Crowdtilt Raises a $23M Series B Led by A16Z | Hacker News Reader

Crowdtilt Raises a $23M Series B Led by A16Z

blog.crowdtilt.com

76 pointsajaymehta17 comments

This is the original Groupon business model, interesting that it ended up being successful.

It started as ThePoint.com, a site launched in November 2007 that lets you start a campaign asking people to give money or do something as a group--but only once a "tipping point" of people agree to participate.

Founder Andrew Mason and his investors soon realized The Point was headed toward failure, and fast. The founders worked on it a year and they went through about $1 million but got no traction. Its business model was not working.

A lot of it has to do with time and place along with execution. Crowdfunding is much more a household term with the likes of Kickstarter and other popular sites. Not to mention the ease of payments and spread of mobile apps has helped these sites too.

That is interesting, though I'd guess that most of the investor interest is in "Crowdtilt Extended", which are their branded campaign pages and API. That is, being a Twillio of the crowd funding industry may be what's attracting the money.

First, a comparison to Groupon is inappropriate since the markets served are significantly different (CrowdTilt is more like Kickstarter).

Second, that a concept supposedly failed (not clear that the concept was ThePoint's main problem) does not weigh heavily on if the concept works with a different team in a different way, etc.

Not really. I just used IndieGoGo to help a brick and mortar expand.

ThePoint was like kickstarter. I wasn't trying to slander crowdtilt, just found it interesting.

Congratulations James! I keep kicking myself for not helping revamp your PHP code base to become employee #3 four years ago.

I do hope you blog about the failure of your micro loan venture one day - it's incredibly inspiring how you ended up turning it around (especially in the light of your current success).

Execution matters and when you're the official crowdfunding platform for reddit , I'm sure that helps.

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/new-fundraising-options-desig...

A16Z is on fire this week. Led rounds of $25mil in Coinbase, $75mil in Oculus, and now $23mil in Crowdtilt.

must have been a fun capital call to make

Congrats guys!

Looks like pg needs to update his tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/411213292330164224

Pretty sure they were already included in that list, they raised a $12 series A like 9 months ago

Congrats James, Khaled, Ajay and team!

Congrats to the the Crowdtilt team!

Congrats, Crowdtilt!

Congrats Crowdtilt!

congrats!

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