We pay for good ideas

At Academia.edu we want to create a fantastic product for academics. There are two constraints we are operating with: having good ideas for features, and having good engineers to build the features. Currently we have tons of ideas - approximately 12 large whiteboards full of ideas. A big constraint for us is engineering, as it is for any startup.

However, despite having whiteboards full of ideas, we are well aware that these ideas may not be the best ones we could be working on. Our users may come up with much better ideas than the ones we have thought of so far. We have decided to trial an idea where we will offer to pay for good ideas that users submit. Users already submit ideas to us for free, but our premise with this new pay-for-ideas system is that many users may be incentivized to submit more ideas, especially ideas that require more careful writing-up and description, if there is an incentive for them to do this. This is just an experiment, and we don't know whether it will work. But we would love to be able to leverage the imagination and innovativeness of our user-base in building Academia.edu, if that is possible.

As we mentioned, we have tons of ideas in the pipeline, some good, some probably not good. There are a lot of features we have already thought of, such as a conference application, a jobs application, and a lot of other features like that. It's very unlikely that we'll ever pay for an idea that we've already had ourselves. The only exception to this could be where we were so impressed with the articulation of the idea that we wanted to incentivize the user in question to submit other ideas, in the hope that they would be similarly good. But we expect that this kind of case will be rare. On the whole we will only pay for ideas when they are new to us.

How It Works

Submitting an idea involves a certain amount of risk on the user's part. They have to take the time to write up the idea, and they don't know if it's already on our roadmap, or whether we'll like it, and if we do like it, how much we'll pay for it. There is definitely that risk for the user. However we hope that some users will decide to take that risk. We would love to get a system going where a lot of the features we are building have come from our large user-base, and where the users who have submitted these ideas are rewarded. There are only 7 of us on the Academia.edu team, and over 3.1 million people who visit Academia.edu every month, so we are sure there are a lot of great ideas that we are missing out on. It would also be great if users felt that their ideas were helping to build Academia.edu.

We can't say how much we'll pay for ideas. We can imagine paying as little as $10-20 for a minor idea that is good, and as much as $1,000 or more if an idea is really fantastic, and makes a huge difference to the product. In some cases if an idea is really good, but really hard to build, we may pay an up-front amount, and then another amount later if the idea proves to be successful.

To submit an idea, send an email to . Please be as detailed as possible in your description of your idea. The more specific the better. E.g. suppose you were submitting an idea for a conference feature; instead of saying 'add the ability to add conferences you have been to', it would be better for you to give us a detailed list of features that you think should be on a conference page. The more detailed a description of how a conference feature, for instance, would work on Academia.edu, the better. Feel free to submit multiple ideas in your email; we will evaluate each of them separately.

Although we cannot promise to pay you for any idea you submit, we guarantee that we will at least reply to every idea that is submitted with our thoughts on it. For some ideas we should be able to decide within a few days whether we'll pay you for it, and how much. For other ideas, we may have to spend a bit of time, e.g. 1-2 weeks, thinking about it, to determine how much impact it will have on the product, and therefore how much we can pay for it. For other ideas, it may take us a while to determine how much impact it will have on the product. E.g. we might think that an idea is good, but that it's not a huge priority and that it may be something we'll get to in 12 months. In that case it may be difficult for us to accurately determine now how valuable the feature is to us, and we may decide to delay giving out a reward until some time closer to when we are going to implement it, when we have a better understanding of how much impact it is going to have. In all cases, we will get back to you fast, and keep you in the loop as we are deciding how to evaluate your idea.