Hacker News Reader

Great write up. It left me wondering - do you think you could have started here? Or did the competitive format bring you the talented experts & public attention you needed to make consultation work?

Congrats on the re-launch.

View on HN

hi emhart, interesting question. The contest format was certainly novel and helped garner a lot of early attention from press. So there's that. But I think you may be right that the contests helped us a) find experts, but also b) learn what was possible.

That somewhat fits with the idea that crowdsourcing is best when you have less info. Once you have more info, then (at least we think) it's best to work with fewer specialists. Although this is mostly referring to the customer, maybe we can apply the thinking to our product lifecycle too.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com