The Startup That Will Enable You To Crowdfund Everything From Your Friend’s Birthday To Your Non-Profit’s Next Life-Changing Cause

It started with the thought of crowdfunding the U.S. national debt (for me at least that’s how it started – by stumbling upon this witty marketing campaign and an April Fools’ Day joke – http://www.crowdfundthedebt.com/). I mean, could we really? Why not? 

When it comes to crowdfunding, I’ve asked the “Why not?” question about pretty much everything these days – music, journalism, a cancelled TV series, a friend’s dream vacation. Many independent artists and inventors have already jumped on the Kickstarter wagon, while non-profits try to come up with innovative ways to collect funds engaging the social media and counting on smaller individual contributions. It still amazes me that Wikipedia is crowdfunded and crowdsourced. 

We are often told, as consumers, about the power we exercise through our spending choices. Still, it’s a limited power if we can only choose from what’s already on the market. The real power comes when we can exercise our consumer vote at the very beginning – do we want this product on the market at all, do we need this service, do we want resources allocated to this cause? Platforms like Crowdtilt are a step in that direction.

Crowdtilt enables everyone – from a person to an organization – to group fund anything – from your favorite toy store to your national debt (seriously, why not?). Creating a campaign is super easy – you choose between a private or a public campaign, set a tilt amount, run it for up to 30 days and then get the funds via a direct deposit. 

In addition, Crowdtilt has launched another product named Crowdhoster which allows everyone to create a crowdfunding site without touching a line of code –  the WordPress of crowdfunding. This could truly empower organizations with limited resources and help them launch big and polished crowdfunding campaigns.

Crowdhoster is currenly invite-only and Crowdtilt is only available in the U.S. (for now) but I’m definitely looking forward to these two platforms becoming widely accessible and seeing their impact on the way crowdfunding is done and how and where it’s applied.

When groups of people pool resources together for a common objective, amazing things happen!

photo: Shutterstock.com