Commit to buy & crowdfunding
Imagine you want something that doesn't exist. What do you do? It should be possible to commit to buy something at a price. Market research and product development is expensive, you need a guarantee you buy something at a price, buying signals are currently invisible.
If you want something that doesn't exist, what do you do?
Can you afford to create it yourself?
You don't have a lot of flexibility if you want something that doesn't exist. You could try to talk to potential manufacturers or existing product companies or software companies to ask if they're interested in creating something to your requirements.
But you have to pay a lot of money to get this to come into fruition.
I propose a platform where you say what you want and how much you're willing to pay for it and it can be crowdfunded with others who want the same.
This should work like escrow. If someone does create the thing and it meets the requirements you purchase it
You think alike. Yes, in fact, mfg.com works a bit like that -- think of it like "UpWork" for suppliers -- you upload your part designs, and it automatically lists all the parts of your hardware assembly for suppliers to bid, for manufacturing them. Now, sure, you have to have your specification of what you want. A "specification" is actually a set of "target conditions" or "goal conditions" for your products (in hardware, a bit like tests in test-driven software development), specifying your desire. Then, you just pay and they deliver those parts to you.
I think I had a similar thought, when I thought -- hey, I should be able to get a search engine generate things I search for, if they don't yet exist.
// I propose a platform where you say what you want and how much you're willing to pay for it and it can be crowdfunded with others who want the same.
Like mfg.com combined with "Groupon"?
Yes exactly like Groupon with mfg.com.
Commit to buy is worth billions - it's like Kickstarter in reverse but with escrow. I posted Kickstarter in reverse on my ideas list.
You could monitor search terms that don't reveal many results on online search engines to create lots of money. If that data was not public that would be really valuable.
// Yes exactly like Groupon with mfg.com.
This idea really makes sense. [+] And, combining with open source hardware, we could probably have hardware approach the software, in the degree of people's ability to get involved into designing it -- best designs get many "Groupon" participants -- so, they get mass-ordered.