Web 2.0 Expo 3 - People Powered Products

I attended this panel discussion about People Powered Products, which was quite interesting because all of the participants in the panel were succesful entrepreneurs of companies selling customer produced physical products online.

The four companies and panelists were:

Etsy.com
Matt Stinchcomb

Crushpadwine.com
Michael Brill

Blurb.com
Eileen Gittins

Moo.com
Richard Moross

I am running out of time before the next session here at the web 2.0 Expo, so I will simply just drop my top-of-the head notes from this session here:

Gittins:

What we are doing is about three things:

1. Democratizing the tools of production and
2. Democratizing the tools of distribution.
3. Connecting supply with demands.

Stinchcomb:

People don’t want to watch just “what is on”- they want selection. And that is the same for products.

Brill:

In traditional production and distribution processes customers do not have control – they do not have a way to express their creativity.

Gittins:

We are removing the friction in the middle – all of the fat in the production and distribution chain.
We are also more ecological as we are only producing goods, when they are actually demanded.

Moross:

Because of digital technology risk has been removed from the productions chain. You no longer have to produce 10.000 items – today you can produce simply one item.

Stinchcomb:

We didn’t really think community from the beginning. It simply developed by itself. We were simply just very open and transparent. I think the future is all about giving people tools and areas where community can grow, and then not get in their way.

Gittins:

Offline is the new online. We are experiencing how people are using the online environment to actually meet in real life.

Moross:

We have decided not to have our own community tools. We use existing community services like Flickr.

Gittins:

In order to generate trust in our products we have always tried to be physically present at events. Also we have a lot of trust because we have grown through personal recommendations.

Stinchcomb:

People are putting a lot of personality and personal history into the products they are selling on etsy.com. The people who are buying the products buy both the product and that history.

Moross:

A lot of companies create crappy products but excellent advertising. We are trying to move some of our energy from communicating the product to producing the product.

Brill:

Not all products are suited for this model. Some products are sheer mass production products that people will never care about.