I liked the rhetoric used by the author on crowdsourcing as to how Threadless made money. Was it an accident? Or was it an exploitation of the internet through which it was able to instill passion in the social media to design T-shirts.
Bottom line : the end result is a simple positive skew of the income statement. Less or negligible costs and a whopping revenue to generate a huge profit margin.
One question I would pose is sustainability. Deep diving more on this, how does the company make sure that the design oriented community can be branded to Threadless such that it will stick to them if the company were to expand its product line to more than the T-shirt business.
The other example is iStockphoto. This company is discussed in the article as to how it is part of the crowdsourcing concept that was initiated through the open source movement in software. All this is passion from the people who want o do it and want to discuss and be acknowleged by peers and friends instead of the standard hierarchical corporate organizational concept. However,some of these entrepreneurs end up becoming a disruptive market to the incumbents. The result is that they get acquired by the big guys for a substantial amount, making these entrepreneurs quite wealthy. It is therefore not necessarily an accident! As a side note, only 10% or less of the entrepreneurs make it.
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