A Dutch farmer took a different approach for selling his vegetables with his concept EtenPerMeter.nl (Dutch) (English). He tries to sell his commodities (because that is what potatoes are) as an experience. You as a consumer come over the farmer and for one day you may feel what it’s like to dig in the mud, looking for your potatoes and onions. At least that is the positive feeling he tries to sell. Back to nature! You then pay for your vegetables per meter you’ve worked. (€ 0,75/mtr). Since you do all the work, you pay significantly less than in a normal store. 
Although the transaction here is rather straight forward, the approach is quite innovative. In a normal situation where commodities are being sold as an experience it is by creating an exceptional good service around it. Think of selling coffee in such a pleasant environment as Starbucks. The creating of such a warm atmosphere with all the branding and so on, is more expensive for a company. To earn back all this efforts, Starbucks asks significantly more for his coffee. And if you do it right you can ask even more what leads to large profits margins. This Dutch farmer did manage to take away a service and sell that as an experience. He enlarged his profit margins, not by first making more costs, but by cutting down on labor expenses. As for now, Etenpermeter seems to be a big success.
EtenPerMeter.nl sells vegetables (commodities) as an experience
Quirky, get paid to influence product designs
Quirky, the social product development community, has a very intriguing multi-level business model that shows other web 2.0 projects that money making from day one is possible. Product developers all over the world can submit their ideas to the Quirky platform. Since the posting of these ideas will cost a designer 99 dollar, a first qualitative filtering will be made upfront. The Quirky team itself makes the final selection of which product idea will be produced and sold on the website but they make use the inputs of their online community to support their decision. These users give design advice on the product idea, the brand name, packaging and so on and will receive a small percentage of the 30% profit generated by that specific product idea. Of course also the actual designer of the product will get a share of this profit once the product has made actual sales. To lower the risk, Quirky will only start to produce and sell a product in their webshop once 500 people made a pre-sale of it. If the product idea never reaches this level, the designer will at least receive the marketing data gained of the platform. 99 dollar for these brief insights is still a fair price. Next to the submission fees of all the designers Quirky will gain of course a lot of money out of their webshop , once it will be running at full force. 
Quirky floats on top of several trends and manages to offer value for all the stakeholders involved. Design influencers win, product designers win and so does Quirky. Where other crowdsourcing plaftorms struggle to find a good balance between trading social currency (influence, exposure, reputation,…) next the ‘normal’ currency (dollars), it seems Quirky got it right. Selling user generated content is not new but this unique approach seems to have enough potential to grow large. Although this sounds promising, Quirky should be aware not to burn their money too fast since they are giving away a few dollars to those who talk about them(*) and to those who fill in a small survey. They do need of course a large community to gain momentum but the investment in new members by offering them 20 dollar (**) is maybe not that sustainable.
(*) Since we’re testing out the service as well, the quirky link in this article has a ‘referral’-identifier attached to it.
(**) You first need to submit a 1 minute survey
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