Bold (22 page)

To gather the advice in the how-to sections in part three, my team did exhaustive research, interviewing over a hundred top platform providers, the very people behind all of these crowd-powered companies, and speaking with top users, those exponential entrepreneurs who have already succeeded in leveraging crowd tools to tackle the bold. We also conducted a meta-analysis of all the various how-to articles online and in major reports, distilling key lessons and insights. Finally,
during the same time this work was going on, I had the opportunity to implement much of this advice, putting it to the test in my own companies. Taken together, my hope is that these how-to sections serve as a comprehensive playbook, literally a user's guide for going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world.

Let's begin.

It started back in the late 2000s. Matt Barrie was irritated. A venture capitalist and entrepreneur with expertise in information security, Barrie was coding a website and trying to hire someone—anyone—to do some basic data entry. His rates were decent. He was willing to pay two dollars a line to the kid brother or kid sister of a friend. But there was soccer practice. There were exams. The whole process dragged on for months. It wasn't working at all.

“In frustration,” says Barrie, “I got online and posted the job on a site called Get a Freelancer. Three hours later, I came back to my computer and found seventy-four emails from people willing to do it for anywhere from a hundred dollars to a thousand. I hired a team in Vietnam that finished the job in three days. It was perfect. I didn't have to pay them until everything was done. The whole process was mind-blowing.”

Following this revelation, Barrie began buying up existing crowdsourcing companies. He started with Get a Freelancer, the first site he'd used, then moved on to Scriptlance and vWorker and soon added seven more. All nine were merged into
Freelancer.com
, which quickly became a behemoth. The numbers are impressive. In less than half a dozen years, the site has grown to 10 million users, and has become the largest freelancer marketplace on the planet. Over 5.4 million jobs have been posted, representing a total value of $1.39 billion in work. There are members in 234 countries and regions around the world, with about 75 percent of the workers coming from countries such as
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and China. “It's a very, very long tail,” says Barrie. “Only about 25 percent of the job postings come from companies. The vast majority come from either individuals or small businesses.”

Under the hood,
Freelancer.com
is actually in the connection business, existing to bring together two types of entrepreneurs. “On one side,” explains Barrie, “we've got under-resourced small-business entrepreneurs in the developed world. They don't have a lot of money, don't have a lot of time, but they have all these ideas. On the other side, in the developing world, we empower a whole new class of entrepreneur—the service providers who can help turn those ideas into reality.”

How diverse are the experts on
Freelancer.com
? “There are a lot of people on the site who are moonlighting,” says Barrie. “So we're not talking plumbing or pest control. We're talking any job you can imagine. We've got PhDs on the site. I've seen both quantum physics and aerospace jobs handled perfectly. From a macroscopic perspective, freelancing is really the vanguard of an economic revolution that's sweeping through the developing world as people can now wake up and [say], ‘Hey, I want to work in this very niche area in technology. Maybe there's no jobs locally, but now I can work for a global client base and earn fantastic income.' ”

What this means is that entrepreneurs can do much more than just outsource work via Freelancer—you can actually build whole businesses on its back. Take Barrie's business partner, Simon Clausen, who started out as one of Australia's top technology entrepreneurs. When Clausen was building his antivirus company, PC Tools, he began by crowdsourcing his first antivirus app—paying an Indian company a thousand dollars for the program. And it worked. PC Tools got to $100 million in revenue per annum before selling to Symantec.

Barrie summarizes the potential nicely, “Today you get someone to analyze the data, put together beautiful figures and graphs, crunch the numbers, do mathematical modeling. It's as sophisticated as you think. As for the future, you're only limited by your imagination.” The
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman put it like this: “You have
a spark of idea now. You can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. You can get the prototype produced in China. In Vietnam you can get it mass-produced. On Freelancer they can do your back office, your logo and so forth. I mean, really—now you can be one guy sitting in a room with a few thousand dollars and off the back of a credit card you can build a multimillion-dollar company.”
¹²

L.A., where I live, is something of a company town, with Hollywood being the company. As a result, every coffee shop and bus stop is packed full of scriptwriters, producers, and directors. Mix that incredible talent density with the plummeting cost of 1080p high-definition cameras and the awesome editing software available on every Mac and you have the making of a video production revolution.

No one has done a better job of exploiting this for
your
benefit than Tongal, a crowdsourcing platform that can help you create TV-quality video commercials for digital or television advertising ten times cheaper, ten times faster, and with ten times the number of content options than by standard processes. Tongal, like
Freelancer.com
, was also born of frustration—in this case, the frustration of James DeJulio.

DeJulio began his career in investment banking, but quickly realized that finance was not the world for him. So he decided to try his hand at Hollywood. And, like a lot of gifted and highly qualified people, DeJulio started at the bottom. “I couldn't believe how hard it was to get a job that paid so little,” he recalls.

DeJulio eventually landed a job in production with Paramount, where he rose to vice-president and was the force behind
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
and
The Kid Stays in the Picture
, but he soon soured—growing as disappointed in Tinseltown as he had been with finance. “I was frustrated by how many good ideas never saw the light of day, how there was a small list of people who tightly controlled all the creative
work, and how many talented people there were who couldn't break into the system.”

Turns out,
The
Da Vinci Code
was his breaking point. DeJulio's boss had gotten a pre-publication copy of Dan Brown's soon-to-be mega-bestseller and asked DeJulio to take a look. “I read it, I thought it was a real page-turner and I gave it to my boss, saying, ‘This is really exciting. The studio should make this film.' ” But the studio passed it off to yet another person who decided the book had “no real entertainment value.” That summer, when everybody in America was reading the thriller, DeJulio decided there had to be a better way.

That was about the time he bumped into Jack Hughes, founder of the crowdsourcing software-solutions company TopCoder, who helped him realize that the same distributed, crowd-powered approach that TopCoder employs in helping companies fulfill their software needs would work in Hollywood. “I started to think about how we could turn the industry on its head and attack the video content creation problem in a very different, incentive-based way,” says DeJulio. “There were so many people around with an HD camera and a Mac who really want to do this work.”

DeJulio wasn't overstating the case. Today the Tongal freelance pool includes more than 40,000 creatives, primarily those working on short-form videos, commercials, and such, and has created content for major brands such as Unilever, LEGO, Pringles, and Speed Stick. And they have done so in a way that is far faster, more creative, and more cost-effective than the traditional approach.

“A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there's somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they'll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you're going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it's going to take a long time—six months, nine months, a year—to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.”

By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource
a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse—anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition—the ideation phase—a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners.

Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world.

Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.

And the level of talent that brands have access to via Tongal continues to grow. “In the beginning,” says DeJulio, “the majority of the creative people working in the Tongal community were hobbyists who grew up making content for the Internet, but as our prize purses have steadily increased in value, we're starting to see super-talented people—people who would otherwise have been hired in traditional advertising industry—opt for our platform instead. And as Tongal-generated content gets better, brands are putting more money on the line. It's a very positive, self-reinforcing cycle. So now it's not unusual to have a $50,000 or $60,000 prize purses result in a set of deliverables for which a traditional agency would have normally charged
millions.”

So how good can it get? How about good enough to make it to the Super Bowl? In 2012, Tongal ran a $27,000 challenge for Colgate Palmolive's Speed Stick deodorant to create a thirty-second piece for digital (Internet) placement. But the final ad was so good, Colgate Palmolive placed it into one of its coveted Super Bowl slots. The ad actually finished at 24 (out of 60) on
USA Today
's ad meter, well ahead of more than thirty other ads created traditionally, and with budgets literally 500 times larger. The television audience for the Super Bowl has been estimated at more than 110 million people, and on YouTube this Speed Stick commercial has been seen almost 1.2 million times. Pretty good for a $27,000 investment.

Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Luis von Ahn wasn't entirely pleased with himself. Back in 2000, Ahn was part of the team of people who invented the challenge-response test known as CAPTCHA—those squiggly, drunken characters we have to recopy to log on to certain websites. The purpose of CAPTCHA was to help differentiate bots from humans, but what was bugging Ahn was CAPTCHA's success.

“All told,” says Ahn, “about 200 million CAPTCHA squiggles are typed in a day. Each time you type one of those you waste about ten seconds. If you multiply that by 200 million, that means humanity as a whole is wasting around 500,000 hours every day filling out these annoying CAPTCHAs.”

So Ahn started wondering if there was a better way to make use of all this time and energy, a way to turn those ten seconds of waste into actual work. “What if,” says Ahn, “there was some giant task that humans could do that computers could not that can be broken down into ten-second chunks?” This was the birth of reCAPTCHA, a website that serves a dual purpose, both helping to distinguish bots from humans while simultaneously helping to digitize
books.
¹⁵

Normally, we digitize books by scanning pages into a computer; next, an optical character recognition program runs through this text, attempting to turn images into actual words. Sometimes this works great; other times, not so well. The big problem is with old books, especially ones whose pages have yellowed. On average, for books written more than fifty years ago, computers can make out only about 70 percent of the text. That remaining 30 percent—that's where reCAPTCHA comes in. When the computer can't recognize a word, it sends it out as a CAPTCHA—meaning the next time you're typing in drunken letters into your computer, know that you're actually helping digitize the world's libraries. And fast. Ahn's dual-use crowdsourcing platform is digitizing over 100 million words a day—the equivalent of 2.5 million books a year.

And Ahn didn't stop there. “I started wondering about how we could translate the web into every major language. It's a big issue. More than 50 percent of the web is written in English, and less than 50 percent of the world's population speaks English.”

But how to translate the whole Web? “You can't do it with fifty or a hundred translators. But what if we could get, say, 100 million people to help translate the Web into every major language. It's a great idea, but how are you going to motivate these people to do this work for free? You can't pay 100 million people. And even if I could, there just aren't that many bilinguals in the world.”