Bluring the Line Between Investor, Customer, and Buisness

Most businesses are built on the idea of "build it and they will come". I'd like to propose the opposite, a "find people that want it and it will get built" model.

Fractional Effort

The Nasa budget is $7 billion a year.
$7 billion a year / 300 million people = $23.33 a year per person
$23.33 / 12 months = $1.94 a month
$1.94 / 30 days = $0.06 a day

How many 7 billion dollar projects could be created for $0.06 a day ? How many problems could be solved if you could break them up into $0.06 worth of effort ?

Bootstrapping

How do you get critical mass behind something that needs to be done ? Suppose you could:

1. Get allot of people to say what they want and how much it would be worth to them.
2. Group people that want the same or similar things
3. People post solutions or ideas to problems that have allot of money behind them.
4. People with the problem "invest" in people solving the problem.
5. The investment return could be stock or a discount off the first purchase.
   

If there are millions with a problem, the investment would be pocket change.

Research

Not all businesses have immediate solutions to peoples problems. Maybe you need a prototype, proof on concept, scaled down test, etc. People contribute to make it happen and move things down the pipeline from risky far out idea to proven techniques that are ready to go.

Think how this would be radically different from a market where only things that are known to return a profit get built. Collecting and concentrating micro-investment from customers gets people that really really want something to take allot of risk and push to the edge of whats possible. What if a million people put in $10 to build and design an open source iPad ?