Show & Tell has always been about ideas. We are trying to give shape to the concept of an idea agency. A place where ideas are considered the cornerstone of what we do.
We think that coming up with ideas is our strongest point. We are at ease when we need to come up with creative solutions. We love the process that goes from the first spark of inspiration to the birth of something concrete.
This is where we thrive. This is where we want to be.
The Idea Struggle
In the past three years we have come up with tons of ideas. We’ve filled notebooks and notebooks with our projects. We’ve dreamed and tried to work on the most promising ones.
We’ve managed to start websites, brands and companies that we’ve sold.
We can come up with loads of concepts, but the issue is always the lack of resources. Time, money, man hours. These are all factors that we need to juggle.
That’s why the vast majority of our ideas sit comfortably in our notebooks. Concepts that probably will never take life.
Everything changed a couple of months ago.
Our ideas and projects are only part of what we do daily. We also do a lot of consultancy and client work. Social media marketing is our bread and butter, but we do all sorts of things in this field. One particular job was a blogging gig. It was a post about how to build your portfolio for what we thought was just a German blog.
That blog turned out to be one of the most interesting discoveries we made: jovoto.
Our Perfect Habitat
jovoto is a platform for creatives. It aims to put them in contact with big companies that are looking for a spark of inspiration.
The model is simple.
A company puts together a brief and sets a budget. Everyone can read the brief and come up with ideas to solve the problem highlighted. The budget gets split into a pool of prizes for the creatives.
The best ideas win prizes and can potentially be licensed. The companies get flooded with brilliant ideas for a very reasonable price. jovoto is a bustling community of creatives. A win-win situation for everybody.
The whole creative process is modelled on the Crowdstorm concept.
The idea is that everybody in the community showcases their ideas. At the same time they give feedback and advice to each others entries. The collaborative part of the experience is very important. It’s the way you can transform simple and naive ideas into viable projects.
The system works pretty well and the community is super creative.
As you can imagine this is our natural habitat. We thrive in an environment like this. We are able to give our creativity an outlet to express and improve itself. We love to jump straight into every project available and come up with the craziest ideas.
The prize aspect is pretty secondary to us. We genuinely enjoy the creative process. We enjoy our brainstorm sessions. We enjoy confronting ourselves with hundreds of brilliant minds.
Sometimes the ideas we come up with are immediately viable. Sometimes we try to stretch reality with something we’re not even sure is doable.
Ideas as a Self-Improvement Tool
We believe in ideas. We believe in the concept of idea. We believe in the benefits that continually coming up with ideas brings to you.
For years now, we’ve been heavily influenced by James Altucher’s beliefs in terms of ideas.
We believe that ideas are the fundamental brick of our existence. Without ideas we would be nothing and our society would still be in the stone age. Keeping our idea muscles in perfect shape is vital for us and it’s something we work on daily.
James Altucher suggests this exercise: every morning write down ten ideas about something, the topic is not important. You will struggle. You will struggle a lot, but let that idea muscle sweat. It will improve. It will get stronger. You’ll become an idea machine.
This general advice has had a central role in our lives, but into jovoto it took a completely new dimension to us.
We were used confronting our ideas internally. It’s two of us, our backgrounds might be different, but our interests are pretty similar. This is not the ideal environment for ideas to flourish.
jovoto is.
On jovoto there are hundreds of creative minds. From all over the world and with completely different backgrounds. Put all these minds together and you’ll have a habitat where creativity rules.
The bar gets higher and higher. You get challenged on a daily basis by truly brilliant people. You are forced to improve. You are forced to see things from completely different angles.
We’re just a couple of months into this experience, but we feel completely changed by it.
We’re loving it.
Sharing The Love
Crowdstorming on jovoto we learnt one important thing. Ideas are volatile, they’re like a summer breeze.
You can’t be possessive about your ideas. Ideas thrive when they are shared with everybody. When they are shared they get consistency, take shape. That’s when the most brilliant ideas become seeds for something beautiful.
We do love that brief moment when ideas are just a spark of genius. When they are shapeless and romantic. At the same time we do know that ideas should be given the potential to become something concrete.
With this in mind, we decided that we want to blog about the best ideas we have. We want to take you through our creative process and show you our vision.
Maybe you’ll find the majority of our ideas crazy and utopic. Maybe you’ll just get inspired by our work. Maybe you’ll want to share your point of view with us.
Ideas are a common good. We think we’re good at coming up with creative solutions. We hope that sharing this with you we’ll do some good!
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