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Crowdsourcing.org
:
The industry-leading resource for everything crowdsourcing. Known as one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, they are recognized for their in-depth industry analyses, definitive crowdsourcing platform directory, and unbiased thought leadership. Their mission is to serve as a complete resource of information for analysts, researchers, journalists, investors, business owners, crowdsourcing experts, and participants in crowdsourcing platforms.

Crowdsortium:
Using the crowd to dissect, organize, and collectively move the young and evolving crowdsourcing industry forward, Crowdsortium helps organizations find, evaluate, and execute new ideas by working with online crowds and providing events, meet-ups,
resources, and guides. Crowdsortium was formed by a group of industry practitioners that have the mission of advancing the industry through best practices, education, data collection, and public dialogue.

While there are way too many crowdsourcing platforms to get into the nitty-gritty of utilizing each, in our research we have identified twelve best practices to apply in almost all cases.

These days, almost anything you want done can be done online.
Freelancer.com
alone has experts available in six hundred disciplines.
²¹
The point here is whenever you need something, instead of defaulting to your normal fulfillment process, try leveraging the power of the crowd to do it faster, cheaper, and better. Define your crowd, get familiar with available platforms, and then pick the right one. “If you're going to start a company, it's never been easier and it's never been cheaper to do so,” says Matt Barrie. “All the tools you need to build an Internet company today are basically free—all the software: Linux, MySQL, voice-over-Internet protocol, Gmail, and so on. The best thing I would suggest you do is browse the projects on
Freelancer.com
, and look at the mobile phone section or the web development section or whatever your area might be, and see what other people are doing and how they're wording their projects and what they're paying. Start from there.”
²²

The most consistent advice we received during our research was perhaps the simplest: Just get busy. In most cases, it's free to sign up and
post a project. People from all around the world will start bidding on it. And once you start talking to them and looking through their samples of work, they'll give you ideas. They'll tell you, “Hey, I've done similar sorts of projects. Why don't you do it like this or why don't you do it like that?” and so forth. Really, as with all things in entrepreneurship, it's really just a matter of giving it a go and proceeding through trial and error.

Completing a crowdsourcing project can be really tough your first few times. Each platform is different and there are confusing elements in all of them. For platform-specific guidance, turn to the site's community forums for help. Experts and forum moderators will come out of the woodwork to give you incredible tips and guidance throughout the process. And all that help comes free of charge.

Don't expect the crowd to understand the core philosophy of your business. What is critical is to give people the context of the project and supplementary resources to consult should they want more background information. A properly established foundation means people spend less time trying to guess your desires and more time delivering exactly what you want.

For non-design-specific tasks, there is usually a data set that you must submit for analysis, categorization, and so on. If you don't have a perfectly formatted and ready-to-go .csv file, you can turn to the crowd for help. Most of the time crowdsourcing workers have actually crowdsourced projects themselves, so they know all the best ways to prepare
your data for this process.

Unfortunately, crowdsourcing does have the potential to create undesired results. The quality of the results can sometimes be inadequate, and crowdsourcing is not sheltered from the scammers and bots lurking on the Internet. Luckily, qualifying your workers and curating a trustworthy work force can help you avoid these issues. To qualify a work force, simply put out a few very simple and inexpensive requests to see how quickly and accurately the job gets done. For example, if you have one hundred images you need created, and a dozen crowdsourced workers to choose from, rather than choosing a single graphic artist immediately, consider taking a few of your images and asking a few freelancers to show you their style and speed. Then choose the best to give the entire job to for completion. Just this sort of quick prequalification can save you considerable heartache and time.

The more clear you are about the role you want your crowd to play in the project, the better the results. If you want creative solutions, tell people. If it's practical solutions, make that clear. Ambiguity doesn't work well in crowdsourcing. Make sure you think through every element of the product or service you need, and be ready to field questions, concerns, or confused comments. These are almost inevitable.

“Remember,” says Freelancer's Matt Barrie, “you're often working with someone on the other side of the world. If you just write a one-line sentence—‘I need a website'—that could mean anything. The better the description you provide of what you want and the less room [there is] for interpretation, the better outcome you'll get.”
²³
Many platforms allow you to communicate with the crowd during the campaign—choose
one of these and communicate often. This collaborative strategy is critical for producing the best results.

This may seem counterintuitive considering the previous two bits of advice, but often the best results from crowdsourcing come from unexpected angles. Sure, if you're dealing with a microtask, then creativity isn't welcome, but for larger projects—like, say, a Tongal video—give people the space they need to surprise you and they will. “Don't do what's expected,” DeJulio said. “Try something new. Allow the crowd to come up with wild and crazy bold ideas that might complement the genius of your brand. Trust the process; don't try to re-create what you're doing normally. The goal is to get something new and fresh.”
²⁴

Crowdsourcing is cheap, yes, but you shouldn't be. If you're running a 99Designs contest, for example, the difference between the number of design submissions you'll get for $199 and $299 is far greater than the $100 you spent. “Put a budget range down,” says Barrie. “Then it's a free market. The freelancers will bid on the project and tell you what they want to be paid. It may be an hourly rate, if it's that sort of a model, or it may be a fixed price. You can look through the bids, but the most important thing is go for quality first, because the price is going to be so cheap anyway that you're going to have tremendous cost savings. That gives you tremendous leverage in terms of what you can do with your starting capital.”
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Crowdsourcing offers a counterproblem to the classic dilemma of “not enough good ideas.” The issue with crowdsourcing is the opposite.
You're going to be flooded with good ideas. Prepare for the deluge. You'll need to be clear about your big objectives, but remain open to new ideas—that is, new paths to your big objectives. This deluge is the true advantage of crowdsourcing.

“The other day I was in London,” said Barrie, “and I met a financial analyst working from home doing financial models for pension funds on things like infrastructure projects. He needed a mathematician to develop these models in MATLAB to be able to do his research and present his findings, so he hired a PhD student in Pakistan to do the work. They set up a chat on Skype. The streaming video quality to somewhere like Pakistan is now unbelievable. It was just like the guy was in the room with him. He'd get up in the morning, have his cup of tea, sit down, put the iPad there, do the video call, and then they'd sit there and talk all day as if they were in the same room together. The ability to communicate with anyone on the planet is getting better and better. That means the ability for us to work with anyone on the planet is fantastic.”
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So there you have it. A quick overview on the exponentially exploding world of crowdsourcing, today's poor man's version of artificial intelligence. More incredibly, today the exponential world is starting to overtake the crowd. Recently, an AI company called Vicarious, which is backed by such investors as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, announced that their machine learning software achieved success rates up to 90 percent on CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal,
Captcha.com
, and others.
²⁷
So stay tuned, since even the crowd can eventually be dematerialized and demonetized.

But one use of the crowd that AI is unlikely to disrupt in the near term is the ability of people from around the world to send you cash to underwrite your ideas. For more on the billions of dollars flowing into the crowdfunding space and the best way for you to capture those dollars, let's turn to our next chapter.

When I started working on this book, my research team and colleagues at Singularity University polled a thousand would-be entrepreneurs and a thousand established entrepreneurs about the greatest barriers encountered when starting a business. Raising money topped almost everyone's list. No surprise, right?

While the numbers move up or down a little each year, at any given time, there are roughly 27 million US businesses in need of capital.
¹
According to the US Small Business Association, lack of capital is the main reason why 50 percent of new businesses fail within their first five years of operation. Yet, despite this clear need, 23 percent of the companies are so daunted by the prospect of raising money that they don't even try, while another 51 percent get turned down for their effort.
²

All of this, though, is starting to change.

Historically, our access to capital has been limited by our access to people. While reaching out to friends and family is how most entrepreneurs get started, by definition, this is a very limited group with
potentially limited means. Next on the list are traditional investors—folks like angels, super-angels, and venture capitalists. But, in my experience, many of these professional investors are too narrowly focused and shortsighted for bold adventures. Yet in today's hyperconnected world, entrepreneurs have instant access to millions of potential backers and a billion-plus potential customers.

Crowdfunding is the exponential crowd tool that lets you tap this new resource, allowing you to mine the world for like-minded individuals and fast-track passion projects like never before. The first crowdfunding platforms hit the scene in the latter half of the last decade. These early iterations were tools primarily used by filmmakers and musicians looking for ways to fund projects without the backing of a major label/studio, but it didn't take long for a far wider range of entrepreneurs
to get involved.

And stay involved.

Emergence of Crowdfunding

The Growth of Crowdfunding

Source:
www.forbes.com
,
www.entrepreneur.com
,
www.gsvtomorrow.com

“E” refers to “Estimated”, as in estimated size of the market.

In less than seven years, crowdfunding has become a significant economic engine. There are more than 700 crowdfunding sites online today, funding every variety of project under the sun.
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And that number is expected to double over the next few years. Globally, the total funds raised have followed an exponential curve from $530 million in 2009 to $1.5 billion in 2011 to $2.7 billion in 2012.
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By 2015, experts predict a $15 billion crowdfunding market, which with the passing of the JOBS Act and the addition of equity crowdfunding to the scene could become an incredible $300 billion marketplace over the coming years.
⁵

What has also increased is our confidence in the process. In the early days of crowdfunding, when a film was prefunded by the crowd, this was a clear sign that people actually wanted to see the film. The same holds true for a product or service. Consider +Pool, which raised over $270,000 on Kickstarter.
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Its service? A filtered swimming pool floating in the middle of the East River. Who knew New Yorkers wanted to swim that badly? The fact is, the people behind +Pool suspected it, and their Kickstarter campaign confirmed it. That's the unique power of crowdfunding.