Crowdsourcing may be partly responsible for the startup's success
Designing new business products or services can be risk for many small businesses, especially if customer demand is uncertain or competition is particularly fierce.
One way many companies are mitigating this risk is by turning to their customers for help, in varying degrees of the recently popular business resource dubbed "crowdsourcing."
Some companies are going all out with crowdsourcing - Netflix recently sponsored a contest giving customers and developers the opportunity to come up with a new movie recommendation algorithm - while some are more modest, keeping their ear to the pavement about customer feedback.
Twitter has done just that, and experts say it may be partly responsible for the startup's success.
The New York Times reports that Twitter will soon release two new features, Lists and Retweets, which are based on users' ideas. Many of the startup's features have the same origin, said the newspaper.
"Twitter's smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, 'Gee, let's not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let's outsource design to them,'" Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at MIT's Sloan School of Management, told the Times.
Another way some small businesses are reducing the risk of unveiling new business products - as well as the costs involved - is to use minimum viable product, in which companies market the product and gauge the response before actually developing the item, reported Inc. magazine.
