MultiHub Forum

Crowdsourcing ideas for a project never works for me

I tried crowdsourcing design ideas for a new app feature and it was a total mess. I got a hundred different suggestions, most of them completely unrealistic or off-topic. Sorting through it all took longer than just coming up with ideas myself. I see big companies do this successfully, but maybe you need a huge community for it to actually work. It just ended up being noise.

Crowdsourcing platforms can work if you set a tight prompt and guardrails You need a clear problem statement your constraints and a way to judge ideas Then collect ideas and apply a simple scoring rubric to cut the noise Also ask for quick visual sketches or described user value to make it tangible

Yes noise is real If you get a flood of ideas demand a short justification and a rough feasibility score Keep prompts narrow and ask for practical outputs such as feature sketches or value estimates Only a few will survive

Try a two stage approach First run a focused crowdsourcing data collection with a clear prompt Then pick the top five ideas and validate them with tiny experiments or quick interviews This turns random input into real signals

Start small with a small curated group of users and a single problem to solve Build a rubric for impact feasibility effort and user value Then choose one idea to prototype before you scale

If you want I can sketch a two week sprint plan for running a tidy crowdsourcing ideas sprint with a fixed prompt a rubric and a path to quick tests We can map the best idea into a concrete next step