Most of us have at some point had an idea for an amazing product, but unfortunately it’s always been a little complicated to get things invented. So most of the time these amazing product ideas we have just fade away or maybe we just hope someone else will think of it and actually get it invented. But now, there’s Quirky. This is a site that has been around since 2009 with a mission to make invention possible for everyone.
The first step is submitting your invention idea. After that, it has to get votes from the Quirky community in order to actually get reviewed by Quirky as a possibility for a real product. The Quirky community (other aspiring inventors or anyone who has registered at Quirky) vote on the ideas. The site says that Quirky gets thousands of ideas to review every single week.
If your idea gets enough votes by the end of the 30 day voting period, it will be reviewed by Quirky. Once a week Quirky reviews all the ideas that received the required 200 votes or that were picked by a Quirky employee and decides which are best. This is neat because apparently the debating is streamed live, so you can actually watch them make their decisions.
You don’t necessarily have to get your product invented to earn money at Quirky. You can earn just from being an active member of the Quirky community. For example, when you answer surveys about products that will be invented through Quirky, you will earn a percentage of influence. The amount of influence varies from product to product.
Quirky shares ten percent of the gross revenue of each product direct sale through the Quirky web store, and ten percent of all gross revenues from the indirect sale of their products through various retail partners. Your influence money comes from that. Each product starts off with 100 percent influence that Quirky community members can grab pieces of. You can learn more about how influence work by reading this.
Quirky gives the largest amount of influence to the person who thought of the product. If your idea gets chosen by Quirky and actually invented, you’ll get a 40 percent cut.
One of my readers, Dion, is an active community member at Quirky. He had this to say about the site:
I’ve been a member of Quirky since 2010, but a fully contributing inventor since 2012 and I’ve come quite close to having an invention of mine created. There are quite a few inventors and community members making 1-20 grand per month due to their invention or contribution to an invention. You can earn influence (aka money) by chiming in on an invention with; research, a name, a vote, a tagline, a design, a logo and more. Think of quirky as one of your “big fishes,” because if your invention or contribution to an invention were to be selected, you could earn a steady income for the life of that particular product. Strong community support and customer service is what Quirky is structured around as the invention process is truly a social effort. It’s a ton of fun to tune into the live webcast of the weekly product evaluations where both board and community members pick a couple of inventions that will move on to the next phase. It could happen to you, because it happened to me, but my invention didn’t make it through that time. Don’t fret, because you can dust yourself off like I did, and now I’m back with my best invention idea yet!
You can go here to get started at Quirky. Please comment below if you want to share your own experience with Quirky. It looks like a fun site.
