Ideasicle X, a decade in the making.

In 2010, I founded the first iteration of Ideasicle. I left a successful advertising career—having worked at creative hot shops Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Arnold and Mullen—to start the original Ideasicle. My favorite part of the ad biz was the ideas and that feeling you get when you witness a new idea or have one yourself. I was an idea junky.

While at Arnold as EVP Director of Business Development, I created a crowdsourcing site we called the “Innovation Station.” In the middle of a pitch I could post a request for ideas and the entire agency could jump in and post little virtual yellow “stickies” on this site. We got a lot of crappy ideas, but we also got some gems. As in, pitch winning gems. Quick example: we were pitching Carnival Cruise and the brief was about owning fun. Not easy. So I posted an idea request on the Innovation Station asking for ideas to get underneath the concept of fun. Someone posted “Interview clowns.” That idea (those two words) won us the pitch because we created a video full of interviews with “fun experts.” We had a rollercoaster engineer, the designer of the video game “Guitar Hero,” a comedian, and several others whose business was fun. That video positioned Arnold as the experts on fun and, along with a killer creative campaign, got us the business.

But the Innovation Station got me thinking. I had worked at some of the best agencies in the world, and I knew some of the most creative people in the world. What if I could point this technology to all of those people? It would be like Superfriends for ideas.

So I started a venture that reverse-engineered a third-party productivity software to do nothing but bring these creative geniuses (now known as the Ideasicle Experts) to come up with ideas virtually and in teams. It was a closed system then, where it was strictly about us coming up with ideas for clients and presenting them (what we now call IX Concierge). Not an open platform users can subscribe to like it is today.

The very first Ideasicle Expert, Wade Devers, describes the birth of Ideasicle:

The original Ideasicle was an “idea only” company.

Wade was not only the first Ideasicle Expert, he designed the brand identity. We used to have an arrow against yellow as our logo, but have since moved on the circle with an “X” in it to better represent the new iteration of Ideasicle X. And believe it or not my sister Jane, a very creative artist on the West Coast, came up with the line “Nothing is unthinkable” while designing tee shirts for us.

In the beginning we did no execution, just came up with ideas for our clients. This position was fairly radical in 2010, but clients like Staples, AMD, Warner Music, Titleist, Constant Contact, several ad agencies, and countless others enjoyed its creative fruits for several years.

I managed the new business, the strategic development, recruiting/briefing the teams and the presentation development. The Ideasicle Experts did the rest. Very similar to what we do today with our IX Concierge Service, only in the early days we didn’t have a fancy SaaS platform on which to bring the teams together.

And it worked. Man, did it work.

But then it occurred to me, why should we have all the fun?

Brought on an investor and Ideasicle X was born.

What if everyone had access to this virtual model of idea generation? What if any customer could recruit their own experts, brief them and watch the magic of our “Post, Build & Riff” method for themselves?

And what if we could design our own virtual platform that wasn’t a reverse-engineered hack job of off-the-shelf software, but was built from the ground up specifically for the creative business of virtual idea generation?

And BOOM. We found an investor who loved creativity and believed in our concept. Two years and lots of coding later Ideasicle X was born.

Agencies (traditional and in-house) can subscribe to IX Original and run their own idea projects with access to all of our Ideasicle Experts, but also with the ability to invite their own freelancers or employees into jobs. But they can also have us do it with our IX Concierge Service.

And just last year we started a new thing. Frankly, I’m embarrassed it took me 14 years to think of this, but I had all these genius creatives, strategists, and media people already recruited and I had clients ask me from time to time if they could hire the Ideasicle Experts for more traditional freelance projects. Up until last year I always said no. But then I started IX Freestyle, where agencies can call me, brief me on the need and budget, and then I’d got find them a person or a team for the job. It’s been going really well.

In fact, an unexpected benefit of IX Freestyle is that several times we finish up an idea project for an ad campaign, say, and the client needs the idea developed more fully for presentation or even produced. So we just switch over the IX Freelance and hammer out a deal. It’s sorta like vertical idea integration. And it works.

What’s coming next? Can’t tell you. But I will!