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Crowdsourcing Moved Your Cheese

May 16, 2011 | 6 Comments

Over the past three years, I’ve written extensively about my company – crowdSPRING, crowdsourcing and speculative work.

Although the debates about speculative work in the creative industries (especially design) continue, the arguments typically are regurgitated rants that add little to the discussion. One of the latest, from idsn, falls squarely into that group.

As is often the case, the real gems – and real discussion, is in the comments. Sam’s comment from a few days ago reflects my own views on the subject:

I went to RISD and I’m a creative director for a major design firm and have led the creative groups for some of the top agencies in in NY and London and I couldn’t diagree with your article more. It’s such an old fashioned approach! You’re a PC, not a Mac… Crowd sourcing moved your cheese…

Don’t you believe that there will always be a place in the world for talented designers? Because there will! And there will always be a place for agencies and design firms. And there will always be a need for beautiful design.

Your argument, in my opinion, is elitist and lacks an understanding of the age we’re living in. People don’t want “perfect” anymore. We’re not in an age of “high design” or “high art”. We’re in an age of DIY and people want different things — there are as many different needs as there are people and projects. Your argument is the same argument against the SLR (and then digital) camera.”Oh no, photography will be ruined, everything will be crap”… Ok, well not everyone is Richard Avedon, but is he the only one who should be privileged enough to take pictures of his kids? Why should individuals and small companies be held hostage by the cost structure that we designers have set for the industry? What are you afraid of? What right do you have, sitting in your typographically decorated office, have to decide what someone should or shouldn’t use for their logo? And what makes you think that a “designer” just because they have been trained at some school can solve any problem? I can’t tell you how many hot-shot, know-it-all designers I’ve had to pull off a project because they wanted to force their aesthetic on the client without regard for the business problem.

My suggestion to the author — stop worrying about other designers who want to reply to Crowdspring RFPs and focus on your clients. It’s not about you — and it never has been…

What do you think?

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How To Respond If A Customer Thinks You Run The Bunny Ranch

April 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment

The customer service team at my company, crowdSPRING, has answered over 40,000 requests from customers. Few have been as entertaining as a recent note which opened with: “hello whores” and then proceeded to discuss vegetarianism, good & evil, moral high ground, and my personal favorite – capitalist baggage.  I wrote about that unusual note – and our response – in crowdSPRING’s blog today: Whore, Vegetarianism, Moral High Ground & Capitalist Baggage.

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup Tips, Strategy Tagged With: ,

To Succeed, Don’t Obsess About Reasons You Might Fail

April 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

A few months ago, I talked about why startups must focus first on the problem, not the solution. A few days ago, I talked about the need to refocus from time to time.

There’s another side to focus that’s rarely discussed – focusing (and often obsessing) on reasons you might fail versus focusing on reasons you might succeed.

To succeed, don’t obsess about the reasons you might fail. If you do, you WILL fail.

The recent reactions from the developer communities to moves by Apple and Twitter underscored both the importance of making sure that you don’t tie your business to that of another company, and also the importance of making sure that you obsess about and focus on success – and not on failure.

At the end of the day, even if there are 99 ways you could fail and only 1 way you could succeed, there’s a very basic and undeniable fact: you can only succeed if you focus on the 1 way you can succeed. Focusing on the many ways you could fail will NOT lead to success. I discuss this in the following video:

What do you think? Do you agree that focusing on possible failures significantly increases the chances that you WILL fail?

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup Tips, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Startup Tip: Dealing With Customer Resistance To Change

March 17, 2010 | 4 Comments

Whether you are a small or a Fortune 50 company, customers typically resist attempts to change products or services they perceive work well. People prefer to deal with the things they already know rather than get used to something new. But innovative companies must constantly find ways to improve their products and services.

How can innovation and resistance to change be reconciled? In this short video, I talk about the lessons we’ve learned along the way in introducing changes to the crowdSPRING marketplace.

What have you done to help your customers or your community deal with change?

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Five Things You Can Do To Improve Your Company’s Customer Service

February 11, 2010 | Leave a Comment

I’ve talked previously about the need for startups to differentiate from their competitors and the need to understand your competitive advantage. For example, my company, crowdSPRING, differentiates by delivering outstanding customer service to our community of nearly 70,000 users from nearly every country in the world. In the following video, I offer five suggestions based on our experience, of the things you can do to improve your company’s customer service.

Can you suggest other tips for companies who want to provide world class customer service to their customers?

Filed Under: Business, Startup Tips Tagged With: , , , ,

Focus On Conversions, Not Just On Site Traffic

February 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

Many companies, especially small business and startups, obsess about the amount of traffic to their site.  Site traffic is important – it brings attention and the opportunity to convert visitors into users or paying customers. But traffic alone isn’t enough. In the following video, I offer three reasons why you should spend as much time focusing on your conversion efforts as you do focusing on your marketing and other traffic-generating efforts.

What do you think? Are conversions as important as traffic-generating efforts?

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Apply Agile Thinking To Everything You Do

February 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

Some of you have heard the term “agile software development”, which refers to a process of software development based on frequent, iterative development. crowdSPRING has been applying the principles of agile development to our own software development efforts for the past year.

We were bogged down throughout much of 2009 launching new products in part because our thinking was too grand. As a result, we ran into too many roadblocks that require further discussion, research, debate, and planning. This caused us to be less effective – and delayed product launches and improvements.

About six months ago, we looked at our non-software development processes (business, strategy, finance, etc.) and wondered why we also couldn’t apply many of the same principles (of agility) to those processes.If you read the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto, you quickly realize that the same principles can apply to many things outside of software development.

About 6 months ago, we started applying principles of agility to everything we do. This has helped us immensely to streamline our processes, to reach quicker decisions, and to iterate our policies and practices much quicker than we had done in the past. We see clear advantages to this approach – I discuss some of these advantages in the following video.

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup Tips, Strategy, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

crowdSPRING Interview (Beyond The Pedway)

January 15, 2010 | 3 Comments

A few days ago, Tim Jahn of Beyond the Pedway spent the morning talking with me and co-founder Mike Samson about crowdSPRING, crowdsourcing, chia Lincoln (see the video!), and our community. Tim did a very nice job editing – here’s a concise version of our conversation:

Beyond The Pedway is a weekly video podcast dedicated to discovering creative companies in Chicago. Beyond The Pedway seeks to learn about the people behind Chicago’s creative companies, what they do, and why they do it in Chicago. A song from a local Chicago band is featured during the intro and credits of each episode. There are other interviews with Chicago startups on Beyond The Pedway (including 37signals, Threadless, Groupon, and many others) and I’d encourage you to take some time to watch them.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , , ,

What Numbers Should Be Important To Startups And Small Businesses?

January 14, 2010 | 1 Comment

A number of small business owners and young entrepreneurs have asked me what numbers and measurements are most important to crowdSPRING. We measure many different things, so there’s no simple answer to that question. But in thinking about the categories of numbers we measure, I came up with a list of five categories – I discuss those categories in the following short video:

(I originally posted this video earlier this week on the crowdSPRING blog).

What numbers do you find important in your business?

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup Tips, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Startup Tip: Selecting Software Technologies For Your Startup

January 4, 2010 | 2 Comments

You have a great idea for an Internet startup – and maybe even seed funding – but how do you pick the right software to power your startup? I offer 5 suggestions in the following video, based on my experience with crowdSPRING.

Over the next two days, I plan to cover two closely related topics for technology startups: knowing when it’s time to make a change to a better platform (when you realize your initial software doesn’t scale well), and the challenge of migrating customer data.

And if you have additional suggestions or questions – please feel free to leave a comment.

Filed Under: Business, Startup Tips, Technology Tagged With: , , ,
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