Mob4Hire from the beginning idea
I have been a member of Cambrian House for over a year now. If you look me up, I am fish99 and I am 6th on the leaderboard. (ie most glory points…a ranking system for doing stuff on the site)
In February, after lurking on the site for a while, I decided to add an idea.
The orginal name of the idea was “Mobile Phone Application Testing Service” (probably the most unsexy name I could think of….but it told what the idea did)
When I was at Blister Entertainment, I knew the difficulties in testing mobile applications. The cost was enormous… I estimated that each handset we tested on cost us between $1500 and $2000 depending on the cost of the handset and the data plan we needed. We needed to test in the countries, where the applications were to be launched, so we had to send testers, usually developers and technical people, to test with added cost.
Working at Cambrian House, I loved the whole crowdsourcing concept.
In brainstorming, the ideas come out of putting two or more concepts together, to come up with a mashup. The idea of crowdsourcing and mobile sounded like a good fit, so I started thinking about it. Where were the problems in mobile and how could crowdsourcing help?
It kinda came to me slow but eventually the idea of crowd sourced mobile application testing came to mind. I found in the mobile space there were difficulties and cost with testing.
Tester bias was also a problem. If you send your developers out to test, you are going to get skewed results. If the person who wrote the application is testing, they tend to follow the same pattern in testing. For example, looking at a help screen in the middle of an application, does not happen if you wrote the code.
So the idea went up, and there were responses immediately. Some people loved it. Some hated it. There were suggestions. I did not know all of the answers right away but on thinking on responses helped me form the simple idea into a legitimate idea.
The bottom line is that the crowd helped me with fine-tuning the idea and the business model behind it.