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/

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: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