✋ Trends #0042 — Crowdsourcing

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🏁 Players

1. Design
   • Next Stop Design
   • DesignCrowd
   • Threadless
2. Newsletters
   • Kick Ass Letters
   • Inside.com
   • Trends.vc
3. Books
   • Audience First
   • MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook
   • Business Model Generation
4. Research
   • Prolific
   • ParticipAid
   • Amazon Mechanical Turk
5. Cloud Storage
   • Storj
   • Sia
   • Filecoin

🔮 Predictions

• We'll see more crowdsourced networks like Helium. The need for permissionless access can outweigh the cost of inefficient, decentralized networks. Cuba is a natural experiment.
• Crowdsourced governance will move from stocks to fractionally-owned assets and DAOs.

☁️ Opportunities

• Use crowdsourced data to find your next investment. See Product Explorer and Growth Ranker.
• Use crowdsourced data to find out what to build next. Webflow's wishlist is full of Micro-SaaS opportunities.
• Crowdsource your growth tool. Martin invites you to add your Carrd site to Drrac's directory. The gallery is used to promote his digital product and XaaS businesses.
• Crowdsource content marketing. Piggyback on the others' platforms with standardized interviews. See Build In Public, Indie Hackers and No Code MBA.
• Reward contributors
  • Trends.vc gives shoutouts
  • Genius has IQ points
  • Stack Overflow provides a reputation score
  • GitHub has stars
  • Yelp offers badges
  • Reddit has Karma
  • MTurk pays participants

🔑 Key Lessons

• Look at revealed, not stated, preferences. Google, YouTube and Twitter use behavior-based crowdsourcing. We may lie. But actions don't.
• Crowdsourcing moves civilization forward. The human colossus is built on the shoulders of previous achievements.

😠 Haters

"Behavior-based crowdsourcing leads to addictive experiences."

This proves it's effectiveness. But should not be abused. We discussed the pros and cons of gamification in a separate report.

"You mentioned Kickstarter. This is crowdfunding."

Yes. And crowdsourcing (of demand and capital).

"These platforms steal data from users."

Each platform has different rules and users opt-in.

"mTurk pays below minimum wage."

Who's minimum wage? And would it be better if mTurk didn't exist?

"What about low-quality contributions?"

You can crowdsource quality assurance. Stack Overflow and Genius use voting systems.

"What's the difference between crowdsourcing and outsourcing?"

They are not mutually exclusive. Crowdsourcing is outsourcing. But the "payment" may be intrinsic.

🔗 Links

1. How to Find Hidden Value That Others Miss - Franklin Leonard, founder of The Black List, built a system to find the best screenplays.
2. Pieter Levels - As a solo founder, he's crowdsourced products like the MAKE book, NomadList, Hoodmaps and more.
3. A Masterclass in Crowdsourcing — Duolingo tapped into hard-to-find skills to scale.
4. Gamification - Study incentive design to successfully crowdsource.
5. Micro-Marketplaces - Like paid communities, crowdsourcing is native to this model.

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