HydraDuo won with 113 votes.

I had 121 votes one week and didn't win. ;-(

We all know votes are a joke and they have no value.

Considering Votes + Rating = Top 5 finishers this round that move on to staff review, I have to disagree.. Unless you know something I don't..

Remember that the Top 5 are selected from a metric composed of Rating, Votes, and Comments. Below are the results from my two wins to date.

TAPE STAMP
submitted to product 0040 on 04/06/10 at 12:50 AM 7.143 Rating 243 Votes 141 Comments

SPLASH STACKS
submitted to product 0052 on 07/12/10 at 02:27 PM 6.2767 Rating 212 Votes 93 Comments

However, giving hope to those who have never broken 200 votes here's an example of one of my top rated submissions that didn't win, and then a lesson in the fickle nature of resubmissions. Notice how the winning assumptions of the community become severely tainted at what point a product doesn't win during it's first round of submission. Can a product really go from GREAT to TERRIBLE? Anything is possible in the land of Quirky...

DRY INGREDIENT MEASURE
submitted to product 0045 on 05/04/10 at 02:45 PM 6.35 Rating 275 Votes 132 Comments

submitted to product 0057 on 08/23/10 at 02:18 AM 4.0331 Rating 9 Votes 14 Comments

@Jared... As a note I hope your example illustrates that your competition is getting stiffer... I'm sure someone could work up a whole thesis on the psychology surrounding this site though...

Competition is surely getting steeper! HydraDuo won on its second submission and with only 113 votes! However with 275 votes and a rating above 5 for his Dry Ingredient measure I wonder why exactly it did not win. I couldn't expect Go Caddy to of beat those votes but maybe I'm wrong.

@Cody
Recall that Go Caddy came from a less democratic Quirky era of decision making than we live in today. Also, with us likely seeing 100+ submissions each week now that the cost is down to $10 per submission I imagine we'll see less consensus on one idea and the product of the week will only have around 100 votes...unless of course the community grows at an equal ratio to that of the increased submissions. :-)

@Jared - You failed to mention that 75 of this would be yours. ;-) Ha!

Joshua, I think a better equation is, (Votes put through algorithm) + (Ratings put through algorithm) + (Comments put through algorithm) = top five point finishers. Since the QS can "adjust" the value of the votes, ratings, and comments (not that they necessarily do), votes may or may not be important.

I clearly saw in my entry that the product didn't get rated and it pulled down the average by half, which destroyed its chances. Suggested they don't average any group equal to zero. Then, we'll won't get bias from people who don't evaluate at all.

I have come to the conclusion that this all just a black box as far as Quirky is concerned. So i don't put out any energy into it anymore. It is what it is.