For small online businesses, it’s never been easier to compete against larger companies than it is today.
Platforms that have harnessed the crowd for the benefit of businesses, such as crowdsourcing, crowdtesting and crowdfunding platforms, have broken down many of the barriers that smaller businesses once faced in order to compete with larger competitors.
What is the next stage for the wisdom of the crowd as it matures into a model that businesses can be built around? What impacts is it likely to have on the growth of entrepreneurship? What are some of the risks associated with the growth of the crowd?
More importantly, can the power of the crowd ever truly win against Goliath-like businesses one day?
The Evolution of the Crowd: Crowdfunding and Crowdtesting
As fresh as they may seem, many crowd-based services like crowdfunding and crowdtesting are nothing new. Crowdfunding, as an example, has been around for several centuries. The Irish Loan Funds of the 1700s pioneered micro-lending centuries before the Internet was even a concept.
What makes the current evolution of the crowd possible is the Internet. Previously, crowd-based services were local — a local lending collective, for example. Today, the Internet allows for crowd services to operate at an immense scale — a scale that’s constantly growing.
Kickstarter has grown from a small crowdfunding platform for small, niche products into a huge, worldwide financing tool. Launched in February 2015, the Pebble Time smartwatch became the most funded campaign in the website’s history, with more than $20 million in pledged funding.
One of the most notable developments in the evolution of the crowd is growth. Crowd services are growing immensely in size, as the scale of Kickstarter campaigns shows. Crowd platforms that were once aimed a specific niche are growing rapidly and branching out in the process.
This scale isn’t limited to any one platform — instead, it reflects the growing scale of the power of the crowd. Today, crowd-based services offer everything from crowdsourced micro-jobs to crowdtesting platforms, household errands and international product delivery.
The Crowd’s Impact on Entrepreneurship
Over the last decade, the cost of starting an online business has dropped significantly. Services that were once outside the reach of small businesses have become more accessible, and much more affordable, as a result of the crowd.
Just 10 years ago, hiring a personal assistant was an expense that most small business owners couldn’t afford. There was the slow and costly hiring process to consider, not to mention a salary and benefits to pay on an ongoing basis.
Thanks to the crowd, small online businesses can outsource simple tasks to virtual assistants at a fraction of the cost — and often, at a greater level of efficiency — than hiring employees.
Likewise, crowdtesting provides the same QA benefits as an internal quality assurance team, as well as the wisdom and scale of the crowd, at a fraction of the price. Businesses that didn’t have the resources for QA testing before now have access to expert testers at a reasonable cost.
As the crowd grows in scale and scope, more and more services that were outside the reach of small businesses will become accessible, giving startups and bootstrapped businesses far less of a disadvantage compared to their larger, better funded competitors.
Bring the Crowd into Your Process
Crowdtesting lets you tap into the wisdom of the crowd to find bugs, quality issues and functional problems in your software. From exploratory testing to email templates, put our tens of thousands of testers to work finding and fixing bugs in your mobile app or website.
