The Indie Startup: How Transparent Should You Be?

Bruce Nussbaum, author of the book Creative Intelligence, has put forward the idea that we are seeing new entrepreneurship often take the form of “indie capitalism.” In this new world of enterprise innovation, large organizations, top-down hierarchies, rigid structures, and monotonous processes gives way to lean teams, free collaboration, and rapid creative cycles.



Nussbaum describes this trend as having analogues in the DIY ethic of the traditional “indie music” scene.  While that may seem to some like a stretch, it is important to note how much both depend upon local networking and building a natural community of fans through offering a creative spin to something that pleases people’s tastes.

Moreover, it is not just the structure of business that is looser and less defined; the business ecosystem has transformed as well. Thanks to crowd funding and other sources of web-enabled collaboration, the lines are being blurred between creators, investors, audience, and collaborators. Both, in traditional business and in the traditional music industry, a highly-controlled vetting process, typically performed behind closed doors and aided by elaborate market research, determined the final product offered to the consumer. With “indie capitalism,” not only does the audience also partake as a source of funding, this shift has lead to idea of replacing the word “consumer” with “prosumer.”

For these reasons, a lean startup - especially one that is engaging in crowd sourcing- benefits from transparency and interaction with the community. Its a great tactic for crowdsourcing ideas, receiving feedback and building a strong customer relationship. This transparency includes frequent updates on product or business development - made possible through services such as Hangouts on Air or just blogging about product updates. UFOstart, for example, is using the weekly "Live Community Hangout" to discuss current company topics and developments. Also, the Community Voting Feature transparently shows our product development - everyone and anyone can vote or suggest new features for the UFOstart platform. 

To take company transparency to the next level, we will be publishing a series of blog posts about the internal company tools we are using. This can be a helpful overview of crowdsourcing services for any young start up and will hopefully expand our list of services through recommendations! Stay tuned for the upcoming blogs about that. 

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If you are interested in learning more about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, contact UFOStart for more information. UFOstart revolves around leveraging the power of the Internet to generate, filter, and escalate innovative ideas. In addition, we want to encourage the notion of project based work resulting in equity in a company for the worker.