One Crowdsourcing Expert's Great Answer to a Silly Question
"Can you crowdsource the building of a house?" I saw this question on Quora the other day, and I immediately chuckled, and was about to move on. But, then I saw an answer. I starting reading it, and thought "By Jove! I suppose you can crowdsource the buidlign of a house!" With Luca's permission Daily Crowdsource wants to share it with you.
Question answered by Luca Hammer from Work|i|o
so, how do crowdsource the building of a house in 7 steps?
1. Start with crowdfunding to get funding for the project. Oh, wait. You first need some material to show the people what awesome house you want to build. Some steps back.
1½. You have an idea: Building a house.
What's the story behind it? Why do you want to build it? No clue. Let's get first input from Amazon Mechanical Turk. For $10, you can get 100 to 500 reasons to built a house. If you go with the most popular, you should have a good shot with the stuff that follows. Of course, you need to define the question in a way that the popular answer isn't “to live there”.
2. Before you go further with your plan, you should ask on a idea platform about creative solutions for the project. Because there are smarter people out there who will provide better solutions than, you can. Maybe give InnoCentive a try. There you could ask for plans how to built a house with crowdsourcing.
3. Your plan is to get funding via crowdfunding. But you first need a great story. You already gathered the ideas from mturk, so let's look for an amazing copywriter who puts the idea into words. Elance, oDesk or Scriptlance.com have the right people for it.
4. A story isn't enough. You also need some compelling images, and a video would help. Via Imagebrief, you get the right photos. For the Video, you could take a look at newspepper.com.
5. Finally, it's time to put everything on a crowdfunding website. Maybe have a 1on1 with an expert on Minutebox first to make sure you got everything you need.
Maybe you can give it an extra push with Trada orBoostCTR. Else you should work with our community to become big on Social-Media. As our video already is amazing, and our story moving that shouldn't be a big problem.
6. You now have money. Let's start planning the house itself. I suggest my own start-up work|i|o to find the right place for the house and finding an architect. Maybe even let the house be planned on the platform. If you aren't sure about the place you can send someone from Gigwalk or WeGoLook.com to check it out.
7. The time of the TaskRabbits begins. You now need people on the ground. Someone who underwrites the contract and many more to get material and build the house.
What do you think? Are there any missing steps? Let us know in the comments below.