The free, open-source crowdfunding site was launched last week. Unlike Indigogo, Kickstarter and similar sites, CrowdtiltOpen allows for full customization of the look and feel of your business’ crowdfunding site. You can even use your existing domain or another one.
For startups or companies looking to expand their profile by launching a crowdfunding campaign, this may be an ideal option. The company says that you can raise more money, establish your brand, and establish longer term relationships with your supporters through CrowdtiltOpen.
CrowdtiltOpen has several templates created for you to use, according to the company website. It also allows for HTML and CSS tweaking to get your crowdfunding pages exactly as you need them.
Crowdtilt’s Ajay Mehta writes that CrowdtiltOpen is doing for crowdfunding what WordPress did for blogging:
“By making powerful crowdfunding accessible, we’ve hopefully just scratched the surface of how organizations are using CrowdtiltOpen … and we can’t wait to see what the next year holds. [WordPress] changed blogging by making tools powerful enough for brands and individuals to create their own experiences. It’s time for crowdfunding to grow up, the same way that blogging has, over the past decade.”
CrowdtiltOpen allows your business to start a crowdfunding, pre-order or donation campaign through the platform. The site says it will handle the “back end” of your crowdfunding site, including processing payments and donations for non-profit organizations. The customizing of the look and feel is up to you.
Since it’s an open-source platform, CrowdtiltOpen is free to use. There are third-party services that can be integrated into your campaign, like ones that manage your payments and shipping. All campaigns provide analytics which tell you who your customers are. Successful campaigns only pay standard credit card fees.
This project started as Crowdhoster last year. Crowdtilt allowed hundreds of companies and non-profits toexperiment with the Crowdhoster platform. The company claims that some of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns have been launched through Crowdhoster. That includes a campaign for Soylent, a food/drink, which raised $2.1 million from about 20,000 contributors.
Crowdtilt says the company is working to integrate Bitcoin payment options for campaigns. It’s also developing a way to purchase multiple rewards in a single transaction.
Image: CrowdtiltOpen
Wow, I REALLY like this! I mean, now it exists, it makes sense that it should. It’s a logical step forward that people should be able to host their own crowdfunding campaigns on their own sites. I like that.
If it’s free to use, how does CrowdtiltOpen make its money? Do they take a cut of donations?
Aira Bongco
This is good. Crowdfunding is now becoming a more common financial source for most businesses. Having a website that is readily set up to do that is a blessing. After all, it’s quite hard to integrate it into your website if you are going to do everything from scratch.
I’m going to look more into CrowdtiltOpen as it’s something I wouldn’t mind implementing on one of my sites in the future. I’m really feeling it!
JMI
Really interesting Joshua, thanks!
I think that you would be really interested in some of the most cutting-edge research that I have come across explaining crowds, open innovation, and citizen science.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1919614
And you may also enjoy this blog about the same too:
https://thecrowdsociety.jux.com/
Powerful stuff, no?
Martin Lindeskog
I have to check out this service for two new online ventures together with some business partners.
Martin Lindeskog
Joshua: I saw now that they are on the North American market so far. I look forward to their international expansion.