I’ve known about mturk for at least a year; but today was the first day I really got into it. For $0.05 per survey ($0.50 total) I found 10 USA-based entrepreneurs who took my survey and pitched me their best web company idea.

Download the results here

What is Mturk.com? Mturk lets anyone on the internet complete tasks for you; and you pay them small amounts of money. Some tasks include surveys, proof-reading, writing, blogging, reviewing, tagging photos, rating content quality, even giving personal feedback or personal experiences on topics of your choice.

I read several blogs from avid mturk workers (80% are in the USA and have a college BA) they often make about $2 - $4 per hour; and typically spend an hour or two each day when they are bored completing tasks. That’s who your workforce consists of.

I’ve already started using mTurk as a lead generator for Enproperty. I created a survey asking apartment tenants to tell me about what services their property managers offer them; and I ask who their property manager is. I even ask the tenants (mturkers) to help me sell Enproperty to their landlord; with varying success.

View the results of my apartment tenant survey here

Gathering the data in the above survey cost me about $1.60

Aside from immediate practicality; mTurk is indicative of a new phenomenon of the distributed workforce. Here are some things you can use mTurk for.

- Instead of writing content for your website; have 5 people write content and then have other mturkers choose the best content.

- Instead of bug-tracking and beta-testing your website, have the crowds test your site and give you feedback

- Instead of trying to optimize website layout yourself, links, images, media, and modules on your website; offer several alternatives to the crowds, and they will choose the best option

- Let the crowds find leads, company data, and basic business research for you

- Turn the mturkers into business leads themselves by ‘paying them to view your advertisement’

midVentures is a distributed company, we have several people away from our Chicago headquarters, so when we have to bring everyone together for a staff meeting, people often ask us how we make it work. Here is our method for having rare, to the point, quick, and effective, congregations.

To begin, a serious meeting is not a place for brainstorming. It is for presenting previously synthesized ideas to the full team. Attempting to have ten people brainstorm over a concept around a table meeting, with three skyping in from around the nation, is ineffective.

Secondly, have an agenda. Tech companies are notorious for being loose on structure, and we are no outlier. However, when you are burning the time of the whole company, in the same room, eliminating roadblocks and delays is important. Remember that the point of these meetings to bring everyone to the same page on for the company projects, not to change the corporate slogan, or debate tea varieties.

Have everyone prepare a three to five minute presentation on their project(s). This will often be in teams, as multiple people work on the same project. Have one person present it, there is no need to have people repeat the same information.

Have snacks. Maybe some drinks. Keep peoples hands occupied, and they will fidget less.

Have a note taker, post the notes to your corporate wiki. When you do this, all the action items for the coming week are public, no one can duck their responsibilities or dodge assignments. We do not have a problem with that here at midVentures, but it makes for good humor when someone misses a dead line.

Finally, at the start of every meeting, get the dirty laundry out. Go over the last weeks notes on to do´s, see which ones were done. The ones that did not happen, figure out why. Sometimes people have a fair excuse, such as the client won´t answer emails, etc. In those cases, just make an action item for the coming week. Simple.

We do these as they are needed, it has become a weekly excursion. But, at least here, we as a team seem to enjoy them. We all get along famously, so putting us all together for a quick talk is hardly a punishment.

Your creative tech guru is an interesting sub-section of the population. He hops between the east and west coasts; he antagonizes college graduates (even if he is a college grad), and he regularly turns down high-paying jobs in order to work on projects that are either entertaining, social cause related, or positioned to be the next high velocity startup. Here are a few of my observations about how tech people think.



1. Your job is your life. Some businesspeople make money during the day and then focus their life around their interests, travel, hobbies, or side-projects. Tech people want jobs they can immerse themselves in filled with people they can relate to; not just a job that will pay the rent or serve as a stepping stone.



2. Tech people like to be challenged by equally competent tech people. A high velocity startup with 1 smart tech guy and a room filled with unmotivated programmers will cause the code guru to leave. Tech people would rather be challenged than find job security or lock in a raise.



3. Tech people are some of the most ‘you are wrong so I will go and do it myself’ type of people. Lawyers and businessmen often thrive in the political structure of a corporation to complete tasks; tech people will frequently escape a structure if no one pays attention to them, or if they think they can do it better.



4. The tech guy will often accept $40k a year for an exciting and challenging job with like-minded people over a brief gig where he could make $120 per hour on a task he doesn’t care about. Compare that to a lawyer.



5. Tech people are information distributors. Even though only a small sub-set of tech people follow techcrunch.com, the techy fan-boys tell everyone they know about a cool app or solution; tech people are viral hubs of information distribution through a network of people that ask them “how does this work”.



6. Not all tech people are ‘computer people’. If your computer has a hardware or software issue - I cannot solve it. However I can think about business problems in terms of a database model. Computer people are rumored to be able to assemble and disassemble computers. Tech people might just be avid twitter users.



7. Tech people often overlap strongly with academics, artists, even athletes or non-profit leaders - anyone who combines creativity with real-world action. We tend to be more on the thinker end than the doer end; but you would sooner see us at an art gallery opening than a baseball game.



8. Each tech person has their favorite coding languages - and the reasons, advantages, contexts, and business models constantly change. Some investors tell me they don’t invest in Ruby on Rails projects. Some seasoned entrepreneurs tell me they only hire Ruby on Rails developers. It depends on the situation.



9. One inspired developer with no capital in 1 month can often do as much work as a team of 5 high-paid programmers and project managers reporting to another manager, his secretary, and the HR director could possibly do in 3 months. Watch a tech person who truly acts on an idea - and you will see how planning, use cases, resource allocation, sales, marketing, financing, business strategy, communication - they all either evaporate or become condensed into a single person’s mind - executed like a piano composition. For example - 37signals.com had only 1 server-side ruby on rails developer for years into their product success. Beware the power of a motivated tech guy.



10. Tech people - unlike computer people - are typically social. Even more so than many lawyers, finance guys, or marketing teams. They often structure an entire application around the parties, meetings, culture, and community that app will create. Many new web ventures are nothing except giant excuses to build a community and socialize most of the day.