Idea Is Queen!

Steve Poland’s new (not quite new now) startup, RingSide Startup, provides an opportunity for everyone to learn how to build a startup from A to Z, . He will disclose the process and progress everyday on its blog, along with advice/ comments from experienced entrepreneurs and VCs. If you donate money (ranging from $5 to $1,500), you will become a contributor and can participant in some business decision making process. The bottom line is to raise $20,000 ($10,000 minimum) within 60 days.

Currently, folks there are discussing about whether equity of the new startup could be given away to contributors or not.

I like this idea, especially the concept of involving in as well as learning from others’ valuable experience. But I must admit that issues of money contribution and contributors’ expected return are more complicated than I thought before.

So it makes me think of another model converted from this one: A website where everyone can post an outline of their project or any kind of plan, and like RingSide, every project originator has to disclose daily progress and problems encountered. However, professional advisers are hired to offer quality and customized solutions, which means “pay per advice”. Still, the main purpose of this site is to educate those entrepreneurs-to-be.

However, next is the tricky part of this idea.

To bypass dispute with equity and the possible unwillingness of contributing money without financial return, I change the role of contributors into “Bounty Hunters”. Users can choose to be normal readers (learners) or apply for the position of being bounty hunter for each project or plan. Applicants are verified by the project initiators. So How to determine that one should be hired or not? Maybe check out their resume (ability) or participation (passion) in comments of a certain project. The hired bounty hunters, like the contributors above, can participate in business decision (voting). Thus every bounty hunter have part of influence of a project.

However, besides influence, there is a chance that they will be paid. (the reason why I call them “bounty hunters”) The project/ plan initiator lists and prices all the tasks needed to be done, and bounty hunters take any item they like as long as they are capable of achieving the goal of that task. (By all means, legally, so it doesn’t matter that bounty hunters broker the task to others to complete.) Bounty come from project initiators and are paid after missions accomplished 100%. If more than one bounty hunter want the same task, let them bid for. Once accepting an assigned task, they must obey orders from the project originator (employer). Orders range from designing, programming, negotiating, fundraising, managing to trivial things like booking tickets, purchasing supplies, accounting, prepare power point slides, blog maintaining, etc. Bounty hunters don’t contribute money, but donate their “time” and “energy” as mercenaries (employees). Therefore though they can’t share equities of any project, (assumed all projects/ plans are future startups engaging in making profit) they can still have financial gains during participation.

I don’t know my proposed idea works out or not. Maybe it’s merely another wild thought. All in all, what I most appreciate is the core value of RingSide - learning from the process and engaging in a risky venture collaboratively that you may not want (or be able) to take alone. Of course you can learn from others’ successful entrepreneurial experience (sometimes a failure one) by reading books or blogs, but don’t lie to yourself, it’s very difficult to be part of their experience as learning from those traditional ordinary way.

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