A new approach to road testing and developing your startup idea Saturday, December 23, 2006
Cambrian House are promoting a service which draws on crowdsourcing principles to help test out entrepreneurial ideas, with the good ones going on to be developed under their supervision.
Focussed around software businesses, the notion is that you submit an idea and if its popular, the "worldwide development community" will build it in exchange for a slice of the action, with Chamelion (?) marketing the software. People contributing to a venture receive "royalty points" which equates to shares in a business.
It's certainly an interesting notion. I suspect that challenge will be to get people to announce their ideas to a wide audience, because people will be naturally suspicious about sharing their ideas with people they don't know for fear of having them stolen.
Other obvious challenges are whether the reviewing group are representative of the market for the idea and hence can spot winners; whether the thing will actually be built by the "group"; and the share split that each party will get.
posted by John Wilson @ 12:40 AM Permanent Link
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