

Show HN: Crowdtilt announces the first Crowdfunding API - knighthacker
https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec

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zbruhnke
This is one of those things that you take a look at and you say "oh thats
nice", then you take a second look and yoou're like "Holy shit, that's life
changing"

Crowd tilt literally just became the company that can work with any range of
major processors to split up payments and allow the payment gateways,
processors etc to worry about what they do best, at 1% it would be alot of
work to go replacing their system and yet it will still rake in profits for
crowdtilt.

As someone who has watched them from the start and met both founders I always
knew that good things were coming but this move could actually change online
commerce for the better, its just awesome.

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ScottBurson
How is it better than WePay? I've used WePay's API, which supports
crowdfunding, and it seems to work fine.

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jjb123
Among other things: One, wepay isn't international. Two, you have to send
users off your site to use it. Three, you can't plug in your own credit card
processing if you use wepay (you have to use theirs).

Additionally, their api doesn't provide the tools for the collaboration side
of things (messaging, invites, sharing, comments/nested comments, reward
tiers, tilting mechanism, etc). Think of this api as a layer above credit card
processing (so you get to choose whichever processor you like or already use,
thus not disrupting your current flow of funds and you get to keep the
branding/UI/UX, the users, the user data, and the credit card processing data,
etc - all important things if you're, say, hotels.com).

(disclosure: I'm one of the crowdtilt founders)

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StuieK
> Two, you have to send users off your site to use it

Thats completely false.

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jjb123
Project creators/campaign administrators must use wepsy to set up their
merchant account. So, that is indeed not false (completely or otherwise).

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esharef
I was buying tickets on StubHub the other day and was pleasantly surprised
that they have an option to "split the cost" with someone. Awesome because
buying tickets always ends up being such a risky business -- if your friend
doesn't show up or cancels last minute

What's awesome about this is that one day hopefully it wont just be crowdtilt
but everything. Airlines, tickets, hotels.

~~~
irollboozers
Was it specifically through Crowdtilt?

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ajaymehta
Awesome idea - we've been considering a feature at FamilyLeaf that would have
required building something like this, but this API would make it much more
feasible. Looking forward to trying it out!

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ttruong
The API looks awesome Khaled. Congrats to the Crowdtilt team. Can't wait to
see what people do with it!

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irollboozers
This is crazy. Very smart and perceptive move, and it puts the power of
crowdfunding directly into the hands of the masses.

I wonder if this will spin out ton of niche-specific platforms. This does
remove some of the heavy lifting, but the hardest part about building a
crowdfunding marketplace is priming the marketplace.

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vlokshin
This looks amazing.

Once available, a live sample of someone using it for a specific purposes
would be even more amazing / would help show just how awesome this is.

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mahmoudimus
Congrats James & Khaled!

+1 - Love this idea :)

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pplante
this would be awesome for group vacation planning via airbnb.com.

~~~
jjb123
it's funny you should say that...

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ephermata
Congratulations! Now to go put this together with exec or taskrabbit. :)

~~~
jjb123
we'd love to see that too. as well as uber here in sf. like my co-founder said
here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912389>), we'd love to see people
build all kinds of things like crowdfunding-as-a-service (think kickstarter
meets wordpress).

whether it's a feature in a current app like exec/taskrabbit or it's own app
like a dinner-bill splitting mobile app (take a picture of the receipt, ocr,
text it out, everyone's charged once the total is reached or exceeded, etc)
the api was built to help any time groups and money interact... and we hope
this renders the ideas devs come up with endless.

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jareau
congrats to the entire CT team. Happy to be working with you guys!

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subpixel
Looks great, but I wonder how this goes beyond
<https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter>?

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knighthacker
The Crowdtilt API can easily power something like Selfstarter and
significantly improve its features by offering support to multiple payment
processors instead of just Amazon Payments. It also provides collaboration
tools for the supporting community as mentioned by my co-founder
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4911765>

Selfstarter is really cool for a one-off type of project such as Lockitron,
but with the Crowdtilt API, you can also build a "kickstarter-as-a-service"
type of product, which I would really love to see built one day.

(disclosure: I'm one of the Crowdtilt founders)

