Faster Horses
The crowdfunding site Kickstarter is a place where you present a product or art project idea to the community, and ask them for the money to help make your idea a reality. If enough people decide to support you, and you raise enough money, then you get to produce your idea.
Kickstarter has enjoyed tremendous success in its short lifespan, and it has inspired hundreds of knockoffs all trying to use the same model in different niches. (The most interesting of which, I think, is philanthropy.) But crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter suffer from one drawback that is characteristic of focus groups:
People don't know what they want.
As Henry Ford once said, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses". Focus groups would never have come up with the idea for the Nintendo Wii. If you asked people what they wanted in a new game console, more than likely, they would have asked for more CPU power. Or better graphics.
Think of the business ideas that have become household names. It's hard to imagine Facebook or Amazon raising their seed money through crowdfunding and then launching something grand.
Kickstarter has enjoyed tremendous success in its short lifespan, and it has inspired hundreds of knockoffs all trying to use the same model in different niches. (The most interesting of which, I think, is philanthropy.) But crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter suffer from one drawback that is characteristic of focus groups:
People don't know what they want.
As Henry Ford once said, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses". Focus groups would never have come up with the idea for the Nintendo Wii. If you asked people what they wanted in a new game console, more than likely, they would have asked for more CPU power. Or better graphics.
Think of the business ideas that have become household names. It's hard to imagine Facebook or Amazon raising their seed money through crowdfunding and then launching something grand.