Quick Pitch: Chirply asks its community which user-submitted designs it should print.
Genius Idea: We didn't see it coming, but Chirply claims it has found a way to "make paper sexy." The Y-Combinator startup asks users to submit their own designs and then leaves it to a popular vote to decide which of the designs it prints on notebooks, greeting cards and wrapping paper. The winning designers get $300 upfront and then a $.10 royalty on every card Chirply sells.
"There are a lot of companies that do print on demand, and the downside is that if the designs aren't curated, the quality is all over the map," explains Gagan Palrecha, who co-founded the crowd-curated printing company with his brother Neel.
Decidedly not sexy, we'll admit. Traditional card companies don't do much better. It's hard to find what you're looking for, you have to lug yourself to a physical store, and many of the designs aren't really, in Palrecha's words, "something you love."
The startup's theory is that drawing from a wider pool of talent will result in better designs. Meanwhile, it can afford to sell them for less than other upscale paper product vendors because it doesn't incur the cost of a physical storefront or full-time designers.
Chirply's founders cite craft marketplace Etsy and crowdsourced T-shirts design company Threadless as its inspiration, but it also has features that remind of us of other established tech companies. Like Digg, user votes aren't taken at face value. Depending on your past behavior on the site, your vote might have more or less influence (this prevents designers from getting all of their friends to vote exclusively on their design, for instance). Like Hot or Not, rating designs from one to five turns into a game. Once you rate one, another pops up.
While the startup is too new to have answered all of the questions that it will need to (Can users buy prints that haven't won the monthly contest? What about posters?), it's off to a decent start. In the two weeks since it launched, about 90 designers have participated in the contest. Some of them have been voted on as many as 300 times.
Image courtesy of gregoryelang
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
