How BrainSumo Actually Works, For Marketing Teams
If you run marketing at a small or mid-size company, you already know the problem: you have more ideas worth testing than time or headcount to test them. A name for a new product line. A referral mechanic. A launch campaign angle. A positioning line that might finally land. Each one is small enough that hiring an agency feels like overkill, but big enough that "we'll get to it" usually means it never happens.
BrainSumo exists for exactly that gap. Here's what it actually is, without the pitch-deck version.
What you post
A specific marketing problem, written as a brief: the context, the constraint, and what a good answer looks like. Not "help us with marketing" — something scoped enough to answer in a single sitting. The three challenges live on the platform right now are a fair sample of the shape this takes:
- A growth idea to win first-time customers for a D2C snack brand, under a fixed budget, with a rough one-week execution plan
- A brand name and tagline for a budget grocery delivery app, aimed at a specific customer segment
- A referral or loyalty mechanic a local cafe could run to bring lapsed customers back, under a fixed budget
Notice what's not on that list: no code, no ad creative, no Figma file. Every one of these is judged entirely on the strength of a written idea.
What you get back
Written pitches from anyone who takes the challenge — students, early-career marketers, people who like this kind of problem for the prize money and the practice. You read them, you judge them against your own criteria, and you pay the prize to the one you'd actually run. You're not committing to execute anything you don't like; a weak batch of submissions costs you nothing beyond the prize pool you set upfront.
What it costs
You set the prize. The three examples above are $50–55 each — genuinely small money for a real outside perspective on a problem your team hasn't had time to properly attack. There's no retainer, no minimum commitment, no long onboarding call. You write the brief, set the prize, and it goes live.
The honest state of things right now
We'd rather say this plainly than have you find out later: BrainSumo has 15 registered users and no client-funded challenge has completed yet. The three challenges live today were funded by our own founder, specifically so the platform has real, real-money challenges running while we build out the roster of companies posting their own. That's the truth of where an early platform is, and it's also exactly why now is a good time to try it — the first companies to post get outsized attention from solvers who are looking for real problems to work on, not competing against a backlog of other briefs.
If you want to try it
You don't need an account to see what's live: browse the current challenges here. If you're a marketing lead with a problem you'd want outside eyes on — a name, a campaign angle, a referral idea, anything shaped like the examples above — reach out and we'll help you scope the brief. No cost to look, and the first conversation is just that: a conversation.