How to build a Crowdsourcing Website?

Posted on May 28, 2008

Filed Under Business |

build crowdsourcing website

Crowdsourcing is an interesting business model. If you don’t know how it works or how to build a crowdsourcing website, this article will highlight a few practical tips as provided by people in real business.

“We launched about 9 months ago, and now have about 900 signed-up users, 250 projects, and US $22,000 in pledged funds.” - Ben Hoyt, microPledge co-founder
“We started with an email list of about 125 creatives, as of Friday 23 May 2008, we had over 1,200 registered users on the site.” - Ross Kimbarovsky & Mike Samson, co-Founders of crowdSPRING

1- Come up with something that you need your visitors or members to contribute to

Decide what your content is going to be; general articles, creative work & designs, software development, photography, videos or whatever. You should consider to choose a content for which you can find lots of passionate users and creatives who are willing to contribute. Narrowing the content scope will make it hard to bring as many contributors as you need. Big community of contributors means a lot of content which is crucial for the success of your website.

Two great examples of crowdsourcing websites: crowdSPRING (Crowdsourcing Creative Projects) & microPledge (Crowdsourcing Software Products).

2- Spread the word to start building a community of contributors

In crowdsourcing, you are bringing users who are interested to contribute to the content of your website, all what you need is to reach those passionate users.

Few ways to spread your word and build a community of contributors:

a- Market research & Online Surveys (ex: Zoomerang )

b- Press Releases

c- Postings on related forums & blogs

d- Submissions to social bookmarking websites:
- reddit
- digg
- sphinn
- stumbleupon

e- Social networking websites:
- facebook
- twitter
- linkedin

Mike Samson - crowdSPRING founder is telling how they started with an email list of about 125 creatives:

We had done some extensive market research, including surveys in the winter of 2007. The list of participating creatives from the surveys formed the basis of our email list. We launched our “project homepage” design contest in March 2008 using that list, we were fortunate to have the project covered on TechCrunch and Mashable that brought additional creatives to us. As of Friday 23 May 2008, we had over 1,200 registered users on the site.

Ben Hoyt - One of the three business-minded brothers and the founders of microPledge says:

Slowly over time, we started with a bang, we’ve done various PageRank efforts along the way, including press releases, postings on our blog, and submissions to reddit. Every so often a larger player will start using microPledge — someone with real drive to get funding for his projects. That’s a great help to our publicity, and each time it happens we have a bunch more inquiries about our system in general. We launched about 9 months ago, and now have about 900 signed-up users, 250 projects, and US $22,000 in pledged funds.

3- Setting appropriate incentives for contributors

Crowdsourcing involves both clients and contributors. However the fact that passionate users are contributing without waiting for specific rewards, it’s important to keep them satisified in someway, otherwise, by time they may lose the interest in going on with your community. You have to make them feel as a part of the community and that they are highly recognized for what they are giving to your website and community.

At crowdSPRING contributions are made by creatives. Buyers (Clients) post creative projects, this may be a new logo, website design, marketing materials or a custom illustration, they tell what they need, when they need it and how much they’d like to pay. Creatives (Contributors) from all around the world will work on posted projects and buyers begin to receive actual work. Buyers are motivated by getting their project done at a low cost, while creatives are motivated by their passion and the fees associated with each project.

At microPledge, it’s slightly different where contributions are made by pledgers (Contributors). A developer (Client) posts a software idea, Pledgers support the idea by pledging to the project with many others from around the world to help fund it. The developer writes the software and claims the pledges if the pledgers agree by vote on the finished product. Developers get the incentive of getting paid for writing software they wouldn’t otherwise get paid for, If they’re commercial developers, the incentive is to use the pledging system as a way to gauge potential interestin their products. For the pledgers(Contributors), the incentive is seeing software get made more quickly because of their pledge and support.

4- Follow up your community to strengthen and improve the relationship between them and your business

Mike Samson says:

“We have a robust forum, an active blog, private messaging functionality, user profile pages, and we try to be lightning fast in our response to customer service requests.”

And here is what Ben Hoyt says about their efforts in following up their community:

“We reply to all users feedback and customers queries, normally within a few hours of receiving them. We’ve had lots of positive user interaction, and people appreciate the fact that it is quick and personal. In the early stages especially, bug fixes or improvements that users mentioned would often get fixed within a day. We also keep an eye on all new projects and project comments and interact and help as necessary.”

Your community is your success. It’s important to communicate with your community on a regular basis to know how they feel and how much they are satisfied by contributing to your website.

So, are you ready for Crowdsourcing?

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8 Comments so far
  1. blogbookmark.com, on May 28, 2008 at 7:40 am  

    Crowdsourcing involves both clients and contributors. However the fact that passionate users are contributing without waiting for specific rewards, it’s important to keep them satisified in someway …

  2. bloggingzoom.com, on May 28, 2008 at 7:45 am  

    How to build a Crowdsourcing Website?…

    Your community is your success. It’s important to communicate with your community on a regular basis to know how they feel and how much they are satisfied by contributing to your website.

    So, are you ready for Crowdsourcing?

  3. microBlog » Design Interval on crowdsourcing, on May 28, 2008 at 8:01 pm  

    […] a nice post about how to build a crowdsourcing website over at the Design Interval blog. He’s written up some stuff about microPledge as well as […]

  4. Crowdish, on May 28, 2008 at 11:05 pm  

    I think “platform” is an important part of a successful crowdsourcing effort. Projects seem more likely to succeed if there are 50,000 rapid soccer fans who want to buy a team (myfootballclub), or thousands of amateur photographers who want to break into the business (istockphoto), or loads of graphic designers ready to hone their skills for the chance to win a design contest (99designs).

  5. admin, on May 29, 2008 at 7:06 am  

    Those are great Crowdsourcing examples as well. Thanks Crowdish for mentioning!

  6. Tech support for all products in one place, on June 1, 2008 at 1:52 pm  

    […] FixYa increased the number of answerers to over 50K, where the majority have answered one or two questions, it’s no doubt that answerers are passionate about helping others with their problems, which is considered as the main incentive for most contributors in any crowdsourcing community. […]

  7. Gert Hough, on June 25, 2008 at 10:55 pm  

    Thanks, I have bookmarked both crowdsourcing websites (crowdSPRING & microPledge). It might come in handy as I have some ideas :-)

    I have never before heard about crowdsourcing and the whole idea is still not clear.

    Maybe there will be a video on youtube about it… Yes there is quite a lot it seems.

    I am not quite ready for crowdsourcing but thank you once again!

    Gert Houghs last blog post..Business email list for sale - 5000 email addresses cheap cheap

  8. admin, on June 26, 2008 at 4:11 am  

    Hi Gert,

    You are welcome! Glad that you liked the article and hope it can be of some help to you someday!

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