Yutongo is idea crowdsourcing as a service at low monthly fees.
With Yutongo, businesses crowdsource ideas with their staff or our community. It follows a specific creative method based on collection of idea fragments, combination and recombination. Innovators can earn money for each participation.
Each business gets its own subpage/subdomain and has full control of who is participating and of the privacy settings of their projects.
That makes yutongo a perfect corporate innovation management platform, and plans start from only 24$/month, all plans come with a one month risk-free trial.
Who is your startup aimed at?
Yutongo is targeted at the business longtail. While most other Open Innovation site offer their service at several thousands dollars, Yutongo offers affordable plans from a few bucks per month matching the exact needs of smaller companies and startups. Also, Yutongo is targeted at teams with creative tasks within larger corporations.
How does your startup stand out against it’s competitors?
Yutongo is not just a bunch of boring idea forms, it is a structured idea pacours, where participants answer a set of individually defined idea-triggering questions and create ideas through the power of combination and recombination.
Where did the idea for the startup come from?
The two co-founders of Yutongo have worked for a company in Switzerland who was offering idea creation and innovation services to customers from all over the world. After they left the company, their vision was to bring their experience in managing creative processes on a compelling new web application and make it accessible to companies all over the world who can’t afford expensive consulting services.
What is your business background, and what got you interested in startups?
I have worked in innovation management and the innovation industry for more than 15 years.
How long has the your startup been in the making, and who is the team behind the business?
We have been working on yutongo for 3 years. Our original plan for yutongo was rather a consulting based innovation service than a web application. Over the time we changed our mind and built yutongo as a bootstrapped startup. This fall, we finally finished the product.
What has been your biggest challenge so far as a startup owner?
To convince seed capital and angel investors that there is a need for a new player in the market of web based creativity. We succeeded.
In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with your business?
Boosting the yutongo innovator base and building a broader customer base as well as keep on adding even more creativity tools and intelligence to the application.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?
To think about the right balance between focussing on marketing or on perfecting the product on a regular basis. And to question your priorities from time to time.