If you are a small business and haven't heard of crowdsourcing...well, the time has come.
How would you like to save hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars on projects ranging from designing logos to writing business plans to designing websites finding language translation services?
There is a growing number of web resources available to help small businesses accomplish their goals by putting a description of their project online, along with the price they are willing to pay, and then letting the creativity that is abundant on the Internet have at it. Rather than single-sourcing your project to one vendor you may have heard of, you put it out to the virtual crowd. Here are some examples of how small business entrepreneurs are using crowdsourcing to save money and increase creativity.
- Tim Hyer, founder of online rental marketplace Rentcycle, worked with San Francisco-based crowdsourcing firm CloudCrowd on several recent projects. Rentcycle is a start-up website that provides users with a place to easily locate places to rent just about anything. "To launch our site, we needed to verify and categorize a list of more than 20,000 rental business websites and had less than three weeks to do it." Using CloudCrowd, which is said to have more than 24,000 workers available, Hyer paid about 20 cents per website for the project. "We saved at least 50 percent over what it would have cost to do this in-house, but this project would have been impossible for me to do with traditional channels. As a start-up I didn't have the space, computers, or management time to hire a team of temps. The short timeframe, and cultural subtleties that required workers to understand the businesses they were categorizing would have made it very difficult to outsource offshore. CloudCrowd's workforce sorted the sites accurately in under a week -- at a fraction of what it would have cost to hire a team to do it in-house. What I really liked was that they not only have their crowd do the work, but they use peer-review to check every result."
- Preferred Organic Therapy & Wellness, a medical marijuana dispensary and wellness spa, was preparing for their official Grand Opening in August 2010 and realized they were in a logo time crunch. They knew they needed to find a logo ASAP if they wanted to get all of their materials created in time for an August opening. The dispensary turned to CrowdSpring.com, a site that allows you to submit a project including naming your own price with a $200 minimum. The site then posts it to its community of designers who submit designs for you to choose from. You can post feedback and they will revise their designs until your deadline. The bottom line price overall came out to around $300 -- a huge savings over most logo design companies the firm found online, which typically offered only five designs with six revisions for that price.
- Lisa Skriloff, president of Multicultural Marketing Resources, Inc. and editor and publisher, Multicultural Marketing News, placed an announcement on a few occasions when she was seeking several freelancers who could speak either Spanish, Chinese, Korean or Russian to help with an outreach project to ethnic media in the United States for a specific project. The project involved sending emails and press releases to the media and then following up to see if they would publish a story. "We received a good number of replies and have used the freelancers we found. We posted the announcement on a LinkedIn group that I manage, Multicultural Marketing Experts, and also sent a twitter message from my account @Multicultural50. I would definitely go this route again for any similar upcoming project."