crowdSPRING

One of my favorite companies in the world - Zappos - is planning a two day Zappos Bootcamp. At first, I got excited because one could never own enough boots, and Zappos certainly has one of the largest inventories of boots in the universe (or at least on Earth). I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to find a great pair of boots and also to find a pair for Chris Detmer (our talented front-end developer), who has a cool hat, as you can see below, but sadly, no boots.

After reading about the bootcamp, I became even more excited because the Zappos bootcamp isn’t about boots at all - it’s an event with a small group of people where Zappos shares its secret sauce for how to create a strong culture at OUR company. Freeki!

It’s been almost a year since I joined crowdSPRING to lead the Customer Service team (reminder: ice-cream anniversary cake would be nice). When I started working at crowdSPRING, our community was 5,000 creatives strong. Now, more than 30,000 awesome and talented creatives from all across the world (150+ countries) work on crowdSPRING. I stopped counting the number of projects that are posted (just kidding - I still love to count!). During the past year, I’ve answered many thousands of customer requests - directly and on Twitter, and my team has handled tens of thousands. I absolutely love working with our customers - and have been thrilled to have met a few in person.

Throughout my time here, I’ve tried to learn as much as I could about culture. I’ve absorbed everything I’ve heard from Zappos and other great companies with awesome cultures. Among many other books, I’ve read the past few Zappos Culture Books and have been so impressed with the awesome people who work at Zappos. I’ve written many posts sharing our views about customer service.

I cannot imagine how a company, or community, can thrive without a great culture. Zappos aims to create happiness. And crowdSPRING fully believes this is the right way to conduct business. I’ve written about this - Helping is Happiness, as has Ross - Happiness Is Helping. Great customer service shouldn’t even feel like customer service, as you’ll hear me say in the following short video:

But my excitement about the Zappos Bootcamp was quickly tempered by two things: Pete kicked my ass at ping-pong and I learned that the Bootcamp costs $5,000. For a startup, that’s about $4,993 more than we can afford. And yet - there is a tiny, little, itsy-bitsy glimmer of hope. A scholarship! Zappos will give two scholarships to its Bootcamp, and I would absolutely love to get one.

I know that chances are extremely thin that Tony Hsieh would be crazy enough to let a Frenchman on board but you never know. So I need your help.

I’ve probably interacted or helped you one way or another during the past year. And I want my team to do an even better job. If you can, please leave a comment telling Tony Hsieh and Zappos why it would be absolutely awesome for them to honor crowdSPRING with one of the scholarships to the Bootcamp. Let them know about our great community and how we’ve worked together through good times and bad (especially during our site problems in May). Let’s show them that great culture can live within a small company and within a large community of people who come from every corner of the world.

Merci!

Jerome - The French Guy

Like many around the world, we at crowdSPRING have been watching the turmoil unfold in Iran. Eager to contribute, we’re hoping to help mobilize our community so that we, and those around us, can show their support through one of the best ways we know how: design.

Every revolution needs a unifying symbol. Iran’s citizens have bravely stood up to the repressive rule of the current regime, risking injury and life. Neda Salehi Soltani has become the worldwide face of Iran’s revolution when she was killed while watching a pro-democracy protest. Many others have been killed and injured during the ongoing demonstrations in Iran.

People around the world have come together to provide support and assistance to the citizens of Iran.

We here at crowdSPRING want to help by asking the world to create a common unifying symbol for this opposition that the world can give to the people of Iran and Iranians around the world.

We’ve asked our community to create a symbol/small illustration that can be used by people in Iran or around the world to show their support for the ongoing opposition in Iran, while keeping in mind to use the color green.  This color has become a rallying color for the demonstrations. We ultimately want a symbol that speaks to the bravery, hunger for democracy, and sacrifice of the Iranian people.

For its part, crowdSPRING is supplying the award and its marketplace to the world - the rest is up to you, our community of amazing designers.

This project ends at 11:59 pm on July 4th. July 4 is an important day in American history because it commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of democracy in America.

On July 6, we will invite the world to come and vote for their favorite designs and we will keep voting open until July 10.

We’ll be working with a small group of respected Iranians who, along with the world’s votes, will assist with the final selection of the winning design. This design will then be released into the public domain, under the broadest Creative Commons license, for all to use.

Visit this link to view entries or participate in the project.

In our first year-and-a-bit in business we have made a number of adjustments to our pricing. We continually review our business model, continually speak to our community, and continually listen to the feedback we receive. When we launched Pro projects back in September of last year, we set the minimum price at a very easy to grasp $1,000 across all categories.

Since then, we have collected a great deal of data on Pro projects, including Creative participation, submission levels, average awards, numbers of NDAs executed, and project lengths. These projects have been very successful and we continue to see growth month over month both in the number of Pro projects posted, and in the average awards offered for these. The data also clearly shows a direct correlation between the amount of an award, the complexity of the project, and the level of participation. One of the lessons we learned is that Buyers sometimes ask for too much and offer too little. One of our primary goals is that every buyer on crowdSPRING ends their project with the great creative that they came to us for. We want each of them to be successful, and we want Creatives to feel that a project is worth participating in. To that end we are adjusting the minimum awards in Pro projects to differentiate across the categories. Take a look here:

The new prices will take effect later this week. We believe that these new prices better reflect the value offered by our community and the feature set that come with the Pro level, including search engine exclusion, privacy settings. non-disclosure agreements, project invitation tools, and more. We also hope that the increased minimums will attract even more participation in these projects and provide more value to our wonderful community of Creatives!

So, heres to lots of great new projects and lots of great new ideas!

All of us here at crowdSPRING saddened with the passing of Michael Jackson yesterday. But mourning was quickly replaced with warm-hearted memories and reflection - how his music had taken part in all our lives. He was a legend, an artist, and a creative force that effected both the music industry and popular culture in immeasurable ways. He was also a troubled individual who never had a chance to lead a normal life. Like many artists before and after him, his fame cost him his privacy and possibly his sanity. But man if he didn’t make some beautiful music along the way.

To this one of a kind incredible and troubled human being we feel a little tribute is in order. Rest in peace sweet prince. May angels carry you to a happier place.

crowdSPRING’s Chris & Kevin - Tribute to Michael Jackson from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

crowdSPRING respects intellectual property - this is one of our core values as a company (before co-founding crowdSPRING, I spent 13 years as an attorney focusing on the protection of intellectual property, for clients around the world). People often ask what crowdSPRING does to protect intellectual property. The Q&A below shares our answers to the most common questions.

1. Does crowdSPRING have specific policies to protect people’s intellectual property rights?

Answer: Yes. crowdSPRING has two specific, written policies designed to protect intellectual property. First, crowdSPRING’s  Copyright Policy makes it easy for copyright owners to report alleged violations of their intellectual property rights. Second, crowdSPRING’s User Agreement prohibits people from selling, reproducing, modifying, displaying, preparing derivative works from, reposting, or using the content found on crowdspring.com - without the express written permission from the owner of the work.

2. What does crowdSPRING do to prevent people’s intellectual property from being stolen?

Answer: The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that the global fiscal loss due to theft of intellectual property is over $600 billion USD per year. Stealing someone else’s intellectual property is a crime in just about every single country on Earth.  However, it is impossible to prevent people from stealing intellectual property (whether the theft occurs online or offline).

Just because it is generally impossible to prevent theft doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t make reasonable efforts to protect intellectual property. Here’s what we do at crowdSPRING:

• We’ve developed and published detailed, comprehensive written policies concerning intellectual property (as you saw in the answer to question 1 above).
• We’ve developed and published detailed, comprehensive written standards of conduct for creatives (see Q&A 4 below).
• We’ve developed rules and procedures recognizing the importance of original ideas in projects so as to protect original ideas and prevent concept copying (see Q&A 14 below).
• We make it very easy to report possible violations of intellectual property (see Q&A 5 below).
• We work together with our entire community - nearly 30,000 designers strong across the world (our designers come from over 150 countries) to identify possible violations of intellectual property.
• We permanently bar people from crowdspring.com for violating others’ intellectual property rights (see Q&A 7-10 below).
• We enforce the licensing restrictions of third parties (see for example, Q&A 13 which deals with stock images).
• After a project is completed, we screen with a gray filter all except the winning entries for that project to make it very difficult to review any details associated with non-winning designs.

We have a number of other systems in place that we keep confidential, that help us to protect our community from the theft of intellectual property, and we continue to look for other technological and non-technological ways we can improve our efforts in this area. If you have suggestions, we’d love to hear in the comments to this post.

3. How does crowdSPRING inform its community about crowdSPRING’s intellectual property policies?

Answer: Every time a creative submits a design to a project, they are required to pick one of three statements about their design:

• I created everything in my entry and I didn’t copy anyone else’s concept.
• This design includes photos, illustrations or fonts created by others but I have the right to both use and resell.
• This design includes photos, illustrations or fonts created by others and if the buyer picks it, they’ll have to buy the rights.

A creative cannot participate in a project unless they select one of those three statements. We also publish links to our policies on the participation pages, and in a creative tip’s page visible to everyone in every project.

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In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community - in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly - activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.

We’re very proud to feature Vicky Willingham (crowdSPRING username: VictoriaAnnDesign) today. Vicky lives and works in Suffolk, UK.

1. Please tell us about yourself.

Well I’m currently on maternity leave from my full time job as a design manager where I design flyers, brochures, conference material, logos, web advertising and any other print and promotional design items.  I live in Suffolk, UK with my partner and our beautiful 6 month old daughter.

2. How did you become involved with graphic design?

I went to college after school and studied media.  I wanted to go into radio.  Not long after the course started I discovered that I really didn’t like my voice!  Part of the course was focused on design elements for magazines, CD covers, etc. and I began to really enjoy that more than anything else.

3. How did you start out as a freelancer doing graphic design work?

This was a long time ago!  I was looking around the Internet for a way to earn some extra money and came upon one of those old forum-based design contest sites.  I threw myself into it and pushed myself to improve.  It was quite a good starting point for someone with no professional experience. Because I wasn’t sure whether my designs were good, I found the feedback invaluable.

4. Who/what are some of the biggest influences on your design work?

I would say the environment around me has influenced me more than anything else.  When I’m stuck for ideas, I tend to stare out of my office window and gaze over the field past my garden and take a moment of thought.  I’m a thinker!  I also love bold colours and design, and have always enjoyed pop art.  I remember learning about Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and thinking how their work looked really modern even though it was created around 30 years ago.

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We just went through one of the most humbling experiences for our company since we launched in May 2008. We experienced serious site performance problems. While our team (and numerous consultants on several continents) worked around the clock, it took us some time to identify the root causes of the problems and to fix them.

We realize that the performance issues made it very difficult to use the site. We did our very best to communicate about our efforts to solve the problems (in this blog, via email and on Twitter).

Yesterday, we believe we turned the corner and got a handle on the problems. Today, we sent the following email to our community of creatives:

Next week, I’ll have a detailed post (or series) explaining the problems and our efforts to solve them. We want others to learn from this experience and we’re happy to share.

We believe in transparency. The response from our community to that email has been truly wonderful.

We love our community. And we take every opportunity to let our community know this.

Here’s one of the best perks (for me) at crowdSPRING - I get to spend every working day with Pete’s chocolate lab, Lucy. Here’s Lucy:

Lucy (Pete’s Chocolate Lab) from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

As a small business startup we spend a great deal of time looking at and analyzing data to help us drive strategy, make adjustments, and better understand our customers. We try hard to not be robotic in our response to numbers, but rather to let them inform our decisions and our direction. Here is the latest in a serial discussion of some of the data we look at internally…

A few months ago I shared some data about crowdSPRING users and visitors and the various parts of the world we come from. I recently met a writer who is interested in publishing an article about how people from different parts of the world leverage sites like crowdSPRING to connect, to work, and to learn. His interest was the developing world so I have collected some interesting nuggets:

• 65,000 people visited the site in the last month
• People are visiting from some pretty cool corners of the earth. In the past month we have had visits from 108 countries including from the Palestinian Territories, Mongolia, Ghana, Malta, Mauritius, Jamaica, Bolivia, Bahrain, Qatar, Cyprus,Uruguay, Sri Lanka, Estonia, and Nepal!
• We had visitors from 61 emerging and developing nations. In the past month they accounted for over 19% of site visits.
• Gender-wise we seem to appeal nicely to both of the major groups: our visitors are 56% male and 44% female.
• We seem to appeal to a slightly older demographic with users age 35-49 accounting for 39% of visitors.
• Well-educated folks seem to find crowdSPRING of interest. 68% of visitors had college or graduate degrees.
• Some pretty interesting companies have been visiting, too: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Global Crossing. Not to mention Sprint, Verizon, Time Warner and AT&T.

Today is Shakespearean sonnet day at crowdSPRING. We all took turns reading sonnets. Here’s Kevin, who was brave (or not too smart?) to let us video him…

Kevin DeLury Reading Shakespeare from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.