[loganu]

I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."

They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.

As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.