CrowdtiltOpen : Crowdfund On Your Own Site

CrowdtiltOpen has just launched, it provides an open source crowdfunding solution that can enable anyone to crowd fund anything on their own website.  You may have heard of something like this before now and that’s because it is the refined version of Crowdhoster, the Y Combinator startup that was created, beta tested and unveiled last year.

The feature list of CrowdtiltOpen is long and impressive: It supports Bitcoin payments, recurring billing, analytics integration, and all sorts of customization options. Registered non-profits can also use it to create tax-deductible receipts for crowd funded donations. The entrepreneurial among you can simply turn a campaign that has reached its funding target into an e-commerce landing page, much like the Beep campaign, which hit its goal after an only a couple of hours.  But what if there is a feature you really want, but it isn’t available?  No problem, because Crowdtilt is open sourced, so you can build it!

In an interview with VentureBeat, Crowdtilt CEO James Beshara said, “Crowdtilt exists because of the open source tools that we’ve been able to make use of, so this is our way to give back to the open source community…It will produce wildly more interesting results by giving it away for free than if we tried to monetize this thing.”  He continued, “Crowdtilt loves Bitcoin and that’s not just plastic bul***** corporate sponsorship of something that has become trendy…As developers, we’ve been big fans of Bitcoin for a long time.” said Beshara.

CrowdtiltOpen’s support for the virtual currency, Bitcoin, has the potential to simplify international crowdfunding.  Let’s say for instance you are in Ecuador and you are unable to find a credit card processor to assist with your project.  You can now choose to accept Bitcoin as your sole crowdfunding payment option. Maybe you want to accept payments from anywhere on the planet, you just add Bitcoin support alongside your other payment options such as PayPal and voila! You are paid as normal.  Crowdtilt is operating out of San Francisco, California, USA and currently has 34 employees. It raised $23 million in December.  Currently their total capital equals $37 million.

Would you sign up to crowdfunding on your own site?  As always, if you have any sensible comments regarding this story, please leave your comments in the section below.

[Image via ziddom]

SOURCE: http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/20/crowdtilt-launches-free-open-source-crowdfunding-solution-and-it-supports-bitcoin/