I am now thinking in terms of crowdsourcing and I love it.  It’s the same effect I had after reading Tim Ferris 4 hour workweek where all of a sudden I wanted to outsource everything to the Phillipines.  So 3 years ago when I first read that book, I had all these plans to outsource various functions of my business and life.  Literally, I was ready to outsource my data entry, my receptionist services, my personal assistant stuff (hey who likes to do their own online traffic school ;), and whatever else I could possible imagine.

Crowdsourcing, I don’t want to let pass me by.  

So what’s crowdsourcing?  Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions fromamateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization

Ok so now in English, crowdsourcing is literally outsourcing, but of a large cumulation of tiny tasks (that’s how I understand it at least).  And let me just preface this by saying that I know incredibly little about it.  

But here’s what excites me about it.  There is a whole world of people out there willing and able to work on all kinds of random things.  There are a lot of things that if I could get done faster, cheaper and more efficiently, I would be way further along in my business than I am right now.  It’s literally the same as outsourcing except instead of hiring one person to work hourly, you’re breaking down your work into bite sized tasks and pushing the task out to a qualified crowd to get the multitude of tasks done.  

For example, instead of paying an assistant $10 per hour to data enter 20 pieces of information within that hour, you might break that data entry assignment into 100 mini tasks that you’ll pay 5 cents per completed task thereby allowing you to complete the same 20-person data entry project for half the price.  Ok that was an oversimplified example and at small scale, but hopefully you get the point.

So what’s standing in my way.  Truth be told, the only thing is the defining of the small task that I’ll want to use as my test run.  I’m currently working through a few options that I think if implemented correctly could have a huge impact on not only the bottom line of my business but also on the marketplace which I serve.

Last week, I attended a meetup hosted by crowdsourcing technology provider Crowdflower at their San Francisco HQ.  I learned a ton about crowdsourcing at this meetup and had the opportunity to network with some really amazing people in the process.  I’ll be following up with the guys over at Crowdflower to brainstorm more about this topic and the best way to start a campaign.

Stay tuned for more about this topic.