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

The author of the article chose those misleading phrases/words, and we wish he hadn't - Crowdtilt is not built to be an "alternative" to Kickstarter; and projects that would be good on Kickstarter (large, ambitious projects), would not be a good fit on our site. We just don't have the traffic or reward structure to crowdfund your video game or documentary. Also "open" is not a word we'd choose either - or that it's some type of "improvement" to the Kickstarter model. We actually think they're model is a very good one for what they do (probably the best albeit US only, which I think you can use Indiegogo to fund your project internationally). Also, as a sidenote, founders of young companies don't choose to disregard potential customer bases outside of a regions just for fun. We feel strongly that this would provide value to a lot of people outside the US, but as noted by my comment up the page (regarding international campaigns), we hope to be able to accomodate them in the very near future. Hope that helps (not really you bc you're a psych troll, but other slashdot readers that might share the same sentiments and questions).

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

... i'm the author of the post above (one of the founders of crowdtilt); just created an account to tie the above comment to.