When You and Your Customers Make the Products Together

This is the eBook version of the printed book.

This Element is an excerpt from 33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking (9780137154357) by Juliette Powell. Available in print and digital formats.

How to dramatically improve your products’ performance by building them around user ideas and submissions.

When a couple of college dropouts with no formal business training got together with $500 each and decided to start a T-shirt shop on the Web, nobody paid much attention. Not at first, anyway. Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell built their own ongoing, community-based T-shirt design contest--and became the multimillionaire creators of a new standard of peer, “crowdsourced” production on the Internet....