
Collaborative startup specification: let the masses tell you what to build (so you know that you will have many users before you even begin) - amichail

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amichail
Why try to guess what many people would want? Let them tell you more directly
via a service for collaborative startup specification. Unlike implementation,
specification -- at least at an informal level -- can be done by pretty well
anyone. Of course, you will need to provide some way to end up with a coherent
spec from all those user contributions. But if something like wikipedia can
produce stellar results, then why not this?

And when you start working on something, why not keep all those people up to
date with your progress? They would probably be very eager to see what you are
doing with their spec contributions. And they may evolve the spec over time,
again, in a collaborative way.

When your startup is ready to launch, you will then have all those people
ready to try it out and tell their friends.

~~~
dfranke
Wikipedia isn't the right mechanism. It's fine when you're collaborating on
documenting something that's completely objective, but as soon as you get into
something controversial it descends into chaos. There's good reason that some
of the highest-quality articles on Wikipedia tend to be the ones about math.

Darcs/git might be a better model for this sort of thing: everybody gets their
own working copy and can merge changes made to other copies into their own.

~~~
amichail
Maybe you can use something like reddit for this purpose.

~~~
dfranke
I suppose the sincerest form of voting would be merging others' ideas into
your working copy. The system could track that and maintain a leaderboard of
most-assimilated specs.

~~~
euccastro
I see two challenges in this idea:

\- to make a darcs-like tool intuitive to non tech types (lest you filter them
out), and

\- to represent such specs so the system can track them while keeping them
palatable for humans.

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drop19
Amichail, there is a site that was a proto-version of what you're describing
called The Business Experiment. It seems to be down right now, but here's an
article about it:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/08/the_business_ex.html

The original site is:

http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/

http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/

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richcollins
People don't usually know what they want. It is your job to figure it out
based on the available information and then give it to them.

Perhaps this would be useful to those ends; but I would not take what people
say to be what they literally want.

~~~
euccastro
I agree, with some nuances.

"People know what they want, but people also want what they don't know." -
Gilberto Gil

People know what they want- when they see it.

They may not be very good at telling you where their itch/pain is out of the
blue. They may be taking it for granted and not even feeling it anymore. But
if you just start scratching/massaging _somewhere_, you'll get useful "more to
the left, no, a bit more up- THERE- AAaaaahh!" feedback. If you're so out of
touch that they will push you away rather than steer you into the right spots,
well, that's useful info too.

I don't imagine that feedback will be coming easy unless there's the prospect
of an almost immediate solution (I'm less likely to discuss back itches on the
phone). Your idea, as I understand it, offers a slim chance that each specific
problem will be addressed, and even in that case the solution is months away.

Filtering people out isn't necessarily bad. This may help in identifying
problems that hurt a lot. What you probably want, though, is problems that
hurt lots of people.

Having something like what you propose would be better than not having it, and
I don't want to discourage you from the idea. Just don't expect it to replace
"trying to guess what many people would want."

~~~
extantproject
Seems like you have to have a starting point in order to get direction for
your project from users/customers. The initial idea doesn't have to be
stellar, just something fairly specific. I hear posing the idea as a question
helps.

Pasting a big bulletin on the web that says "What do you want me to make?"
would likely be useless. (Or would it? There's something to try...) The domain
is too big; trying to gathering the web into a room and giving them a blank
whiteboard might generate a lot of ideas, but how many of them would you be
interested in? In fact, isn't that kind of what the web is to begin with: a
big whiteboard with a bunch of ideas written on it? So which ones get your
attention?

Solve some problem that you're interested in, place it in public view, foster
communication with the users/customers, and listen. Building something
specific ("hey, here's a web-based classifieds system..."), getting people to
use it, and giving them a place to critique it seems to be a good way to get
people to tell you what they need built.

Building a prototype and then getting people to use it is like writing that
initial phrase on a white board, circling it, and asking every one on the web
to generate ideas. Interested people will cluster around the idea and talk
about it. Some of the talk will be horrible, and some outstanding -- but it
will likely be more focused than if you just ask the web "what should I make?"

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extantproject
I've had similar thoughts; a sort of business that is "open source" in the
sense that the users determine what gets built and can look at (modify, even?)
what's going on...

extantproject at gmail dot com

