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It's an interesting idea, and I hope it's successful, but I'm wondering if a similar business model is possible. Imagine a service where a company or individua
by dane-pgp 7y ago
It's an interesting idea, and I hope it's successful, but I'm wondering if a similar business model is possible. Imagine a service where a company or individual could submit a suggestion for a product / app / service, with no upfront cost, and the receiving company would offer to create the MVP and generate revenue from it until they recouped their costs, then demand only a small percentage of all future sales / subscriptions.
The company offering this would obviously have to be very careful about which ideas it invested its resources in, because it would be taking all the risk, but for simple ideas the exposure would be quite small. Also, anyone using this service would want to be very clear about what "recouping their costs" means, so that there isn't any creative accounting going on. In practice, it might just end up as a way for one company to harvest a lot of barely profitable ideas, but that might be sustainable, and eventually they might bag a unicorn.
- cameronbrown 7y agoIt's been said many times that ideas aren't worth much, implementation is. Chances are that shipping dozens and dozens of 'ideas' won't yield a sustainable business model.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoThe business model is implementing customer’s ideas, or at least an MVP of them. They’re monetizing the prototypes, not the ideas themselves.
- seventhtiger 7y agoThere is no customer here if they're not paying.
- rgbrenner 7y agoSo this shop would take on all the risk and get almost none of the upside.. And customers would need to risk nothing, but might get a huge payoff.. Even better, since submitting ideas is free, a customer could submit a ton of vague ideas, then sue them if they do anything remotely similar.
- dane-pgp 7y agoThe shop would have the right to refuse any idea that it didn't think would produce enough revenue to at least cover their costs. Also they would have a clause saying that the customer whose idea is closest to the one they implement is deemed to be the one who owns that idea (which an independent arbitrator can decide).
- alaskamiller 7y agoWas done before, didn't work: https://venturebeat.com/2013/11/01/assembly-will-crowdsource-development-of-your-awesome-startup-idea-then-pay-you-cash/ https://venturebeat.com/2013/11/01/assembly-will-crowdsource...