Over the last month or so I have come across Spigit (a startup for startups) a few times. On each occasion I have admittedly been in a hurry, but each write up I read on the company, including those from the its own FAQs page, left me not much the wiser about what exactly Spigit was offering. I knew that it was a site for posting your business ideas and tapping into the wisdom of crowds to test their viability through the use of some sort of simulation engine. Until today however, I didn’t know how exactly it differed from other websites that let ‘crowds’ vote on your business idea.

So what happened today? Well I heard someone, who by the way is not affiliated with Spigit, describe the company as follows: “a fantasy league for startups where you trade a pseudo stock and earn a reputation, visibility and connections for your own business by having it rated and by helping rate others”. This description was offered by Sean Tierney to kick off his Grid7 podcast interview with Paul Pulschell, CEO of Spigit.

Only with this unofficial summary did I grasp the essence of Spigit - at least my own opinion of what that essence is. This just goes to prove once again the power of metaphors and analogies, or “building on established schemas” as the Heath brothers put in their excellent book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. It is for this reason that Prosper is often described as an “ebay for loans” and many a niche video sharing site as “a YouTube for insert appropriate niche market“.

I would like to make it clear that I do not intend this post as a criticism of the Spigit team, rather I hope that Spigit would see it as constructive feedback on their product description. To be fair I think the Spigit CEO himself did a better job in the podcast of explaining the concept than in the written descriptions I had previously read.

Personally, I see this as an opportunity to remind us all (myself included) not to fall victim to what the Heath brothers term the “Curse of Knowledge”, i.e. knowing so much about our own ideas and works that we struggle to describe them simply and clearly to people who are new to them. It is not unreasonable to assume that Sean was able to summarise Spigit so well because he is not as close to it as its founders and employees are.

With my new insight into what it is about, I have today been looking more closely at Spigit and find that it could indeed prove very useful for startups. I can’t say much more until I have tried it myself and I intend to do so very soon. In the meantime if you have used Spigit, do let us know how you have found it.