Crowdtilt Pivots, Then Launches

James Beshara didn't take long to pivot into the business that would become Crowdtilt, a Y Combinator-funded startup launched to the public Thursday and announced this morning.

At first, the 25-year-old Wake Forest University graduate thought he would be able to replicate his experience in Capetown, South Africa, building a crowdfunding platform for charities. But he found out within six weeks of starting to test his idea in Austin, Texas, Dallas, and San Francisco that the people using the platform really were more interested in being able to fund anything, and I do mean anything.

“I thought I was casting a wide net for charities to use, and now it’s a lot wider,” the CEO and cofounder of Crowdtilt told Portfolio.com Thursday.

The platform Beshara and his colleagues have launched is simple in its concept. Say you want to go to a Phish concert and arrive in style in a bus. You rally a bunch of your friends to chip in for the bus (we’re not making this up, on the Crowdtilt homepage is just such a campaign).

The concept is so simple, Beshara said, that he’s seen plenty of people kicking themselves for not coming up with it themselves.

“The reaction has been, Man, why wasn’t this around a few years ago,” he said. “People feel like now, at least, Why didn’t I think of it that way.”

Of course, a simple solution for friends pooling resources online sounds like a sure winner, and the company’s current enrollment in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator in San Francisco is some validation. But Crowdtilt still has a long way to go before it hits the big time of other Y Combinator companies like Airbnb, or even crowdfunding startups like New York’s Rock the Post.

Though Crowdtilt is raising money from investors, it hasn’t announced how much, and the company isn’t making any money yet. Beshara hasn’t settled on whether the company will be based in Austin or the San Francisco Bay area. Some of that decision will come down to where the company's backers other than Y Combinator are located.

Beshara said moneymaking or even finding a permanent headquarters aren’t his goals at the moment.

“We don’t know where we’re going to be. Y Combinator is pretty good at getting you to focus on one thing while you’re in the program, and that’s been growth,” he said. So he’s intent on building a user base through the public launch, opening the platform to outside developers to build their own applications, and hooking into the Facebook application ecosystem.

But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought of a way for his site to make money. Very likely the model will be to take a cut of transactions conducted on the site.

Right now, “We’re opening the doors for anyone to use the site,” he said.

---

Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com