Quirky.com - the Threadless of product design | Hacker News Reader

Quirky.com - the Threadless of product design

quirky.com

56 pointscsmeder17 comments

A lot of people might consider it to be poor value to put up $99 for a ~1/50 chance (47 submissions being voted on) that someone might start the development of their idea, which if it ever actually makes it to market will offer them a 12% revenue share...

With that kind of expected ROI, you'd better have an idea you believe is worth tens of thousands of dollars, in which case why would you leave the chances of it actually being developed to a popularity contest...

We're actually looking at this very issue right now. At the moment most of our submitters tend to be spare time tinkerers that actually really believe in their products, so much so that they're willing to spend $99 dollars on the chance to see it in production.

Outside of that, we actually give them back all of the data from the 'popularity contest' in the form of pretty detailed analytics package, so they can refine their idea and take it elsewhere or give us a shot again at a reduced price.

The analytics might not be entirely without value, but I'm guessing people are paying the submission fee because they want you to build their product and give them an entirely reasonable 12% of the proceeds rather than for feedback (which they could solicit on web forums targeted to their intended niche without paying a dime). As far as I can see they don't learn much about the actual commercial viability of the product, simply that some unqualified people love or hate it.

Have you tested the price point? Assuming your business model is ultimately based on selling viable products rather than submission fees, removing the entry fee or lowering it to a nominal amount might actually benefit you in terms of better submissions, particularly since you already have the community to filter for crap.

We actually have weeks with free submissions and we're strongly considering changes to the pricing structure.

Our main argument for the current fee has actually been to discourage a huge amount of submissions so that we could take time to evaluate the viability of each submission. However, as we've grown (we're just over a year old now), the fee certainly seems to have become more of a hinderance to good ideas and the community has actually become a lot better at actually judging and filtering out products based on their viability.

Is the $100 really projected to be a revenue source?

Because it's terrible.

More specifically, it's poorly implemented and too high. It's "hidden" until after you finish filling out the 'submit idea' page with a big button on the home page, and it's poorly phrased... "Also, your payment information is required to complete your submission." Oh yeah, like you almost forgot you were gonna do that. Be more up front about the fee (change the layout so it doesn't hide below 'the fold'), and make the fee smaller. You want to avoid people filling out their idea submission, getting pissed that it costs $100, and then refusing to come back.

You should charge something (rudimentary spam-filter), but $100 is too high. The tinkerer has already identified a problem, come up with a solution, drawn their idea on a napkin or even Google Sketchup, is also going to have to weigh that $100 against material costs. As an example - cream cheese that comes in bagel-shaped slices. I could gamble $100 on it at Quirky, or spend $50 in cream cheese and some shop-time to build a prototype. If I'm really convinced that my shelf-shaped cereal-bowls-so-your-cereal-doesn't-get-soggy idea is going to take over the world, I would have a rough idea of the costs involved to fully bring it to market (shapeways.com + etsy.com + reddit/digg/etc, and if it really pans out - use proceeds to pay for injection molding).

If I'm looking to spend $100 at once on an idea, well... it costs $100 for a provisional patent, and tinkerers are well aware of that.

(And that half-baked idea that I'm too lazy to implement? Not worth $100.)

How about sliding scale - pay $20 to submit your idea, but you get less of the revenue?

I hope you guys succeed, if only so I'll have somewhere to buy my dustpan-with-fingers.

heh, please see my reply to the post below this.

It doesn't feel as readily accessible or friendly as Threadless, despite the school-paper design. I was thinking it might be the subject matter, being that love of product design isn't quite as ubiquitous as people who like t-shirts, but it also occurs to me that while both demand community participation, the Threadless site has lots of cheerful looking people. I wonder if this impacts on desire to participate.

Using NoScript, I see a lot of sites that don't gracefully handle disabled javascript, but the click handling for the "Newest Accessories Toys ..." js links has to be one of the worst.

Before you dismiss me as another NoScript crank, think about this:

If you ran an A/B test and eked out a 5-10% conversion improvement for that test, would you be happy? Of course you would. It would be a small improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. Not gracefully handling the 5-10% of visitors with javascript disabled is just like that A/B test, but in reverse.

I've heard 5%, 10%, occasionally 15% many, many times, I've never heard a verifiable source.

The most recent number I can find is 2008 and that's at 5% with a downward trend: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Or ~2% in 2007 at http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/eu-and-us-javascript-d...

I don't think that number is going anywhere but down, no matter how many of your hacker friends are running noScript.

Sure you can argue you're losing x% of your possible conversions due to needing JS but you cannot quantify what percentage you gain by having a distinctly more fluid/exciting website or the cost of the features/polish you don't do because you're developing handling for no-js scenarios. Personally I'm a fan of graceful degradation in all but the most appish sites but at this point no-js is almost as edge-case as no-css.

I wasn't trying to imply that that a site had to accommodate disabled javascript, Sites should handle it gracefully though. It doesn't take that much effort to at least add something like <noscript>This site requires javascript.</noscript>.

BTW, I just revisited it and they fixed the previous problem. Earlier, if you clicked one of the js links you would get text page of raw html.

Try using twitter.com without javascript enabled. You can't even post a tweet; even though it's just a text field with a button, the button does nothing! Twitter is one of the sites I really want javascript disabled on. I don't want to be involved in their latest JS worm.

It reminds me a little bit of Tchibo Ideas https://www.tchibo-ideas.de/ (German). Tchibo was originally a coffee trader (I think), but now they push weekly special products at supermarkets (a trend that started in Germany some years ago). So if one of your ideas is adopted, it could be sold in huge quantities.

Unfortunately most of it is the antithesis of lean living (useless special case household tools), but some things they make are nice.

I like the idea of this site, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

It reminds me of those catalogs in the seat-backs of airplanes that I end up reading when I get bored. Lots of stuff -- but nothing really struck me as being all that valuable or novel. Kitsch.

Oddly enough, the people that actually love those backseat catalogs are our core audience at the moment. This current incarnation was more of a following rather than leading our audience.

We're in the process of remedying this "kitsch" right now.

There's a lot of money in kitsch, and following your audience is where you're supposed to be!

Probably just a bad mix between the material and my personal tastes. I often think that startups and business that submit ideas that are non-hacker-related get more criticism than they deserve from HN'ers. So heck, I'm the last guy you want to listen to! Stay with the customers :)

Small world... my girlfriend just applied to a position with Quirky and today I see it on HN.

I once helped build a site for a client that sold all sorts of one-off stuff from around the world. Last I heard her site really took off and she's been contacting some of the orig devs about more work... it's definitely a niche market but I guess there's plenty of folks with disposable income seeking novelty.

Hardly.

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