Story:
Tongal: A 21st century business model for finding top talent and putting them to work on something they love

Refining the concept
By the summer of 2008, we were refining the concept. Like Topcoder, the basic idea is to run collaborative contests where each project is broken down into pieces, and people compete for cash, with a panel of judges picking the winners. For our projects, the phases in the creative process are submitting an idea, making a pitch that expands on the idea, and developing the video itself. We added a few extra twists too. The contest process, and incentive system ended up looking like this:

1.  We announce a contest on our site.  Deadlines for each phase are posted on a project calendar.
2. A member – they need to register first – submits an idea. The best 5 ideas advance to the next phase, and their authors get a cash prize.  They also earn a percentage of the prize money their submission generates in future rounds.
3. Members can submit pitches for any of the ideas. The best 5 get a cash prize and advance, and earn percentages of future awards, as merited.
4. Members submit videos for any of the pitches.
5.  Judges review video submissions and select the top five, for cash award.
6. Members also can the view the submissions, and predict winners. The viewer whose top 10 predictions most closely match those of the judges get cash.
7. The most watched video – which can be embedded anywhere but must be seen via the Tongal player and cannot be a YouTube hit – also wins a cash prize.
8. Clients get 5 video products as part of their subscription, but can have additional items at extra cost.

By breaking creativity into smaller pieces, we allow people in all walks of life to compete. For example, a mother in Iowa probably isn’t about to move to New York to join an ad agency. And she may not have the skills or time to create a video for a consumer product that she uses every day, but she can, at the very least, throw her idea into the collective hat – she should, she’s the loyal consumer – and allow the brand and her fellow consumers to hear her voice. And she can have some fun! She can be part of a community, play in a contest, and get some recognition for her contributions. Even if she can’t come up with an idea, she can be a voice in predicting the results of a contest for her favorite product.

What differentiates Tongal from traditional outsourcers is that it’s not an open call for work; it’s a forum where people with different skill sets can collaborate. The predictive element of our contests also sets us apart.  We actually have filed a patent on it, as an analytical and decision making tool. Its power is that it takes personal preference out of decision making. It’s like the NCAA Final Four; even if you hate Duke, you’ll vote for them if you think they’ll win.

That brings us to a question we often get: “What the heck does TONGAL mean?”  It was inspired by a book published in 2004 by James Surowiecki called “The Wisdom of Crowds.” The book begins with an anecdote: In 1906, in Plymouth, England, statistician Sir Francis Galton attended a country fair, intending to prove the “madness of crowds,” or that crowds lacked intelligence and were prone to delusions. To his surprise, he observed that when guessing the weight of an ox, the average of the crowd’s guesses was more accurate than that of any given individual. TONGAL is an anagram for GALTON.

Developing the platform and putting it to work
We were trying to create a community. The Tongal site only existed to support the community; it was the scaffolding. Through TopCoder competitions, which we began in late 2008, we created the look of the site; built the website pages, voting systems, and the video player, writing the software to manage membership registrations and for members to submit their work; and ran bug races to identify and resolve any problems. We integrated it into Facebook so people don’t even have to navigate to tongal.com. Lots of clients have dedicated a lot of time, money and energy to build a Facebook following; now they can give them something to do, and a way to be productive.

We figured we could leverage our personal networks to attract the first members and companies. We were still in beta – open to invitees only -  when we ran our first ever contest in May 2009. It was for an original parody or spoof commercial for Comedy.com, with a $2,500 prize. In June, we were startled but thrilled to get reviewed by PCMAG.Com. We ran a few of our own contests, to develop an elevator pitch and “who we are” video for Tongal. Word began to spread.

Launch, learning and growth
We officially launched summer 2009. Our pitch to clients was that not only could they have access to more talent, we’d be engaging hundreds of consumers in creating ads for their brands. They also could achieve significant cost savings. The cost of creating a 30 second ad is $500,000 or more; we figured we could do it for as little as $5,000. Plus, it costs another $130,000 every time an ad is aired on prime time TV. By making creative development an on-line contest, the ads get permeated throughout the Internet. And clients can still air the ads on TV if they want to, of course. It wasn’t an easy sell. We had to explain the basic crowdsourcing concept; we didn’t have much product to show; and corporate marketers were nervous about straying from their ad agencies. But by the end of 2009, we were running four client programs.

We got a special boost early in 2010 with a project for Kiva, a nonprofit organization that fights global poverty by enabling people to make small loans to low-income entrepreneurs who are supported by microfinance institutions around the world. Kiva wanted an inspiring video that would not only explain the loan process but also raise awareness and attract new lenders to kiva.org. The winning video, developed by a Tongal member in Sweden, was featured on YouTube’s homepage and accumulated over 100,000 views in 1 day. By July, we had run 22 contests total, with prize purses as large as $15,000.
 Newer clients tended to be more sophisticated; we didn’t have to use the crowdsourcing presentation slide as much, and some were interested in using our tools for problem solving or product improvement. 

Meanwhile, our community has become as diverse as we hoped it would. Our members range from teenagers to 45+. They are 70% male and 30% female. They are US based (87%; all 50 states) and international (13%; 40+ countries). In just one month, we had visits from 125 different countries. This is a huge factor is our ability to offer diversity in our product, and a global market perspective.