford to build such communications channels themselves, nor can they afford to spend their marketing budget on building a community like ours. unserAller offers a platform that attracts interested consumers who are eager to play a part in product development—or who just like to be creative and talk about it with their friends.

I would also like to mention a detail that really sets us apart: unserAller does not only happen online. User innovation toolkits are sent out to participants so that they can build prototypes at home. These packages create an important online/offline connection because they are both fun for the consumer as well as increase the quality of contributions.

What do you want to achieve in one year?

Eventually, we want unserAller to become a symbolic stamp that is put on products to let buyers know, “I have been created by a community and therefore I am a better product.” Of course, this is probably more realistic as a five-year goal!

In one year, we want to have grown the community significantly, and to have helped at least five consumer products be brought to market through our platform. Also in one year, unserAller will not just be a Facebook application—we are in the process of building a stand-alone version as well.

What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams in the future?

We sell development projects to companies—either on a per-project fee or with a revenue-sharing model. Aside from this, we strive at developing our own products and license the concept to our clients.

Eva Missling is the founder and CEO of 12designer GmbH, a young company based in the heart of Europe, Berlin. After more than 8 years in the design industry, she currently uses her experience as founder of an online marketplace where customers with design demands meet the right creatives to get the job done; it doesn’t matter if it is about naming, slogans, logos, websites or multimedia clips. Quick facts about 12designer.com: more than 7400 registered creatives, 1100 accomplished projects, 250.000 € business volume and available in 5 languages - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

1) Which 3 main trends does 12designer.com tap into?

First the idea of crowdsourcing itself, that remains to be understood in a practical way by many of our main targets, start-ups and SMEs. The delegation of tasks to the crowd is translated concretely, in the case of 12designer, into a platform where customers can obtain creative solutions, such as logos, flyers, websites, multimedia clips, or naming, slogans, and more. Then, our online roots make internet the natural place to deepen the tendency of building relations and achieving results through it. Taking into account that we are a young and small company, too, we also understand our customers as partners. Third, we offer a real enhancement of cost-effectiveness for entrepreneurs, by giving them the ability of having more professional solutions than those given by their nephews or neighbors, for a price that they can pay. It is about bringing new people to a market that virtually didn’t exist before, not only on the side of customers, but also of talented designers that are starting their professional careers.

2) What is your unique selling point in the market (compared to 99designs, crowdSPRING, etc.)?

Compared to our main competitors, I can mention some advantages. For instance, we offer more than just design projects. Start-ups looking for a name can do an online XXL brainstorm session with us, in order to find the right one. Sound and multimedia creations are also possible: radio spots, computer games effects, screencasts and webvideos, all that can be done on our platform! We support 4 more languages besides English: German, Italian, French and Spanish. It means that, despite a geographically united world under the internet, we are able to reach out groups with different cultural backgrounds, and, as a major European crowdsource marketplace, we do understand European client needs better. Finally, and most important, we keep a close contact to them and our creative community, what has ensured a level of satisfaction that we want to keep in the next stages of our development. If there is someone out there not satisfied, I’ll be happy to be in touch and talk about any shortcomings that may have happened.

3) Which challenges have proven most successful? Why?

The most successful? I would say the launch of 12designer itself. We had a demand much higher than we thought just in the beginning of everything, when we planned to maintain for a while a German version only. We realized, though, that it would be our chance to develop further and launch a Spanish and English version for the website, which happened only two months after. With that, we would give a worldwide channel to our platform and also tap into the market of my sponsor Grupo Intercom, Spain. We became market leaders there in a matter of a couple of months.

4) What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams?

We have recently introduced a Freemium model, after a completely free period gave the platform credibility. It has been a success so far. Right now, we have the free 12basic option, that limits the number of participants of a project to 12, and 12plus, paid, with unlimited participation and advanced options such as privacy. A 12premium project option is also on the way. As this will keep us busy for the next months, we don’t plan to have another revenue stream in the near future.

Try it for free: To strenghten their positioning as start-ups’ partner, 12designer is going to offer on the 15th of July the possibility for everyone  to create projects with advanced features for FREE. No fees will be charged. An excellent opportunity to try it out!

I am keen to share with you these interesting insights from Pepijn de Visscher, President of Brainrack.com. Pepijn shares the vision, learning points, positioning, and revenue model behind his new crowdsourcing platform, which launched its first challenge in March 2010. Brainrack is a crowdsourcing platform that allows creative students to support organizations by providing fresh and innovative ideas.

1) What’s the vision behind Brainrack?

The vision behind Brainrack stems from the fact that many great ideas remain unutilized for two reasons: First, there is a general lack of portals where people can go to submit their ideas. Second, organizations rarely ask people to come up with ideas. People and companies alike share a tendency to keep problems to themselves. The consequence is that only a few people are then aware of the problems companies have, hence any potential solutions remain unutilized. Many great ideas never see the light simply because organizations don’t ask for it, often not even their own employees. Look at this Wall Street Journal article on how idea generation should be done. Brainrack’s vision is to create a portal for organizations, which allows for them to open up to smart ideas.

2) What have been the largest difficulties Brainrack experienced?

Our biggest problem has been persuading organizations that it’s not embarrassing to share some of your problems or challenges with the world. Companies often consider it weak to ask the crowd questions like “What new market should we pursue?”. They are concerned that people will think that they can’t solve their own problems, or that they have no clue about what market they should enter. I question the validity of this reasoning though. It is no secret that every company is looking for new markets to enter and one good idea could be of extraordinarily value. In fact, it should be considered a strong and innovative sign that companies are seeking alternative ways to gain inspiration and ideas.

3) How do you position Brainrack in an increasingly dense market?

By taking a niche. We focus on students whose ideas consist of 3 or 4 pages. Generally between $3,000 and $9,000 in prize money is distributed amongst the winning innovators. The average time to compose a winning idea is around one or two nights of work. We consider our range of prize money to balance well between affordability for companies and fair compensation for the winning students.

4) What is your revenue model? Do you plan for other revenue streams?

Currently we charge $99 plus 25% of the prize money. We don’t differentiate between customers. We consider ourselves relatively affordable in contrast to some of our competitors which charge $10,000 - $15,000 per challenge. We prefer to aim for the Fortune 5,000,000 rather than the Fortune 500 (inspired by ReWork, written by the founders of 37Signals). We have some plans for future revenues, but as of now we aren’t quite there yet.

5) What has been your biggest/most unexpected learning point so far?

“Niche first, world later”, an excellent quote from Drew Houston (Founder Dropbox). I wish I ran into that quote 6 months earlier. When we started, we focused basically on everyone. The philosophy we share is that “out of the box” ideas come from unexpected places, therefore everyone should be targeted. By focusing on students, it would technically violate our philosophy since it implies that you automatically ignore other market segments, but there is simply no other way. Seeking a niche is the only way to build a business.