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Crowdtilt’s latest product helps those who can’t code, crowdfund

Crowdtilt releases a "Wordpress for crowdfunding" site that enables anyone to easily enable raise money on their site.

crowdfunding dogCrowd funding is as hot right now as English-Irish boy band One Direction and everybody wants a piece.

Crowdtilt has released a new product called CrowdHoster that makes it easy to build a custom crowdfunding site without having to write any code. This popular Y Combinator startup provides an online place for friends to pool their money together for a specific purpose, like a wine tour or a wedding gift. Unlike Kickstarter and and Indiegogo which mostly feature creative and business projects, Crowdtilt focuses on enabling group experiences or shared causes.
Conceived as the “WordPress for crowdfunding,” CrowdHoster enables businesses with limited resources to implement a crowd funding campaign directly on their site. The technology is based on the SelfStarter open source project. After presenting the Crowdtilt API in December for developer use, many people without programming expertise expressed interest as well. The team worked with fellow YC alum Lockitron to build out and popularize the SelfStarter codebase, integrating the API and adding in other features.

“For the first time, you can launch your own crowdfunding site without having to touch a line of code,” said Crowdtilt’s ‘API evangelist’ Marc St. Raymond. ” Your contributors become your users when they sign up, as opposed to users of a third party site like Kickstarter.  You control the branding.  You host it at your own domain.  And you don’t have to have technical expertise to do it.  Not to mention you avoid the high fees that third party crowdfunding sites charge.
 id.  Those teams can now turn to CrowdHoster.

The technology is available for free on CrowdHoster.com. It includes a project page with a funding progress bar, sharing links, and customizable content areas; checkout capabilities with the payment processor of your choice, including Balanced, Stripe, Braintree, or Amazon Payments; project administration and contributor management.

Right now, CrowdHoster is by invitation only. Crowdtilt, which was founded in 2012, has raised $2.1 million to date. Some of its more noteworthy campaigns include a Halloween party on a mega-yacht, a chartered jet for New Years Eve partying in Vegas, and rallying for Twinkies to come back. Also, some good causes like raising money for hurricane victims.

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