An Open Alternative To Kickstarter

angry tapir writes "Crowd-funding website Crowdtilt officially launched last week, expanding upon the collective fundraising model pioneered by Kickstarter to enable raising money for any project — even a beer blitz. Like Kickstarter, Crowdtilt allows users to create a fundraising campaign with a tipping point. If the effort falls short of the set amount, would-be donors are not charged. However, unlike Kickstarter, the platform allows users to "group fund anything." Users can initiate campaigns without first getting the approval of service administrators, which they must do on Kickstarter."

Comments

Spam, perhaps - "just give me money", likely

[QuasiSteve]

I wouldn't worry so much about spam, but rather about frivolous projects.

To see what other models are like, go check out...
http://www.indiegogo.com/
http://rockethub.com/
http://www.pozible.com/
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/
http://invested.in/
http://fundry.com/
http://pledgie.com/
http://www.sponsume.com/
http://peerbackers.com/

Then after you're doing reading through the hundreds of projects that amount to little more than "give me money because... well, just because.", you'll probably be glad that KickStarter does some, albeit a very superficial, checking of projects.

Yes, KickStarter has its own problem projects that make it through the review process.. projektor (probably a scam), juicies (unrealistic funding vs rewards leading to a kid way in over his head), Googly Eyes (essentially selling an existing product for a premium).
But they do try, and they explicitly disallow 'good cause' type projects, which are often the "just give me money" type projects.

Nothing against 'good cause' projects when they really are for a good cause - people who need a prosthesis but can't afford one.. more power to then. But then there's the "I want to go on a trip to Europe"-types.

I'd be more afraid of that sort of thing hitting crowdtilt, than spam hitting it.

Also, for those who want a truly open alternative, set up a Wordpress site and go check out:
http://ignitiondeck.com/id/wordpress-crowdfunding/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crowd-funding/

Re:Spam, perhaps - "just give me money", likely

[QuasiSteve]

Replying to self - this site may have 'officially launched a week ago', but there's blog posts going back 11 months and projects going back not much more recent than that. Is this a Slashvertisement hoping to bank in on the Double Fine article from a few days back?

Also... frivolous projects seems to be the core of this site - it might technically be 'an alternative to KickStarter', but it's far more an alternative to IndieGoGo or sponsu.me, just with a funding model similar to KickStarter's.

Answering a few questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys - glad to see our site's launch made it on here!

It was also awesome to see IDG pick up our TechCrunch story/ and press release, but the title of the article is pretty misleading (as well as the first few paragraphs). All press is good press for a young startup (gives us a LOT of feedback early on as we continue to build out our site/service), however the story seems to imply that this is for Kickstarter type projects... The language, both in our press release and our site, is actually explicitly different from Kickstarter's.

So just to clarify a few things for those that have asked questions:
-Crowdtilt is more of a "Kickstarter for groups of friends" (where instead of a $30,000 project, your group of friends funds a $1,200 party bus or bachelor party or wedding gift).
-It is for pooling money together, where instead of crowdfunding (many-to-one funding), it is more of a genre we call groupfunding (funded by the group, for the group)... I actually posted why we stuck with the name Crowdtilt over the other domain we own Grouptilt on Quora if anyone is interested.
-The author made a bit of a misleading statement, where he said :"Users can initiate campaigns without first getting the approval of service administrators, which they must do on Kickstarter." -- Users can start campaigns without a wall set up by us, but we do look over campaigns, and use a few other Y-Combinator backed companies for fraud prevention and identification upon starting a campaign and disbursement of funds (as well as the several measures taken by our secure payment processor PoundPay).
-The campaigns that use it for grandiose individual fundraising haven't done so well in our testing (it's not very likely for people on the internet to just fund an objective without having a clear connection to it).

Any other questions, feel free to check our FAQs or reach out to us using our Live Chat or help client. Hope this answers a few.

Thanks for posting the link to us!! Pretty huge day for something we've created (with tender, loving care) to make it on Slashdot!!

James // Khaled
crowdtilt

Re:Answering a few questions

[jjbeshara]

Hi Steve,

The comments have definitely had some great and thoughtful feedback we can take (including yours) and use in the continued development of Crowdtilt -- so, know it's being taken into account ;) -- especially the high demand for international expansion quickly. My background is actually in poverty alleviation (having studied development economics and worked in South Africa), and though we built the site originally with a 'Kickstarter for Charities' approach in ming, groups of friends started taking to the beta-version like wildfire; while the non-profits (the realm I knew and came from), would take weeks to start campaigns and would often require many meetings with administrators and boards (all the while, it kept spreading within groups of friends more and more - and they kept requesting features and giving insightful feedback).

I mention this because, early on, we made a really conscious effort to take the development of the site where the users found most value, not necessarily where *thought* it would provide most value. And this just happened to be the direction our users wanted to take Crowdtilt. Though we'd obviously love the type of success Kickstarter has had, our first users began really responding to the idea of taking elements of crowdfunding models out there and providing them to groups of friends instead - and that is where we are today.

If the user-base starts requesting a Kickstarter like model/experience, then that is the direction we would plan on taking it, but right now it seems private, smaller campaigns have been most valuable to users (the vast, *vast* majority of our campaigns are private/groups of friends that don't necessarily want their wedding gift, group vacation, or party-bus campaign to be browsed). It has actually been so overwhelmingly private, that we've wondered what real value the search has for users.

Pardon the typos from the last post (also, did not know it was html friendly!), we've been going like crazy with the growth of the site since public launch on Friday morning. But feel free to reach out to us anytime through the site.

-James

Re:Remains to be seen

[QuasiSteve]

I already commented, so if somebody wouldn't mind modding parent up - that would be appreciated.

It is very true that KickStarter doesn't really do anything in the way of promotion. The home page gets a few 'featured' projects, every once in a while they might feature something in their blog, but that's entirely the blog writer's fancy, and there's a 'staff picks' section. The rest of the site is pretty much automatically generated. So yes, new projects are not easily found by way of promotion from KickStarter.

But KickStarter, like most of the peerfunding websites, isn't really there to recommend projects, or for people to discover projects (although KickStarter certainly does offer great ways to do so, from the 'recently launched' page (which would have included your project) to the 'ending soon' pages), but simply to host them.

In fact, they probably couldn't. KickStarter gets the most new projects out of all of the peerfunding websites that I mentioned in the other post. How many? Well, on Saturday (I'm in the CET timezone), 111. They can't possibly 'promote' (by way of front-page feature or 'staff picks') all of them (which would defeat 'staff picks' as a section anyway) - never mind when you include any projects that were launched Friday... and Thursday.. and so on.

So yes, they have to cherrypick.. projects they like, and certainly projects they think will be successful. I've pointed out in a completely different story that 1 in 5 projects in the Technology and Design sections are iDevice projects. There's rational arguments for why there are more of those to begin with, but those all lead to the equally rational argument that of course KickStarter would 'promote' those over other projects.

Moreover, however, it's just not their job to 'promote' your project. Even if they did put your project on the front page, the only people who are going to see it is those who go to KickStarter directly - they're the people most likely to browse for projects as it is (and I do agree they need to make it more clear that clicking on the 'more popular projects' in a given section is what gets you to all of the projects in that section).
And there it has to compete with anything else on the front page, nevermind in other sections.
That's going to be a vastly less effective than if you promote your project yourself. You really can't expect to launch a KickStarter (or other peerfunding website) project and see pledges rolling in. You have to tweet, post to facebook, put up a website, make a kick-ass video (projects without videos tend to fare less well than those with video - people love video), etc. If you get your first backer - great, thank them with a private message, let them know that their pledge is appreciated and subtly hint that you would appreciate it even more if they told their friends about the project.
If you hit milestones, post about that at twitter/facebook/whatever. If you're working on something for your project, place it in the Updates of your project.

If you don't do any promotion.. then yes, there's little hope of your project getting funded. But you can't really blame a 'lack of promotion' by the peerfunding website for that.

And if you think that crowdtilt will do better - think again; there you will have to rely even more heavily on doing your own promotion as there isn't even an index of projects (you get to see 6 randomly chosen 'recent' ones) and their blog is recently more about their site than about any campaigns on their site that they personally like.
Maybe they'll improve the site after the /. attention, though.

Re:will this be open to anyone or just US?

[jjbeshara]

One of the founders here - Right now, we're limited to the US (payouts outside the US is a lot for a super-young startup to take on at launch), but both my co-founder and I are very aware of needs/uses outside the US, and we hope to open it up internationally very soon. -James