Why We'd Tell a Marketing Team to Fund a Challenge on BrainSumo Right Now

If you're a Head of Growth, a CMO, or the person doing marketing at an early-stage company and you're sizing up whether to fund a challenge on BrainSumo, here's the number you'd notice first: 15 registered users. Three live challenges, zero submissions on any of them yet, and every one of those three is funded by us, not a paying company. That's the honest starting point — we'd rather you hear it from us than discover it and wonder what else we didn't mention.

Here's the case for funding a brief anyway, and where the actual risk is.

What a challenge here actually is

You write a real marketing problem — a growth idea for a specific budget and audience, a name and positioning for a new product, a referral or retention mechanic for a real location or app. No file upload, no design tool, no code. Solvers submit a written pitch, usually 200–500 words, that answers exactly what your brief asks for. You (or we, on your behalf) pick the best one against a rubric you set upfront, and the prize goes to that person. That's the entire mechanic.

The three live challenges right now are all this shape on purpose — a 30-day D2C snack growth pitch, a name-and-tagline sprint for a grocery delivery app, a student referral idea for a cafe — because that's the exact kind of problem we think a marketing team would actually pay to get 5–10 fresh outside takes on, without running a full agency brief or a weeks-long internal brainstorm.

The honest tradeoff at 15 users

We don't have a completed challenge to point to yet, so we can't tell you "here's a real example of what you'll get back" — because it hasn't happened. The closest live challenge closes in 2 days with zero submissions so far, and we don't know if that changes before the deadline. If you fund a challenge this week, you're funding it on the same footing we are: real prize money, real deadline, unproven time-to-first-submission.

What you do get, even at this size: every submission gets read by a real person against the rubric you set, not lost in a folder. The prize only pays out to a submission that actually meets the brief. And because the solver pool is small right now, a well-written brief gets disproportionate attention from whoever does show up — there's no algorithm and no bidding war, just your problem in front of people who chose to engage with it.

What we'd ask you to do differently than a normal brief

The briefs that get real submissions are specific, not broad. "Help us with marketing" gets nothing. "Pitch one growth idea to get first-time customers for a ₹15,000/week budget, judged on specificity and realism" gets something a solver can actually sit down and write in an evening. If you're evaluating this, come with a real constraint — a budget, an audience, a deadline — not an open-ended ask. We'll help you scope it into that shape if you're not sure how; that first conversation costs nothing.

If you want to see it before deciding

You don't need an account to look: browse the three live challenges here and see exactly what a brief and a submission ask look like today. If you'd rather talk through whether your own problem fits this format, reach out and we'll scope it with you — no cost, no obligation, and we'll tell you honestly if we don't think it's a fit.