1060: Crowdsourcing

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Crowdsourcing
We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'
Title text: We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

Explanation

This comic is a take on the way that a lot of new businesses "crowd source" their products, so they do not have to actually do anything. Which the image text indicates is only "playing shooters", which is short for first person shooter video games.

Transcript

[Cueball is standing in front of a flowchart on a wall, indicating with a pointer. A man and two women are looking on with interest. One woman holds a briefcase.]
Cueball: We crowdsource the design process, allowing those with the best designs to connect - via already-in-place social networking infrastructure - with interested manufacturers, distributors, and marketers.
Nobody caught on that our business plan didn't involve us in any way - it was just a description of other people making and selling products.


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Discussion

Even better is when you can repackage an existing open-source program and sell it for a tidy profit. It happens. Davidy22[talk] 13:42, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Isn't that technically "asset flipping"? --JayRulesXKCD what's up? 14:22, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I personally like to think Cueball's audience are potential investors and that Cueball is trying to convince them to fund his "company" 141.101.104.49 23:10, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Given that he is referring to it as a "business plan" and the people he's showing look fairly corporate (as much as one can tell from stick figures) and he's phrasing it like a pitch, I'd say this is exactly what he's trying to do. -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 02:13, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Isn't that called "Multi-Level Marketing" (MLM) aka Amway *cough* pyramid scheme *cough* 108.162.238.137 16:31, 15 September 2019 (UTC)