Thu 25 Mar 2010
There are a few reasons why we like products to hit a threshold before moving into production:
Quirky should be just as powerful in killing mediocre ideas as it is in pushing great ideas forward.
Threshold lets us be sure that the ideas/products that we take a substantial amount of risk on are going to perform well in the marketplace. It’s not our desire to design/develop one product per week for the sake of designing one product per week. We don’t want to create more landfill, we want to create products people want and/or need.
It helps pace the business.
Designing one product per week is a tall order… having the product spend time in the store gaining traction allows us to use that time to go through a full process behind the scenes in order to fully engineer the product, prototype it, test it, and get it FULLY ready to go into production.
It allows influencers to vote with their wallets.
Votes and comments and ideas are all great. But when we see a product fly off our virtual shelf, we know we have a winner, and we are more motivated to put a substantial investment behind it.
It gives us fabulously predictive data.
One thing we love about threshold is we hope it will make our business fairly predictive. If we know the product sells 29 units per hour, via Quirky, we are able to extrapolate that out into models to determine how the product will perform in distribution, etc. — allowing us to take an aggressive, but comfortable amount of risk on that particular product. Obviously, what we are looking for with this data is an indication of near guaranteed market success.
This brings us to the problem at hand:
What should we do about products that have been on the site for a very long time and have still not hit threshold?
There is obviously a case to be made that an aging product that hasn’t hit threshold just isn’t a good product, given the amount of time it has lingered on the site.
The other worry, is that given enough time, everything will hit threshold… just naturally. Problem with that is that the people who committed 10 months ago no longer want the product, slow trajectory of sales is a negative indicator of the marketability of the product, etc. etc. etc.
In this, the first of many in a “Help Us Decide” series, I will start the conversation with a few of our internal ideas on this problem, and let you guys take it from there.
A forum topic has been started, and we’d like the conversation to happen there.
We will make a decision next week, on April 1st.
Here are the options, as I see them:
- Increase threshold with product age. So far, this is my favorite. Basically, as a product ages, say every 2 weeks or so, we will increase the threshold by a certain percentage (actual number TBD). This will guarantee that products that hit threshold are on a proper trajectory indicative of future market success.
- Set a timer. Just like Quirky development projects, we can set a timer for threshold to be hit. If the product does not hit in the predefined time, the idea gets sent to the graveyard… where we may choose to resurrect the product for events, upon demand/request, etc.
- Whatever else you guys think of... This is just an early look at what I hope will be an exciting conversation. We are hoping that you guide us and provide us with a ton of food for thought. In your suggestions be sure to remember the reasons why we use the threshold model (detailed above).
An important thing to remember is that we are in no way trying to make it harder for products to get made — we want nothing more than to create great products. We are just simply trying to assure, for the health of the company and the community, that the products that do hit threshold are, in-fact, great ones.
So, faithful Quirks: Help Us Decide.
