CrowdSourcing - anyone tried it?

[kessa]

Hi All,

A couple of years ago I had a great company / brand name in mind for a product for but for various reasons (which I wont bore you with), it wasn't the right time for me to setup a business and the domain names I wanted were in use.

Long story short, the domain names are still taken, and someone has since TM'd the name so it's time for me to start looking at other options.

I've tried coming up with some more ideas myself but I keep coming back to the idea of my original brand name - I really liked it as it was short, easy to say, descriptive, hard to mis-spell, non specific (in terms of region and user base) etc.... so I wonder if I'm a bit too close to the problem.

As a result, I was tempted to try Crowd Sourcing.

It sounds like a really good way to reach a large number of collective minds, and I was just wondering if anyone had tried it, and what your thoughts were.

One of the sites I've been looking at provides some "examples" of the kind of things people submit, and to be honest, a large number looked pretty useless..... but.... there seemed to be some users amongst them who had obviously put some thought into it, and I guess it only takes 1 real gem to be onto a winner.

So:

a) have you ever used crowd sourcing?
b) what aspect did you use it for? (i.e company name creation, logo design, website design, etc)
c) what did you think of it? Were the responses any good
d) Ultimately, did you use any of the suggestions?

I'm guessing we can't mention sites specifically although it would be interesting to know if any particular site has a better sucess rate / user base, than any other

Thanks

 

[MediYeah]

I havent used it myself, but I do regularly check in on a couple of crowd sourcing websites.

It might not be a bad idea to give it a go - most of the ones I look at, you offer a cash prize to the winner, but if you're not satisfied with any of the responses you get the money back. There are probably some T&C I haven't looked into, but that is the gist of it.

And to be honest, some of the contests on there have produced some really inventive and creative ideas. Let me know if you want me to PM you a couple of links.

 

[TotallySport]

There are a number of posts about crowdsourcing on the forum, it might be a good idea to do a quick search to see what other people have put.

 

[Homer J Simpson]

I'd never even heard of it before........

 

[kessa]

@TotallySport - thx. TBH I did actually have a quick search prior to posting, but unfortunately the search facility on here isn't that great and doesn't seem to support boolean searching so I got a mass of results - but they weren't actually that relevant.

If you know if any really useful posts in particular though, please feel free to point me in their direction and I'll happily check them out

 

[winsoar]

I've used Pickydomains many times to get ideas for domain names, their service is very good. You get some ideas you wouldn't have thought of yourself.

Next I shortlist the best ones and then ask as many people as I can, including posting a poll on my Facebook account to find the best one.

Ultimately I would decide the winner but it's very good to get other peoples input.

 

[lockyer]

We have had a great experience with crowd sourcing, but after a lot of trawling the examples of work, we picked a south American site called choosa.net

I did a blog post about it here

http://www.lockyers.co.uk/2011/02/lockyers-has-a-mid-life-crisis-crowd-sourcing-fixes-it/

 

[Newcott]

Kessa - I'm running my second film crowdsourcing project on the link in my Sig.

1st project went well & got some good support. We're about half way through my second and would like a little more support but things are going well.

We've used IndieGoGo - we wanted to use KickStarter but you had to have an American Bank account. Still their support is pretty good

 

[kessa]

Thanks for the input all. It sounds like most of them offer a kind of money back guarantee (although all still seem to charge a non-refundable listing fee), so I've picked 1 to try. We'll see how it goes and I'll report back if I have any interesting to share.