Learn

You'll need a Quirky account to make a purchase or participate in our product development process. It's super easy to sign up:

1. Go to the Quirky home page at www.quirky.com and click on the blue “Sign Up” button on the top right corner.

2. Fill in your name, e-mail address, and desired password, and check the box that indicates that you've read and understood Quirky's Terms & Conditions.

3. Click on the blue "Sign Up" button.

We'll send an activation link to the e-mail address you gave us; click on the link to activate your account and you're all set up. It's free to sign up and fun to get involved, so do it. Come on, do it.

Once you've signed up for a Quirky account, there are tons of ways to get involved!

1. Help a new product take shape by submitting and voting for product ideas, product designs, names, and other phases of the product's development. Click on the "Participate" or "Upcoming" tabs at the top of the Quirky homepage to get started. To submit an idea or browse and vote on other community submissions click the "Participate" tab. Use the "Upcoming" tab to influence the development phases of a product.

2. Place orders for Quirky products. Click on the "Shop" tab or visit www.quirky.com/shop to browse.

3. Promote Quirky products to friends and family and earn a share of the profits through social sales. On your "My Account" page, select the "Social Sales" tab for more information on our referral program and your unique social sales link.

Meet fellow community members by clicking on the " Our Community" link at the bottom of any page, or logging onto www.quirky.com/community. You can browse other user profiles, participate in our community forum, check out our blog, follow us on Twitter, and become a fan on Facebook. There's never a dull moment in Quirktown!

There is no fee to register with Quirky. Community members are welcome to vote, rate, and comment on product ideas. If you want to toss your own product idea into the ring, the submission fee is $10. Check out our answers in the "Submitting Ideas" section for more details!

I'm afraid there is no cure. But the community functions as its own support group, so at least you'll have company!

In order to offer the coolest features and provide the best possible Quirky experience, our website is optimized for modern Internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. Although our (amazing) tech team is hard at work on more robust support for Internet Explorer, it is our professional opinion that downloading a new browser will change your life.

For more in depth questions and answers about how submitting an idea to Quirky pertains to Intellectual Property (IP) issues, check out the Quirky IP FAQ page.

If you don't find the answer you need on the FAQ page, there's a bunch of ways you can contact us. Ask general questions, share suggestions, report problems, or give praise (yes please!) in our support forum at support.quirky.com or e-mail specific questions to questions@quirky.com. You can also join or start a community discussion on the Quirky forums at www.quirky.com/forums.

Influence is a real-time measure of your contributions to a project. You can earn influence either by submitting a winning idea, or by supporting and refining that winning idea.

Think of the Quirky influence engine as a complicated, evolving recipe, made up of many different ingredients. The ingredients are your contributions to the site, which include: submitting a winning product idea; submitting a major edit to an idea before it wins; submitting a winning idea in another phase of the product's development, like a name, logo, industrial design, tagline, etc.; voting for a winning product idea; and voting for a winning idea in another phase of the product's development. More details are available at www.quirky.com/learn#influence.

Eval (the product selection phase) accounts for 60% of overall product influence by default
The Inventor’s Share is 70% (42% Overall)
The Collaborators' Share is 10% (6% Overall)
The Comp Shoppers' Share is 5% (3% Overall)
The Winning Voters' Share is 10% (6% Overall)
The Losing Voters' Share is 5% (3% Overall)
Collaboration Influence goes to the winning voters if there are no accepted collaborations.

Move the mouse cursor over the "vote" button, and it will turn from grey to blue. Just click on it to vote. At the end of every eval round, two groups will be awarded influence for each winning product: 1) people that voted for that product, 2) people that voted for products that were under consideration, but were ultimately passed on during the course of that round. Each voter will be given the same amount of voting influence, depending on which of those two groups they belonged to. The catch is that users are limited to casting 15 votes per day. The vote count will reset each night at Midnight EST.

The 15 vote limit is a measure to prevent over-voting (voting on as many possible ideas in order to have a better chance at getting influence). We realize that not everyone can log on to Quirky every day, but 15 votes per day is meant as an absolute maximum. We are not trying to encourage people to use every possible vote; we are trying to encourage people to vote for the ideas they like the most. If you choose to use every possible vote, thereby ignoring the intent of the system, we will not be sympathetic to complaints regarding the amount of work involved.

Voting for a ton of ideas doesn't guarantee influence! When you vote, you're telling us that you think we should move that product from the general round to "Under Consideration". If we agree and move that idea to "Under Consideration" there is another round of voting. If you vote in this second round, you'll get influence in the product(s) we chose to make from that round regardless of whether you voted for the winning product or not. So get voting!

Hover over the "Problem" or "Solution" section of an idea and click the button with the pencil icon. An edit screen will appear where you can submit your proposed change. If you mark the change as "major", and the original ideator accepts it, you will earn influence!

The submission process is easy:

1) If you don’t have a Quirky account, sign up first. Check out instructions for creating an account in the General FAQ.

2) Click on the “Participate” tab at the top of the page.

3) Click on the “Submit Your Idea” button to, well, submit any idea.

4) Fill out the easy-to-use form and upload image files, videos, sketches, or other inspiration to further your case.

5) Provide payment info for the $10 fee.

Once your idea has been submitted, it will be included in the general product evaluation round for 30 days. Don't forget to jot down the date listed in your confirmation e-mail, so you know when to head back to the site to check out all the buzz around your idea!

Well, you've got to ante up to give your idea the fair shot it deserves. Best case scenario? Your $10 investment takes your idea from a tiny sketch to a professionally manufactured product, on shelves worldwide, earning you a heckuva lot more. Worst case? That 10 bucks gets you extensive community feedback on who liked and didn't like your idea, which serves as focused consumer market research. You then have the option to resubmit your idea, or you can use the valuable market research data to make the thing on your own.

But of course... submit as many ideas as you want. $10 a pop.

We're making invention accessible by allowing regular people to bring their ideas to life without sacrificing their livelihoods. And we’re paying out thousands of dollars in the process! Can we guarantee that someone reading your idea won't run off and attempt to do something similar? Well, no. But we can guarantee that if your idea is selected to move through our unique development process, our expert staff will work their tails off to make it the best it can be, without any additional capital investment on your part. In our opinion, it’s worth the risk.

Deciding whether two ideas are "similar" is done on a case-by-case basis. The best way that you can help is by letting us know when you think two ideas solve a similar problem in a similar way with similar features. On an idea's page, click "Add a product" and paste the Quirky.com link to the idea that you think is similar. When the time comes to choose one of the ideas, we will take your feedback into consideration.

It's not necessary, but it certainly helps. Community members often like a little visual stimulation to help them get a better feel for the idea. Photos, videos, diagrams, presentations -- all are welcome! Keep in mind that if you want to submit an image, it will only show up as a preview thumbnail if it's in JPG, PNG, or GIF format and under 10MB.

Just log in to your Quirky account, click on your name, and choose My Account. On your account page, choose the Ideas Submitted tab. There will be a blue Edit button in the top left hand corner of the page. Click on that Edit button to make text changes, upload new images and delete old images.

The timeline goes something like this: You submit your idea. It is then immediately open to the community for viewing, voting, and commenting in the general submission round. Your idea can sit in the general submission round for up to 30 days until its time expires. Every week Quirky marks several ideas from the general round as "Under Consideration". If your idea is marked as "Under Consideration" it moves into that week's finalist round. For every idea in "Under Consideration" we complete our DMV analysis and these are the ideas that move into Friday's staff evaluation. We then announce the winners of the staff evaluation on Monday on our blog. Sound confusing? Don't worry - we post countdown clocks on every idea page.

There are two main steps to idea selection: Community Curation and Staff Evaluation. During Community Curation, members of our online community view, vote, and comment on all the Ideas submitted. Quirky Staff then looks through Ideas and, based on many factors including number of community votes and issues raised in community comments, may decide to move some Ideas into "Under Consideration". This is the Quirky Staff "short list" of Ideas that we think are promising. The Quirky Community then gets to submit similar existing products, collaborative edit suggestions, and more comments to Ideas in this short list. The Idea is then evaluated by Quirky Staff and thoroughly analyzed in three areas: Design potential, Marketing potential, and Viability. The Ideas that score high in these areas are then put before Quirky Staff in our Weekly Eval meeting where we discuss the Ideas in depth as a group. Some Ideas are chosen to move forward in the Quirky Development Process, some are not. At the end of the day, though, all Ideas submitted will receive feedback from the Quirky Community, and those placed Under Consideration will receive feedback directly from Quirky Staff.

Say your awesome idea is selected to move forward... right there, you've just earned yourself around 35% of the community share of revenue, which is 30% of direct sales from our website and 10% of the sales from our retailers. That means you're pocketing around 12 cents for every dollar your product brings in online, and 4 cents on every dollar the product brings in at retail. Ask anyone in product development; that's pretty good. But wait, it gets better... your influence percentage can grow just like everyone else's if you continue weigh in on winning ideas throughout your product's development process. Cha-ching!

You know what? We can't all win every time. But then again, when you submit your idea to Quirky, you're a winner no matter what. From our process you will get extensive community comments and feedback on who liked and didn't like your idea. That way if you choose to go for it on your own, you've got valuable research you can use to build the product. And if you want to give your idea another shot, just throw down another $10 and you can resubmit with edits based on the feedback you got.

So, you didn't win, lame, but don't fret yet. You have three options after your idea expires from the general submission. One. Resubmit it for another $10 for another 30 days. Two. You can archive your idea. This means your idea is no longer public, but remains for private viewing under your Ideas Submitted tab on your dashboard indefinitely. In your archive you hold the options to delete your idea or resubmit it for $10. Three. You can take your idea and pursue it by other means.

By all means, go build what you want to build! Our main jam is that it can be hard to do it on your own... or at least in our experience it was. And it can kinda cost a lot, which sometimes means tricking your parents into remortgaging their house (cough, cough, Ben). But we’ve got an expert design staff, established manufacturing relationships, a rock star sales and marketing team, and all the tools and resources to get that idea out of your head and onto shelves. So if you're willing to risk $10 for your killer idea, it's totally worth it.

On your "My Account" page, you can view all the ideas you've submitted. Click on the little "resubmit" link to edit and upload your idea for the general submisson round. It'll cost you $10.

Ahh, that was close! Since, your idea was marked "Under Consideration" but was not chosen it will not go back into the general submission round. From here you have the same three options as if your idea expired after 30 days, but now you have lots of community feedback and voting data, which you can use to edit your idea and resubmit it or take your idea and pursue it elsewhere with this market research.

Quirky shares 30 percent of all top line revenue brought in by direct sales on quirky.com, as well as 10 percent of indirect retail sales revenue, with each product's influencers. About 35 percent of that reward goes to the ideator/inventor.

Go to your “My Account” page and click on the “Account Balance” tab. You'll be able to view your available balance and your estimated pending balance, as well as request payout if you’ve earned more than 75 big ones.

As soon as you earn $75 on Quirky, you can request payout under the “Account Balance” tab of your “My Account” page. We will ask you to fill out a Quirky Payee Information Form (QPIF) and U.S. tax forms, if applicable. If you are a U.S. citizen with a U.S. bank account, you can opt to receive your earnings through check or ACH direct transfer to your bank account. If you are not a U.S. citizen, you have the option of check or wire transfer (subject to a small fee). Quirky will cover all related postage charges.

Where you live shouldn't be an issue; we have community members from around the world. If you are not a U.S. citizen, you can choose to receive your payments by check (we’ll take care of the postage) or by international wire transfer (the small wire fee will come out of your earnings).

You can request payout any time your account contains more than $75, but you can’t request payout more than once a week. We process all withdrawal requests within seven days of receiving them.

There is no limit to how much you can withdraw, as long as your account balance is over $75.

When you fill out your Quirky Payee Information Form (QPIF), we also ask that you provide us with your tax information. If you do not provide this information, Quirky is required to automatically withhold taxes from your earnings. Members who earn more then $600 in a calendar year will receive a 1099 form.

Available earnings are on products that we are currently selling and shipping. These earnings are immediately available for withdrawal. Estimated pending earnings are on products that are available for sale, but which we haven’t yet collected money on – think items in Presale or In Production. These earnings will be marked available once we have shipped the products.

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