Beyond the backer: New crowdsourcing and crowdfunding ecosystem helps test ideas, hire talent, raise capital and go public

Introductions
#1

Hi all! I wanted to introduce myself, my name is David. My co-founder Jeff and I have been building a platform since September 2015. We finally launched the platform and wanted to invite you to check it out. It is Umergence .com

Umergence .com is a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing productive network. The Umergence platform allows entrepreneurs, inventors, makers, researchers, professionals, established companies and investors to work together on one site - building their ideas, forming teams, launching campaigns and raising capital. The site uses “wisdom from the crowd” technology to reduce startup risk, streamline tasks, quickly iterate business ideas, help in forming functional teams and hiring skilled workers, who can find short or long term work contracts. Umergence provides entrepreneurs access to human resources with a full services marketplace and job listings. Startups and accelerators can find talent in the crowd and manage it from their own dashboards. Aspects of the site is equally useful to investors, who are able to track progress of teams or ideas in real time, scouting worthy investments, watch the growth and development of prospects.

Umergence is a fully licensed broker/dealer registered with FINRA and the SEC offering companies more robust capital options from security campaigns to non security campaigns such as Rewards and Donations. Umergence is “collectively intelligent,” using a process of sorting ideas, with up-down voting. Information is also tagged and sorted into categories which are immediately searchable - making it easy to form communities of like-minded people. This is intended to give the site all the natural give and take of a regular office or co-working space. The platform was designed to be especially useful to creative, driven, entreprenuerial-mined individuals and existing business owners looking for a productive network. We welcome you to join the community today!

#2

This is a very good idea.

Have you considered going into a direction, where bakers will receive shares from the venture (like ICO’s) and eventually a second market for those shares ?

#3

Yes, Umergence can issue securities. Umergence is uniquely capable of handling the pre-sale of token offerings within compliance of the US SEC regulatory requirements through, for example, SAFTs (Simple Agreements for Future Tokens). ICOs and most token pre-sales are likely considered by the SEC as securities and will be increasingly scrutinized. Umergence is a registered broker/dealer with FINRA. Issuers have the option to do Securities-based fundraising campaigns to issue Equity, Debt, Revenue Sharing, Convertible Debt or Future Equity in exchange for investment dollars.

Umergence can do also non-securities campaigns like Rewards-based campaigns like Kickstarter where rewards are given in exchange for backing an idea to be able to validate an idea, establish a following or pre-sell products/services.

Umergence is a unified marketplace that can grow with your company so you can do for example a Rewards campaign to prototype as described earlier, then issue securities for Seed stage, Series A, B, C until they IPO all on the same platform.

We are currently in development for a secondary market and will be available soon.

The best part is that is that Umergence is free to use! Publish an idea, create a crowdfunding campaign, publish a service that you are good at for hire, list a job you need filled. It’s all free. Umergence is aligned with your interests, only if Umergence delivers is there a fee taken. No risk, try it today!

#4

Hey David,

Umergence looks very interesting; what’s the backstory behind the name?

#5

Umergence \ yü-ˈmər-jən(t)s \ was inspired by the word “Emergence”, which is a phenomenon of coming together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

You are emerging something… hence Umergence.

We wanted to create an online startup accelerator where creative, driven, entrepreneurial-minded individuals and existing business owners looking for a productive network could come to validate ideas, raise capital, and hire talents where they lacked. Everything we wish we had when we first got started. I am from the IT background and my business partner Jeff is from Finance. Now that we are growing, we are quickly researching other disciplines like sales and marketing are areas of knowledge where we lack. Hiring people to help in areas so that we can be the most efficient.

We looked to solve the 2 biggest problems the SBA (Small Business Administration) identified in one of their studies as to why most new startups fail. #1 is lack of capital, #2 lack of expertise. At Umergence, you validate your idea to reduce the risk of bringing the product to market… essentially by establishing a following. Through the up-down voting of comments all the best ideas filter upward so companies could implement what the crowd believes is really important to add. Then once you determine what is needed, Umergence has a project planning tool GANTT chart to plan it, and raise money for it. Everyone needs help along the way, so as you are raising money you can list jobs that you need filled, concurrently look for service providers/freelancers to help in areas of expertise that you lack and once you get funded. You use the money to hire, execute and hit the ground running. Co-Ideation of ideas and idea iteration flow of the Umergence Ecosystem:

how%20it%20works%203400

Our metrics for success is simple. If we can increase the number of successful startups by reducing failures we succeeded! VCs will tell you 1 in 10 startups will succeed. Our goal is to invert that so that 9 in 10 startups succeed. Through the power of the network effect and harnessing the wisdom from the crowd, I know it will!

There are many more features we are adding in the coming months that use theories from James Surowiecki book “Wisdom of Crowds” that we are implementing in practice that will help more startup companies to succeed through the Umergence platform. Including AI Personality Insights to help teams find co-founders that balance out their personalities, AI will be also used to find the right freelancers so they “fit” with the team, and many more. It’s hard enough to start a startup, it’s an emotional rollercoaster ride. We just want to empower founders with all the tools they need to be successful so they can do what they do best… run their companies.

#6

is there any wisdom from the crowd for B2B products?

#7

The crowd wisdom comes from the potential consumers and investors contributing to any given idea. The goal is to shape the idea before building. This could apply for new startups that bring a new product/service to market or existing companies that are looking for an extension to their research and development to shape new products/services they are considering to bring to the market. Thereby, the model works for B2C naturally. We are currently looking to gameify and provide incentives to contributors of an idea. The possibility of putting a dollar value (ie. bounty) to find solutions to something. Alternately, providing a dollar amount (or discounts on future campaign raises of that idea) paid out to the best comments to ideas that filter up through up-votes. We have several ideas we are considering but are looking for crowd feedback to determine which would be the best.

To use an analogy, Facebook as a platform is worth 0, yet they are a several billion dollar company. The reason being is that they as an organization keep all the value that their users bring to the platform. At Umergence, we are trying to figure out a way to pay out the value to contributors. Quantity is number of contributions, Quality is number of up-votes. We have several payout algorithm that we are looking at. We are looking at models like Steemit . com a blog that does something similar to handle payouts.

Finally to answer your question about B2B products, as defined above, the crowd in the crowd wisdom in B2B scenario would be the businesses. Businesses have no incentive to help other competitor businesses, this is not to say there isn’t a potential model there, we are looking to find ways to incentivize this model. If you have any suggestions we would be open to it.

#8

it is so, if the product is simple, when no need to see who have done the upvote. If it is B2B product, it requires niche business with relevant skills to do the upvotes and downvotes. It is a good question - how you can get businesses involved into your system. Business owners are busy people, they have limited time to “give advice for developers”. One idea is to integrate your system with linked-in or some niche business forums where it is possible to reach B2B decision makers.

From my point of view B2B niche products are easier to start, that’s why I’m more interested in getting “crowd feedback about my startup idea” from “thousands of CEOs” of course it is not possible

#9

There are many people in the crowd that can potentially be CEOs or former CEO who are now philanthropists wanting to give back. SCORE . org is an example where former executives and people in high ranking positions join SCORE to help mentor startups and early stage companies for free. We are growing and hoping to attract these people to the community to help others too. Launching a startup is not easy and establishing a good group of advisors could mean the difference between failing or succeeding. I would suggest perhaps reach out to score and find a mentor that relates to your startup idea. It’s a good start.

Umergence also has a Services section, where we welcome people to list anything their talented in as a service for a fee if they prefer. They can be hired as freelancers by startups, a former Marketing executive could list their service for free. Let’s say that person lists a service “I will help you build a brand strategy.” for example. It is free to the freelancer to create the page, then entrepreneurs looking for that service could hire him for fixed or hourly rate. If you or anyone you know would be interested, I invite you to create a service on Umergence and we will send you customers. Wish you all the best!