Open Beats Closed: The conversation continues...
Thanks, everyone, for the thoughtful responses and ideas. I’m jazzed by your enthusiasm.
I’ll provide some feedback to many of your comments. First, though, I want to address some of the characteristics of a great team, and why these characteristics are so important to Quirky’s success.
The hallmark of a great team in any organization is that everyone’s voice is heard. People debate and enthusiastically argue for what they think is best for the team. And then, ultimately, a decision must be made. All teams have participants and a decision maker. It could be the CEO, the manager, the coach, whoever – but for progress to be had, someone must be responsible for making what are sometimes difficult decisions, quickly, and often with incomplete or imperfect information.
That’s what we are. Quirky is a team: employees and community, in this together. Ideas for how to improve will come from the community and from Quirky’s staff. We want the best ideas to win, regardless of source. Often the ideas will be polar opposites and often our decisions will be difficult ones. Our commitment is to listen intently, and then do our best to make the best possible decision in any given situation.
We’re young -- a work in progress. We’re going to make some mistakes. But we’ll constantly be learning, constantly trying to get better. Our goal is to be the best team we can be.
Ok, on to some feedback:
Improve the voting criteria. We hear you. This has been brought up a number of times and we’re actively researching new ways to do this. Stay tuned. We expect to roll out some changes in late spring.
Can we help sell to retailers? We’re intrigued. Obviously, with our business model, our focus on consumer products (low margin to begin with), and our commitment to sharing revenue with the community, we’ll always have to figure out ways to do more with less. If we can include the community, that’s even better. We’re trying to think through how we could effectively do this. How to certify someone? How to ensure all sales reps are terrific ambassadors of the Quirky brand and community? How do we ensure that reps don’t play favorites with products? How do we manage negotiating terms and conditions? How would reps coordinate with our ops team to understand inventory levels, timing, etc.? There’s a lot here. We’ll post this sometime soon as its own topic and begin vetting more thoroughly with you. In the meantime, where else could the community participate? Customer service? Site quality assurance? Application development? Marketing? We love the ideas! Keep ‘em coming.
Show us the votes: The purpose of voting on weekly product ideas is so you can let us know which products most interest you and so we can get specifics on the different criteria and how the products rank on each. In the end, we’re responsible for deciding which product has the best chance to be a commercial success, so that we can share as much money as possible back with the community. Our internal evaluation includes an IP search, a review of the competitive set, whether we can manufacture it within our cost structure, whether we can price it competitively, is it on-brand, and does it have a chance to make an impact and solve a real problem. Votes help guide these decisions – in a big way. But ultimately we have to use our judgment, experience and expertise to make the final call. We don’t want the person with the most friends on Facebook to have an unnecessary advantage. We also want to look at the underlying demographic information on each of the votes to give them appropriate weighting based on the product type and category. Showing the votes will just raise more questions than answers. But we do want to help educate and to provide more clarity about our product choices, so…
Tell us why you chose what you did. You’re right. We should be doing this. Each week, we’ll provide an explanation of why we chose how we did in a given product eval round. Give us a little time to get this right. We want our explanation to be illustrative and actionable for the community and to help promote stronger and stronger idea submissions. We’ll begin testing this and will probably roll it out sometime in May.
I’m worried that community growth may be bad for me individually. A couple thoughts here. First, growth means change, and we understand that change can make some of our early members a little nervous. But a rising tide will absolutely raise all ships. It may be a little tougher to earn influence in each product, but the influence will be worth far more in real dollars. A more robust community means more products make it into production, get sold directly on the site and get distributed domestically and internationally. It means more and better ideas, more word of mouth, better comments and ideas in the development phase and more brand ambassadors out spreading the word. Secondly, the idea of multiple categories is something we’ll consider once the number of product submissions grows beyond a certain point, or when the ratio of influencers to products to influence gets too high. Before we get there, though, we need to get better at what we’re doing now. We’re trying to build something enduring and profound. To do that, we need an incredibly strong foundation and we don’t want to stretch too far too soon. We’ll be monitoring this closely.
Can we put up barriers to limit the number of influencers (fees, limits on product involvement, seniority for existing influencers, etc.)? In line with the point above, we really want to be free of any barriers for participation. Not everyone can afford the $99 product submission fee, and we really think it’s important that as many people as possible be able to influence and help build great products. For now at least, we’re not considering putting up any barriers.
Can we verify accounts to limit/stop gaming? We want to make sure there isn’t any gaming either. We have a strong stopgap in place today: when someone wants to withdraw money, that person has to have a W-9 tax form issued. If we ever see one person with more than one form, we will instantly remove that person from the community. It hasn’t happened yet. That said, with a community like Quirky, there will always be someone trying to figure out if there’s a way to game the system. We’re watching closely.
How can reviewing names and logos be made easier? Again, we agree. This process could be made a whole lot easier. Our design and tech teams are beginning to evaluate options on this subject. Give us 6 to 8 weeks, and we’ll make it better.
Is it better to use polls or open-ended questions when asking for community feedback? There are pros and cons to each option and we’ll continue to use both. The threshold question worked great as an open-ended question because it sparked debate and resulted in us looking at the topic from totally different perspectives. We wouldn’t have gotten that kind of insight from a poll.
Is it possible for there to be some discretionary influence given to someone who provides a great comment or moves a product in a new/better direction? We already do this to some extent, but we’re continuing to look for ways to evolve our influence engine to handle comment influence better.
Thanks again to everyone for your enthusiasm and participation. You gave us a lot to think about, and we’ll continue brainstorming ways to address all your points. You may not always agree with our decisions, but you will always be heard, and we’re working extraordinarily hard to make decisions that are in the best interest for all of us.
