Should Do This, a new site from Robot Co-op, came out of closed beta today and will officially launch tomorrow. Should Do This is a service that aggregates user submitted suggestions on any topic. The site has a similar look and feel to Robot Co-op’s other products, such as 43 Things.
According to CEO Josh Petersen, Should Do This was created out of necessity for the company. “Should Do This grew directly out of running and operating our other web sites,” he said. The small company knew it was useful to gather user feedback, but needed to figure out a way to distill suggestions from their more than 1 million users down to only the best and most popular. “We initially ran a public feedback site that worked well for gathering and prioritizing this feedback,” said Petersen. “Over time we developed the Should Do This concept and thought the application would be applicable as a suggestion box for just about any company, non-profit, city, person or thing – not just 43 Things.”
Indeed, Robot Co-op eats their own dog food and is using Should Do This to gather user feedback for their existing web sites, including 43 Things, 43 Places, and even Should Do This itself.
Like other Robot Co-op sites, Should Do This is dead simple. Users enter suggestions into two text boxes in the form of “BLANK should BLANK,” as in, MySpace should release an API. Users can then agree or disagree with suggestions, vote on how likely they are to actually happen, vote on when they might happen, and leave comments or reasons why or why not something should be done.
For $35/month anyone can manage their own suggestion box on a specific topic, which can be mapped to an outside domain, or be customized to match the look an feel of an existing web site. Robot Co-op plans to add more features to paid suggestion boxes in the coming weeks and hopes that companies and organizations will use their paid service to gather feedback from customers or users. The site also supports OpenID and lets users put suggestion boxes (or their own list of shoulds) on their website via a JavaScript include.
Should Do This fits very well into Robot Co-op’s catalog of sites. Their monetization strategy — a combination of contextual text ads and paid suggestion boxes — is a smart one. In the past year, both Dell and Yahoo! have experimented with Digg-style community voting for gathering sugestions from users. Should Do This offers another innovative option for companies to manage user suggestions and sort the good from the bad.
