The innovation would allow project managers to alter the branding and design of a campaign, communicate with their target audience, and be in control of all data relating to the project (including information about their funders). In short, Crowdhoster, an offshoot of Crowdtilt, will give campaign initiators a greater level of autonomy than that offered by crowdfunding sites.
This, to Crowdtilt CEO James Beshara, is a natural progression: “There is this voice in my head saying that crowdfunding is so far from what it could be in 2013. We believe strongly that crowdfunding has the power to turn payments into a form of communication. Communication shouldn’t be restricted, it should be open, accessible and given to everybody. Its about radical inclusivity.”
Once a round of fundraising has been completed on a major crowdfunding site, such as Kickstarter, the platform’s usefulness ends. Crowdhoster campaigns provide more a more complete service, through post-fundraising tools for taking orders, tracking customers and billing.
“Crowdfunding is too powerful and makes too much sense for it only to invest in silos,” said Beshara, in an interview with Venture Beat. “With Crowdhoster, we want to infect the world with crowdfunding. This is just version 1. Who knows where it will all go? Kickstarter is not the future of crowdfunding, and we are building the product we think should exist.”
Crowdfunding platforms will often talk about the benefits of bypassing financial intermediaries by seeking funding from the crowd. Crowdhoster will attempt, in rather an ironic move, to render crowdfunding platforms themselves a redundant intermediary.
Beshara’s vision of infecting the world runs in the opposite direction to the progression of the equity crowdfunding sphere. Regulation and the various platform’s processes, in many localities, are geared towards shrinking the range of investors and borrowers involved. Reward-based crowdfunding is perceived as far less risky a practice, and is thus much more accessible. If, to continue Beshara’s image, one form of crowdfunding were to become a worldwide pandemic, it certainly would be the reward-based variety.
