Earlier this week, my co-blogger Josh Fershee authored an interesting post about the surprising crowdfunding success of the PicoBrew "Keurig for Beer.” After reading Josh’s post and the embedded links, I have to agree with him; I have no idea how they raised $1.4M for a product that I don’t see being that useful. The product appears to be both overly expensive and overly time-consuming.
I think many venture capitalists would join Josh and me in questioning the wisdom of PicoBrew, at least before it raised $1.4M. But as I wrote in an earlier post, crowdfunding may help overcome biases of venture capitalists. In the days since Josh’s posts, I have heard a few people talk about how excited they were about PicoBrew. These people were all at least 10 years younger than Josh, me, and most venture capitalists. While us “older folks” may not see a use for the product, judging from the crowdfunding results and a little anecdotal evidence here in Nashville, there appears to be significant market demand for PicoBrew. Similarly, on the show Shark Tank, the female “sharks” have accused their male counterparts of largely avoiding companies with products aimed at women; and while I have not run the numbers, it does seem like the sharks' investments skew toward products that they (or maybe their family members) would use. Very few venture capitalists are under 30 years old, so perhaps products aimed at younger people got passed on more often than they should have before online crowdfunding became popular. Of course, crowdfunding can have a dark side as well; crowdfunding may be used not only to uncover good products that were passed over, but could also be used to lure more gullible funders.
Somewhat related, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article entitled “When Recruiting Teenagers, Don't Forget to Question Your Assumptions.” The article is focused on undergraduate recruiting practices and challenges readers to question conventional wisdom. The article notes a disconnect between what universities think applicants want and what applicants say they want. For example, “[a]lthough 30 percent of admissions officials said social media was the most effective way for a college to engage students who had never heard of it, just 4 percent of students said the same. . . . And while 64 percent of admissions officials said a college’s official social-media accounts were important to prospective students after applying, only 18 percent of teenagers said the same.” The article’s main directive appears to be, don’t assume what prospective students want, ask them and use evidence to craft your recruitment programs. Using evidence rather than hunches to make decisions may be obvious to professors, but I wonder how many schools use sophisticated studies in designing their recruiting programs.
Like all of us, venture capitalists and university recruiting staff members have blind spots. Perhaps evidence, from crowdfunding and student surveys, can help these respective groups shrink those blind spots.