Like all the rest of the companies working in collaboration tools, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding or any of the other “Social Commerce” domains, the biggest challenge at BountyUp seems to be “Cognition Friction”. Which is a fancy way of saying that people have no idea what we’re talking about.

The best way to address this seems to be by analogy - unfortunately, we’ve yet to find a sufficiently universal analogy, to which all of our current (and future) users can relate. But as I hinted at in a previous post, we’ve been considering the Stock Market.

Why? Whether the participants realize it or not, it’s a massively collaborative experiment in Social Commerce - with literally MILLIONS of strangers pooling their funds to support (and capitalize on) companies around the world. In fact, it’s the closest thing to BountyUp that exists.

Here are the gaps:

1. In the stock market, you invest in companies as a whole. With BountyUp, you invest directly in the project or product you’re interested in.
2. The stock market can only be used for investing - BountyUp can be used for investing, purchasing, or donating.
3. Investments in the stock market are immediately at risk - BountyUp pledges are actually incentives, not true investments. The upside is that they’re never at risk - if the product or project is not completed, you get your funds back. The downside - you have no claim to company returns that are outside of the Bounty contracts.
4.  There’s no “tool” (outside of the Annual General Meeting) to chat with other investors in the Stock Market. BountyUp provides a forum as well as a marketplace.

On second thought, perhaps this analogy is reaching a bit. What do think? Can you think of a simpler, better way to explain what crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is, and how to do it?