I have no dissension on the new design goal of CH… it’s a great idea but the execution is not so impressive.

I personally think that the initial emphasis on development and implementation should have taken place rather at the business facilitation end of the spectrum rather than the technical end… this is where there is a greater need of service facilitation and one where there is a lack cohesive tools and services elsewhere to use, other than the expensive use of auditing and legal bodies… unless there is and I just don’t know about them?

The seamless plug-in of a project into a clearly defined business model capsule where regulatory setups, logos, trade mark registrations, relationship agreements and all the administration tasks are handled ,will then allow the business to fly as soon as the project is ready for market.

I am not suggesting for one minute that we shouldn’t have source code depositories and project management tools but they are available in various shapes and forms outside of CH to use in the meantime.

If I look at what is needed to start a business and generally the skills that developers (and others) lack in general then that is without a doubt business administration, accounting, legal and marketing.

These tasks are very important for the success of a business but most of them are boring tedious tasks that do not attract the majority of people… In fact, they generally act as a deterrent to go into business for many people.

CH in my view should have spent time designing and implementing a business service that handles all the administration and accounting needs for a project including the regulatory, tax and legal stuff that so far little attention seems to have been given to. These tasks would be much more cost effective on a co-op basis and these tasks centrally administered would not hinder the startup and product development which could take place in parallel, as said already, using outside industry tools readily available.

Co-operative marketing is the other main area that I think should be given more attention, we all know it’s expensive and unpredictable but a co-operative platform should be given more thought as to how to pool resources so that each new project can use it as springboard and the cost savings here could be substantial.

Once these areas are well covered, then I think the attention should revert back to the definitive technology platform for the projects to be developed on in-house.

I love how Ray throws a completely different perspective on the direction of a business. I love the idea of a set of business services. I’ve often wondered if and when I should start up an LLC or corporation for my ideas. Is it considered a sole proprietorship or does it fall under Cambrian House? I think it’s a really interesting question that hasn’t really been answered. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that a group of programmers won’t be able to accomplish this.

The second part of Ray’s proposal is a co-operative marketing. I’ve been harping on this idea for a while. What an incredible value add Cambrian House could offer its projects! Any idea in their system could instantly have access to a group of crowd owned marketing resources. I’ve called it the Cambrian House marketing mob.

Thinking back to the various business plans I’ve written, the largest costs are business overhead, labor and marketing. Cambrian House is moving in the right direction to link up various labor resources. Like Ray, I agree that they could do a lot more to facilitate business and marketing resources.

Here’s Mistake #1

1. Single Founder

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.

But even if the founder’s friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he’s still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks “I can’t let my friends down.” This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it’s missing when there’s just one founder.

This mistake really hit home for me. I have this really great idea. I won $20,000 in startup money for the idea. I guess to me that says that someone else thinks it’s a good idea. However, I still haven’t found the right person to help me build this idea. I guess you could say that I have Single Founder syndrome. I don’t want to be a single founder of an idea. I want to have someone else to share the burden and success of building a great business. I’ll keep looking for the right person.

The cool part about submitting ideas to Cambrian House is that you instantly have a crowd of people that are ready to comment and possibly participate as a “founder” of an idea. If you want to get some honest feedback on an idea, then all you need to do is submit it to Cambrian House. People pretty much will tell you exactly what they think of your idea. The power of a crowd looking at your idea is pretty powerful. The Cambrian House crowd pretty much knows if that idea has been done before or not. They are pretty savvy with their feedback on revenue models and ability to execute. It’s a really great place to throw out ideas and get feedback from the crowd.

However, the best part of Cambrian House is that by submitting your ideas, you might just find a future founder of your idea. I know. I’m currently working out a deal with a member of Cambrian House to develop one of my ideas. I’ll let you know more details when it happens.

Most importantly, Cambrian House completely changes the startup model. It has the potential for a company to say it has 100 founders. Talk about game changing.

The article classified crowdsourcing into 3 categories:
1. creation (like Wikipedia);
2. prediction (like Yahoo! Buzz); and
3. organization (like Google).

Cambrian House was stuck in the creation section. I think that is completely true and fits Cambrian House completely. However, Cambrian House isn’t just about creation. They have dipped their toes in both of the other sections too. Idea Warz is definitely about prediction. Idea Explorer fits into the organization category.

Regardless I think it can easily said that Cambrian House is all about crowdsourcing. It’s part of everything that they want to do and want to become. Will that change and evolve? I don’t know. However, there was some interesting discussion on the Cambrian House forum about companies that started as one thing and became something else over time.

One thing I find interesting about venture capitalists is that they don’t expect or plan to have all their ideas become enormous successes. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve heard it said that if a venture capitalist invests in 10 companies then they expect 8 to fail, 1 to have reasonable success and 1 to hit it big. If this happens, then a venture capitalist is happy. Anything more and it’s a bonus. I see it as spreading your investment across a set of great ideas.

I believe Cambrian House has the potential to do something very similar with someone’s time. In a previous post I said that I think it’s a good idea for talented people to share their skills across multiple projects. Imagine that you are a venture capitalist and your skills and time are the assets you have to invest. Cambrian House gives you the platform to do so. By participating in 10 projects that you believe will be a success, then you are giving yourself a much higher probability of success. If even one of those 10 projects goes big, then you’ll be in a very good position.

Now, just imagine that something you create for one Cambrian House project can be shared with another project. All that is required to earn a share of the other project is the time to integrate your previous work. I’ll give two examples of work that I’ve done that could be integrated in other projects. I created the captcha image and google mashup for Robin Hood Fund. Both of these could pretty easily shared with other projects.

This type of interaction is something that could set the Cambrian House community apart from other communities. Projects can more quickly roll out new functions. Talented people can receive a share of multiple projects. That’s a win win in my book. The real question will be how the owner of the code will know that another project needs it.

In my book, Cambrian House has always been about creating a revenue stream and not just a one time payment. Cambrian House 2.0 has made this even more apparent.

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners.

“For the first time in history, it allows the patent-office examiners to open up their cubicles and get access to a whole world of technical experts,” said David J. Kappos, vice president and assistant general counsel at IBM.

It’s an interesting read since the office has 4,000 examiners that completed 332,000 applications. That’s a lot of work. No wonder they want some help from outside people to narrow down the work they have to do.

This is a good caution.

“I’m sure there will be a degree of gaming. There always is,” Kappos said.

After asking for help from these SEO specialists, they appropriately said that they believed SEO help should be rewarded like providing code or other tasks. I agree. Of course, on Robin Hood Fund I have no power to do so. However, I do have the power to reward people on Spoil My Spouse and Jumble Lunch.

The real question is how do you put a value on SEO? My initial thought is that you provide a small amount of royalty points for the initial work, but then you track the results of the SEO work and reward more royalty points accordingly. I think this is the only way to handle SEO. Essentially it provides limited value to get the work done. However, it only provides major reward to someone who really adds value to a project.

I actually think that a lot of crowdsourced tasks should be rewarded this way. For example, marketing tasks should only receive value if they produce value for the idea. I think that one of the keys to successful projects is for them to build in a way to quantify value provided by marketing tasks. This could be things like traffic generated, conversion rates, or other quantifiable measures. The key will be to provide a means to measuring these rates.

I’m not sure whether this is something that Cambrian House should look at creating or whether each project should create their own measures. It seems like a robust affiliate management program would be a great value add by Cambrian House. Possibly even some sort of relationship with Commission Junction. I just know that all of my projects will find a way to quantify, track and report marketing efforts.

The point is that right now Cambrian House is a bunch of people interested in having their own idea developed. That means we have a bunch of bosses and no worker bees. If you are interested in finding a coder, a graphic designer or a marketer at Cambrian House, there is no one available. They are working on their own ideas. My hope is that Cambrian House will do a good marketing push once the “Help Wanted” job board is up and ready to go so that their is a more diverse community of workers and not just bosses.

In the meantime, I only see two solutions to the problem. Of course, there will be some sharing between projects. I know that I’m interested in working on a bunch of projects even if they aren’t my own. Watch for a future blog post on my personal plan for Cambrian House and you’ll understand why I think it’s very valuable to work on more projects. Sharing with other projects and the cross over of idea submitters to other projects is only going to touch the surface of the need that’s out there.

My second solution is for Cambrian House to hire some Cambrian House staff community members. I think we’d need a coder, a graphic designer, a marketer and maybe something else that I’m missing. These people would be required to rack up as many RPs in projects as possible. Of course they’d be paid by Cambrian House according to how many RPs they were able to get for Cambrian House. Essentially Cambrian House would be investing in the success of their product until they were able to build the community in a way that these specialists were no longer needed.

Of course, we could just wait for the Cambrian House community to become what it’s suppose to be. That’s what I’m facing now. For example, I have absolutely no graphic design skills. I can’t find another graphic artist in the community outside of the Cambrian House staff. How am I suppose to redesign the website without a graphic artist? I can’t. I have to either hope that a good graphic artist finds Cambrian House and wants to help with Spoil My Spouse or try and go find one myself.

I personally prefer spelling it as one word: crowdsourcing. However, I have Firefox 2 with the build in spell check installed on my computer and every time I spell crowdsourcing as one word it gives me the spell check error. It doesn’t do that when I write it as two words. I tried to add crowdsoucing to my dictionary, but it just seems like a temporary add.

I wonder what I need to do to get crowdsourcing in the dictionary.

I just checked Microsoft Word and it had the same problem. Someone call up Microsoft and teach them what crowdsourcing is. I’m sure they’d love that.

Have they gotten there? No

Are they getting there? Yes

I recently said in the cambrian house forum that this iteration of Cambrian House reminds me of my wife cleaning our house. When my wife starts cleaning the house she chooses one room and goes to town. The room gets cleaned really quickly and is spotless from top to bottom. However, during the cleaning of that room, all the other rooms in the house get totally trashed.

I think this is similar to what is going on at Cambrian House. They had to clean house. Their code needed to be fixed and they needed to change their business model completely. The principles of crowdsourcing and entrepreneurship were the same, but the method was completely different. I think Cambrian House has only cleaned one of their rooms. They still have some major rooms to clean out.

Here’s my top rooms that Cambrian House better “clean up” to get their house in order.

First is how rewards for working on projects will be handled. Can you imagine PayPal being built, but there was no way to keep track of who paid who? That’s where Cambrian House is at this point. No one at Cambrian House wants to do it, because that means you are creating something that no one knows how to create. Everyone knows how to create a forum or a wiki. It’s been done and is down to a science. Creating a royalty payment system for crowdsourced projects hasn’t been done. Plus, whoever does it will suffer the wrath of MJ (Cambrian House CEO) if it is done wrong. All I know is that MJ better sit down with one of his coders (or a team of coders) and map out exactly how the Royalty Point system will work.

Second, helping project managers find people to work on their projects. If you have a project on Cambrian House then you need have a large set of tools that help you find qualified people to work on your projects. On that same token, if you are someone with specific skill sets, you need to have the ability to find which projects need your skills. Cambrian House’s answer is tagging. I personally feel that’s a step in the right direction, but it may require something more granular than that. At least tagging would get us on the right track.

Third, avoiding the problem of everyone being a project owner and no project workers. Right now everyone that comes to Cambrian House is funneled into submitting an idea. In all fairness, having your idea become a success is the way to make the most money. At least on paper. However, I’ve always said that owning 100% of a small project is still a small amount, but a little of a large project could be very large. Cambrian House needs to market the projects being created to people with skills. Otherwise, we’ll have a bunch of projects that are being built by individuals when we should have a smaller set of projects built by crowds. It reminds me of University admissions. You want the best and brightest projects, but you also can’t educate if there are too many students. Just because Cambrian House is removing themselves as the bottleneck doesn’t mean that the Cambrian House community couldn’t still be a bottleneck. The Cambrian House community still has its limit on how many projects it can support. Will natural selection of projects be enough of a filter?

Fourth, finding a way for the cambrian house crowd to contribute to lots of ideas. Let me give an example. Say I’m working on Robin Hood Fund and I create a sophisticated captcha image. How will someone working on Gwabs know that I’ve created a captcha image which I could easily integrate into their site? Or how will I know that Gwabs has need of a captcha image? If forums are going to be our means of communicating, then they better not be buried and I better be able to quickly see what’s going on across all the projects that CH has going. By doing so projects can be developed faster and contributors can be rewarded for the same code on multiple projects. It’s a win win for everyone, but only if I know that someone else needs it. Otherwise, we’ll be reinventing the wheel over and over again.

I’m also not just talking about contributions such as a design or a set of code. When we start talking about business expertise, monetization methods, creative marketing, killer feature request, bug finding/testing, and all the other brainstorming activies that go into a business, then each project needs a way to access the Cambrian House “crowd.” Having some forums buried inside a project page won’t access the crowds. They’ll facilitate those working on a project, but will get very little visibility by the Cambrian House crowd.

Ok, that pretty much covers the dining room and the front room. I’ll tackle the kitchen later and let’s not even start talking about cleaning out the garage.

Cambrian House is a start up company that is currently creating a platform for people that want to start a company. While their model could be applied to other businesses, I think it would be a bad choice to use Cambrian House for anything other than an internet related company. I hope someone proves me wrong on this, but I’d say at this point that Cambrian House is going to be an awesome platform for entrepreneurs wanting to start an online, internet, web 2.0, etc etc business. However, I don’t personally see it working that well for other businesses.

Each week all of the Cambrian House staff get together and do what they call Demo Days. This is a day where all of the various teams demo the progress they’ve made on their various projects. I think generally it’s a great idea for them to do this to keep everyone in the company apprised of what’s happening at the company, to share knowledge and expertise, and to share experience across the various teams at Cambrian House.

A few months ago (I think December) Cambrian House decided to publish all of the demo days videos to the community so that everyone involved with Cambrian House could see what was happening with their corporate office. This was a pretty amazing step forward. You get to see actual people and the progress on projects. You get a feel for the style of the company and why the company is making the decisions it is making. Of course there would be the occasional bleep for some of the more proprietary information. It usually consisted of partnerships that were still under development and they didn’t want to anger their partner by “announcing” that they were in negotiations.

Well, now Cambrian House has even taken it to the next level. The past two weeks Cambrian House community members have been able to connect to a live video and audio stream of demo days. We even have a chat screen that allows us to ask questions as if we were sitting at the demo day.

I don’t know many companies that do this for their own employees let alone people outside of Cambrian House. Of course Cambrian House isn’t the typical start up company. They are trying to use crowdsourcing for everything they do. This is just one more example of them living what they preach. How could Cambrian House preach crowdsourcing and not involve the crowd?

The can’t. I just can’t wait until Cambrian House comes out with information about how they are going to reward the crowd with “ownership” of the company. That will be completely revolutionary and unlike any other company.

Update: It looks like my previous post on this being transparency week for my blog somehow didn’t get posted and is still saved in my blog post drafts. Oh well. I’ll post it sometime next week.